It is not just Chinatown businesses but all Chinese restaurants over the US are suffered badly due to xenophobic. I knew many Chinese dine in, buffets, and even takeout are forced to permanently closed. And the media is to be blamed for things became so bad.
Chinatown Businesses Face a Particularly Brutal Winter
Yelp data shows that historic Chinatowns in several U.S. cities been enduring an economic downturn longer and more severe than in surrounding metros.
Weeks before the first reported U.S. case of Covid-19, the future pandemic was already inflicting economic damage in the Chinatowns of several U.S. cities. During what should have been the busiest time of the year in these Asian-American enclaves, business was down.
In January 2020, dim sum parlors and banquet halls in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown noticed a drop in reservations. A conspicuously thin crowd gathered to watch San Francisco’s Lunar New Year parade on Feb. 8. At a grocery store in Houston’s Chinatown, sales fell overnight.
The downturn was that was then racing through the Chinese city of Wuhan. It became a collapse in March, as public health restrictions shuttered restaurants, salons and retailers in many U.S. cities. By summer, even as some businesses partially recovered with relaxed public health restrictions and pandemic fatigue, the streets and shops of Chinatowns remained much quieter than those in surrounding metropolitan areas.
Now, as the country copes with a new surge of infections and braces for a second year of pandemic misery, business owners and community leaders fear that these historic entry points for Chinese and other Asian immigrants may never return to their pre-pandemic stature. Instead, the economic pain that Chinatowns are now enduring could be a glimpse of broader devastation to come.
“What distinguishes Chinatown businesses is that they’ve been facing financial and fiscal problems for a much longer time, with deeper cuts to revenues,” said Paul Ong, an economist and urban planner at UCLA who directs its Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. “If we see that they aren’t coming back at a meaningful level over the next year, that would tell us a lot about businesses in other communities. It’s that early experience that makes them a potential leading indicator of other changes that are lagging behind.”
Data from review website Yelp Inc. is a proxy for how that story played out in the Chinatowns of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and Chicago over the past 10 months. The business search platform measures what it calls “consumer interest” by capturing views of listings and posts of photos and reviews.
From February through November, consumer interest levels for restaurants, bars, and retailers in zip codes associated with those six Chinatowns trailed behind those of their greater metropolitan areas. This was true even after public health restrictions hurt urban economies across the board, and even after partial recoveries began. The chart below shows how, as measured in the percentage point difference between year-over-year monthly growth of consumer interest in Chinatowns and that of metro areas.
There were variations between the places measured. Economic gaps between Chinatown zip codes and surrounding metro areas were widest in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Houston had the narrowest, perhaps a reflection of its Chinatown being younger than the others and located in a more residential area, as well as Texas’s relatively loose public health restrictions on restaurant and business activity.
Several interviewees said that Chinatowns suffered more deeply than the surrounding urban economies in part because the xenophobia that kept customers away early on has only persisted. “I was dealing with community members who were fearing they were going to be attacked,” said Debbie Chen, an immigration attorney, activist and co-owner of Shabu House, a restaurant in Houston’s Chinatown. “Things that make you really wonder, is this truly America?”
Yet Chinatowns were uniquely impacted in other ways. may have hit especially hard in these neighborhoods, where dining is a centerpiece of local economies. Many are located in downtown areas — San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example, is adjacent to the Financial District — that . And several depend heavily on tourism, a sector that also collapsed this year.
“All of the other tourist areas — Union Square, Fisherman’s Wharf — it’s the same, with hardly anyone around,” said Eva Lee, who runs the Chinatown Merchants Association in San Francisco.
The loss of business hurt residents as well as businesses in these communities. Sissy Trinh, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, a Los Angeles advocacy group based in Chinatown, said that government agencies have failed to recognize the depth of need in that community, one of the city’s poorest. Officials failed to translate public health materials into Chinese, she said, and .
Trinh attributed some of these oversights to the “model minority” myth, or the racist belief that Asians outperform other groups in socioeconomic terms. At the same time, many of the issues that residents of Chinatown deal with are the same as in other marginalized racial and ethnic communities.
“It’s a microcosm of what’s happening to low-income communities nationwide,” Trinh said.
Some Chinatowns also faced long-term economic challenges that predated the pandemic, including a decades-long decline in garment manufacturing, an industry that once employed tens of thousands of low-wage workers, Ong said. Changes in immigration laws and policies favoring wealthier, more highly educated immigrants also contributed to shrinking ethnic economies, while like the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles has further depleted historic urban enclaves.
Many residents have also felt the pressures of rising housing costs in recent years, given their proximity to gentrifying downtown areas. In some, homeless populations were on the rise: In a January 2020 citywide count, were reported as homeless in the council district containing Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown, .
And that was before the pandemic. “I’m terrified about what this upcoming count will show,” said Trinh. “People are getting further and further behind on rent, landlords are getting increasingly aggressive about eviction, because Chinatown is gentrifying. There are targets on our residents’ backs.”
Some Chinatowns have benefited from , such as a $1.5 million emergency fund for small business loans led by the in New York City. Yet absent a wave of government assistance to owners, renters and workers in these communities, interviewees said they expect these trends to accelerate as a result of the pandemic.
Specific trajectories are hard to predict, especially since it’s still unknown whether downtown areas will remain desirable from a real-estate standpoint, Ong said. If they do, longtime Chinatown residents and business owners could be pushed out and replaced by newcomers. If they don’t, storefronts may empty out, and stay empty — and homeless populations may grow.
While a vaccine promises to bring relief to the U.S. in 2021, the effects of the Covid-19 recession are expected to outlast the end of the pandemic itself. With a new president entering office and hope of second pandemic relief stimulus, Ong said, the potential loss of these historic communities ought to be reckoned with and addressed before it’s too late. Their sped-up decline may be a leading indicator of what’s to come in the broader economy, Ong said, but so could their recovery.
“That’s one of the reasons it’s important for those who are vested in future of Chinatown get engaged in the larger discussion about recovery,” he said. “If we can intervene to save these businesses and neighborhoods, that may tell us a lot about what we need to do to help businesses and workers beyond Chinatown.”
Chinatown Businesses Face a Particularly Brutal Winter
Yelp data shows that historic Chinatowns in several U.S. cities been enduring an economic downturn longer and more severe than in surrounding metros.
Weeks before the first reported U.S. case of Covid-19, the future pandemic was already inflicting economic damage in the Chinatowns of several U.S. cities. During what should have been the busiest time of the year in these Asian-American enclaves, business was down.
In January 2020, dim sum parlors and banquet halls in Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown noticed a drop in reservations. A conspicuously thin crowd gathered to watch San Francisco’s Lunar New Year parade on Feb. 8. At a grocery store in Houston’s Chinatown, sales fell overnight.
The downturn was that was then racing through the Chinese city of Wuhan. It became a collapse in March, as public health restrictions shuttered restaurants, salons and retailers in many U.S. cities. By summer, even as some businesses partially recovered with relaxed public health restrictions and pandemic fatigue, the streets and shops of Chinatowns remained much quieter than those in surrounding metropolitan areas.
Now, as the country copes with a new surge of infections and braces for a second year of pandemic misery, business owners and community leaders fear that these historic entry points for Chinese and other Asian immigrants may never return to their pre-pandemic stature. Instead, the economic pain that Chinatowns are now enduring could be a glimpse of broader devastation to come.
“What distinguishes Chinatown businesses is that they’ve been facing financial and fiscal problems for a much longer time, with deeper cuts to revenues,” said Paul Ong, an economist and urban planner at UCLA who directs its Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. “If we see that they aren’t coming back at a meaningful level over the next year, that would tell us a lot about businesses in other communities. It’s that early experience that makes them a potential leading indicator of other changes that are lagging behind.”
Data from review website Yelp Inc. is a proxy for how that story played out in the Chinatowns of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and Chicago over the past 10 months. The business search platform measures what it calls “consumer interest” by capturing views of listings and posts of photos and reviews.
From February through November, consumer interest levels for restaurants, bars, and retailers in zip codes associated with those six Chinatowns trailed behind those of their greater metropolitan areas. This was true even after public health restrictions hurt urban economies across the board, and even after partial recoveries began. The chart below shows how, as measured in the percentage point difference between year-over-year monthly growth of consumer interest in Chinatowns and that of metro areas.
There were variations between the places measured. Economic gaps between Chinatown zip codes and surrounding metro areas were widest in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Houston had the narrowest, perhaps a reflection of its Chinatown being younger than the others and located in a more residential area, as well as Texas’s relatively loose public health restrictions on restaurant and business activity.
Several interviewees said that Chinatowns suffered more deeply than the surrounding urban economies in part because the xenophobia that kept customers away early on has only persisted. “I was dealing with community members who were fearing they were going to be attacked,” said Debbie Chen, an immigration attorney, activist and co-owner of Shabu House, a restaurant in Houston’s Chinatown. “Things that make you really wonder, is this truly America?”
Yet Chinatowns were uniquely impacted in other ways. may have hit especially hard in these neighborhoods, where dining is a centerpiece of local economies. Many are located in downtown areas — San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example, is adjacent to the Financial District — that . And several depend heavily on tourism, a sector that also collapsed this year.
“All of the other tourist areas — Union Square, Fisherman’s Wharf — it’s the same, with hardly anyone around,” said Eva Lee, who runs the Chinatown Merchants Association in San Francisco.
The loss of business hurt residents as well as businesses in these communities. Sissy Trinh, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, a Los Angeles advocacy group based in Chinatown, said that government agencies have failed to recognize the depth of need in that community, one of the city’s poorest. Officials failed to translate public health materials into Chinese, she said, and .
Trinh attributed some of these oversights to the “model minority” myth, or the racist belief that Asians outperform other groups in socioeconomic terms. At the same time, many of the issues that residents of Chinatown deal with are the same as in other marginalized racial and ethnic communities.
“It’s a microcosm of what’s happening to low-income communities nationwide,” Trinh said.
Some Chinatowns also faced long-term economic challenges that predated the pandemic, including a decades-long decline in garment manufacturing, an industry that once employed tens of thousands of low-wage workers, Ong said. Changes in immigration laws and policies favoring wealthier, more highly educated immigrants also contributed to shrinking ethnic economies, while like the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles has further depleted historic urban enclaves.
Many residents have also felt the pressures of rising housing costs in recent years, given their proximity to gentrifying downtown areas. In some, homeless populations were on the rise: In a January 2020 citywide count, were reported as homeless in the council district containing Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown, .
And that was before the pandemic. “I’m terrified about what this upcoming count will show,” said Trinh. “People are getting further and further behind on rent, landlords are getting increasingly aggressive about eviction, because Chinatown is gentrifying. There are targets on our residents’ backs.”
Some Chinatowns have benefited from , such as a $1.5 million emergency fund for small business loans led by the in New York City. Yet absent a wave of government assistance to owners, renters and workers in these communities, interviewees said they expect these trends to accelerate as a result of the pandemic.
Specific trajectories are hard to predict, especially since it’s still unknown whether downtown areas will remain desirable from a real-estate standpoint, Ong said. If they do, longtime Chinatown residents and business owners could be pushed out and replaced by newcomers. If they don’t, storefronts may empty out, and stay empty — and homeless populations may grow.
While a vaccine promises to bring relief to the U.S. in 2021, the effects of the Covid-19 recession are expected to outlast the end of the pandemic itself. With a new president entering office and hope of second pandemic relief stimulus, Ong said, the potential loss of these historic communities ought to be reckoned with and addressed before it’s too late. Their sped-up decline may be a leading indicator of what’s to come in the broader economy, Ong said, but so could their recovery.
“That’s one of the reasons it’s important for those who are vested in future of Chinatown get engaged in the larger discussion about recovery,” he said. “If we can intervene to save these businesses and neighborhoods, that may tell us a lot about what we need to do to help businesses and workers beyond Chinatown.”
