Prestige and distortion within Chinatown

The Asian American Federation, a social services and research non profit highly regarded within Chinatown, published a study of Chinatown in 2008 in which they found that East Broadway, the center of recent Fujianese immigration and a low-income area, was one of the most resilient, vibrant and successful parts of Chinatown, while much of the rest of the neighborhood was ailing commercially. Yet the study's recommendations completely disregard its findings of fact. Their recommendations all favor tourism with no recommendations that support the ethnic community.

Most telling are the recommendation that waiters learn more English (useless for local-serving restaurants), and the absence of any recommendation that managers stop stealing waiters' tips, a wide-spread practice among restaurant owners in Chinatown. Stealing tips removes the most easily available incentive reward for waiters to improve services like learning English. Without tips for improved service, AAF's recommendation burdens the waiter entirely. The bias in favor of management is evident: compel the waiter to learn English but still take his tips. There isn't even a recommendation for free or supported English lessons.

The power of prestige and respectability is pervasive. Growth is viewed as outward-looking towards an upscale mainstream culture, not expanding and supporting the base. So, for example, here are their findings of fact:

A number of changes in the mix of residents in Chinatown also has altered the customer base for Chinatown businesses. Over the past 20 years, growth of the Fujianese population in Chinatown, due to new immigration patterns, has generated demand for businesses supporting their food, entertainment and service preferences. Newer Fujianese-owned businesses have sprung up along East Broadway.... A lack of nightlife in Chinatown also makes it difficult for restaurants to attract evening business, and garment-industry job losses and relocations have reduced restaurants’ traditional customer base. However, restaurants catering to Chinatown’s growing Fujianese population report brisk business.... The decline in the garment industry has decreased measurably the daytime population in Chinatown, a key component of the traditional customer base.  As this traditional customer base shrinks, the growth in Chinatown’s Fujianese population and the influx of non-Chinese and some returning Chinese immigrants and retirees have created a demand for products and services catering to these markets. 

 And their conclusions:

A general lack of customer service reduces the appeal of shopping and dining in Chinatown. Limited English capabilities of staff make it challenging for people who do not speak Chinese to patronize Chinatown businesses. Gruff service from a few businesses hurts the image of all Chinatown establishments. Many stores and restaurants operate on a cash basis, which discourages those customers

 The customers mentioned are tourists with credit cards, not local recent immigrants. And "image" is a problem looking to outsiders, not to locals. The sole source for this claim of gruff service and bad image comes from the Zagat Guide -- a restaurant guide published in English for English-speaking customers. There is no Mandarin, Fujianese or  Cantonese Zagat for New York. If you look through all their recommendations, you'll see that they are equally outward, not inward, looking. And this is characteristic of many such studies of Chinatown. Whether they are positioning Chinatown non profits to obtain government funding for development or attracting private sector investment, they ignore the economic base and their recommendations threaten them with unstable, fragile commercial gentrification.

Image and money are tied together. Semiotic neighborhoods pretend with an image for sale, much as a suit allows its wearer to pretend to an image of respectability. The base of the economy is disregarded, dismissed and invisible.

Next: semiotics and deception among the suits in Chinatown, and the struggle up from the bottom.

See also in this series:
Semiotic neighborhoods vs the authentic and anti-fragile: prestige and its deceptions and betrayals
Suits and betrayal in Chinatown
The Mobility Dilemma and the Clearinghouse Effect
Authenticity in the East Village

Division

[Cross-posted at http://chinatownforchinatown.wordpress.com/]

There are two sides debating in the Chinatown Working Group. Some want to see more tourists in Chinatown to support business. Developers, financiers, some business owners, the Business Improvement District, for example, sit on this side and arts purveyors as well. On the other side stand the labor and tenant adovocates who want business to serve the local residents. You might ask, why not have both, local services and toursim?

If only the sustainable market forces were balanced. But they’re not. Gentrification is an opportunistic tide that, once it gains an entry, will flood the locality resistlessly. To use urban planning to help the juggernaut of monopolistic market forces is unnecessary. The empowered need no help.

In any economy, there are vulnerable sectors even among the most sustainable. Local services are actually highly sustainable since local residents have consistent, reliable purchasing needs. You see those needs reflected in the streets of Chinatown. As long as the community remains, the local services will be sustainable.

Although they are highly sustainable, local services are also highly vulnerable to attack from giant outside capital which has more resources, government connections and mobility. Ironically, the least vulnerable — giant capital, developers, big businesses, chain stores — are also the least reliable because they are mobile and least tied to the locality. Like a corporation that protects itself in bad times by laying off labor, giant corporations are most capable of protecting themselves at the expense of the locality, whereas small local servers depend on the locals.

Tourism is closely tied to development and big capital — high prices and upscale values that can be marketed to upscale spending. Local services, especially in Chinatown, depend on low prices and high volume. If giant capital gains a foothold, commercial rents will rise, replacing local services, and  gentrification will displace the community, killing the viability of any remaining local services. It’s a snowball effect.

This is not to say there shouldn’t be tourism in Chinatown. There’s always been tourism in Chinatown back all the way to the 19th century. But here’s the paradox of tourism: people come to Chinatown not to see a spectacle staged for them but to experience Chinatown as it is, a lively working community, culturally distinct from the rest of New York because it serves its own. Cater too much to the tourist, and you lose the Chinatown that tourists come for. You’d then have to market Chinatown as a brand, constantly hoping that that brand doesn’t go out of fashion. Chinatown business becomes the slave of an outside community that it has no control over, and it turns a community with businesses in it into a business with no community in it.

In planning, as everywhere, there are empowered sectors that need no help, and disempowered groups that need support. Were it not for the 1% predators, the 99% disempowered would be fully sustainable. That’s why planning should always keep as its goal protecting the disempowered and avoiding giving ground to giant capital.