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Chinatown, crossing Mott Street in New York or going under the arches in Los Angeles or Boston gave the teenage boys a feeling of doing something daring. All the while, immigrants from Asia filled the apartments above as they learned their way around the new world. Chinatown, a taste of the Orient.

Now with property values in the cities rising and space for new projects being hard to find, developers are setting their eyes on these formerly untouchable areas. Offers are being made and properties are being bought. I completely understand what is happening, but at the same time this boy from Long Island who delighted in learning about new food in his forays into New York Cities Chinatown will be sad when the unique flavor is gone.

This struggle in Boston is the latest in a land squeeze that is changing the nature of Chinatowns across the United States. As America’s downtowns become hip again, urban real estate is becoming so valuable that ethnic enclaves find it increasingly difficult to survive as the first stop for new immigrants, usually with few skills and no English.

Once a fixture in most major US cities, many Chinatowns have ceased to exist as magnets for new arrivals. San Diego’s Chinatown is now a historic district. A coalition in Phoenix is trying to save the last remaining Chinatown structure from becoming a luxury apartment building. Four of the enclaves in the 10 largest cities – in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia – are now commercial areas. Dallas, which never had a historic Chinatown, designated a retail center as “Chinatown” in the 1980s. Other Chinatowns in Seattle, Detroit, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., are today primarily tourist spots.

“Because it’s very valuable downtown real estate, [developers] would love to dismantle the housing and just build hotels and office buildings,” says Paul Watanabe, director of the Institute for Asian-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. via  CBS News.

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