The Displacement of Chinatown’s Low-Income Residents Is Aggravated by COVID-19 IN 2019, THE CITY APPROVED PLANS TO BUILD THE MASSIVE HIGH-END DEVELOPMENT “THE 78” ON VACANT LAND BETWEEN THE LOOP AND CHINATOWN, SPURRING FEAR THAT SUCH PROJECTS WILL ENCROACH ON THE SPACE OF LONGTIME RESIDENTS. PHOTO BY SARAH DERER
Data from the Chinese American Service League shows an exodus to the South and West BY YILUN CHENG
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t the intersection of Cermak Road and Wentworth Avenue, a stately red gate with a handpainted inscription that reads “The world is for all” welcomes visitors to Chinatown. Dim sum restaurants, grocery stores, and Chinese medicine shops line the streets to serve the nearly 7,000 people living in the area. But the very thing that has long distinguished Chinatown––its close-knit Chinese population––is being dispersed throughout the city as the pandemic-induced economic downturn puts a striking number of Chinatown residents out of work. In recent years, rising rental costs, combined with high poverty rates and a lack of affordable housing, have forced an increasing number of lowincome Chinese Americans to abandon their longtime residences in Chicago’s greater Chinatown area. Such housing challenges have long haunted the historic neighborhood, said Paul Luu, the CEO of the nonprofit Chinese American Service League (CASL). But COVID-19 28 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
and the job losses that came with it have made it more apparent that people are struggling to pay rent and mortgages, he said, and are leaving as a result. In the past year, Chinatown’s Chinese population has migrated south and west along Archer Avenue to more affordable places in Bridgeport, McKinley Park, Brighton Park, and all the way to Gage Park and Archer Heights next to Midway International Airport, as shown by a heat map generated by CASL, which visualizes the displacement of more than 5,000 clients who utilize services offered by the Chinatown-based organization. “I’ve met families who said they’ve moved three times in the past three years,” said Luu. “When I asked them why they moved, the answer was always the cost of housing.” Chinatown residents see drastic income drop amid COVID-19 Even before the pandemic, Chinatown had a higher-than-average poverty rate.
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In Armour Square, the community area where Chinatown is located, thirty-eight percent of the households live below the poverty line, compared with the city-wide average of seventeen percent, according to an analysis of census data done by the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As communities of color have been hit hard by the pandemic, Asian Americans have not been immune to the surge in unemployment. Across the nation, the unemployment rate for Asian Americans jumped from 2.4 percent in February to 14.5 percent in April, before slowly settling to 6.7 percent in November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Chicago, Chinatown businesses felt the blow of the pandemic long before Illinois’s statewide shutdown in midMarch, said Hong Liu, the executive director of Chinatown-based nonprofit Midwest Asian Health Association. In fact, some business owners started to report a nearly eighty percent drop in
sales volume shortly after the first cluster of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China, broke out at the end of 2019. “The Chinese community started to be cautious and stopped going to restaurants starting in January,” Liu said. “Even the American people, they knew there was a huge outbreak in China, so they were afraid of coming to Chinatown to eat.” With COVID-19 disproportionately affecting those in the service industry, Chinatown residents—many of whom work in restaurants, retail stores, and hotels—are increasingly dependent on unemployment benefits to survive. In Cook County, the number of Asian Americans who filed for unemployment insurance increased by nearly sixteen times in the month of April, skyrocketing to an unprecedented level of more than 20,000 claimants––a steeper increase than that experienced by any other ethic group––according to data from the Illinois Department of Employment Security. By October, the number of claimants had dropped to
