Building Community and Leadership: San Francisco's Chinatown, A Model

On Saturday, September 12, 2015 at 1 p.m., the San Francisco Public Library, in association with the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University, presents Gordon Chin to talk about his book, Building Community, Chinatown Style: A Half Century of Leadership in San Francisco. The lecture will take place in the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room of the Main Library, Lower Level. A book sale and signing will follow the talk.


Today, Mr. Chin fills-in at "What's on the 6th Floor?" as a guest blogger:

“ONE OF THE TEN BEST NEIGHBORHOODS IN AMERICA”

When I first heard in October, 2013 that the American Planning Association had selected San Francisco Chinatown for its list of Top Ten Best Neighborhoods in America, I was both thrilled but also a bit surprised. I was thrilled because I was in the midst of writing my book, “Building Community, Chinatown Style,” sharing a personal memoir and my observations about this important place. I was surprised because I had never thought of Chinatown as a “best” neighborhood given the serious problems it has historically been challenged with–the lack of affordable housing in San Francisco, inadequate recreation and open space, traffic congestion impacting pedestrian safety, to name a few.

The lists of “Best Places” you usually see in travel magazines were about places that are ideal places, where anyone would want to live. But these were not the reasons why Chinatown was chosen by the APA for its annual list. San Francisco Chinatown was selected for its leadership, as well as for its strong history of social capital and institutions which has preserved this community since its founding over 170 years ago, protecting it from discriminatory legislation, natural disasters, and civic neglect. And this is the Chinatown leadership I wrote about in my book, with stories of individual courage and organizational persistence which have characterized the community over the last half century, the time span of my book.

Clayton Hotel ribbon cutting, 657 Clay Street, 1982. Chinatown Community Development Center's
first residential hotel acquisition and rehabilitation project. Courtesy: Chinatown CDC.

Chinatown is one of the least understood neighborhoods in San Francisco. It is alternatively viewed as a major San Francisco tourist attraction and a ghetto with one of the highest rates of poverty and housing overcrowding in the city, a living dichotomy of perceptions and images. Saul Alinski, the late community organizing theoretician, once described San Francisco Chinatown as the most organized neighborhood he had ever seen in America. Most everyone was active in community life as members of fraternal associations, music and cultural clubs, business organizations, kung fu studios, and churches; there was a vibrant community sense of volunteerism and social capital that the outside world did not know.

“Building Community, Chinatown Style” chronicles Chinatown activism in the community development issues I have been involved in for over four decades, starting with the fight for the International Hotel and ending with my observations about other Chinatowns and Asian American communities in the country. The book shares hundreds of stories about leaders I have had the honor of working with, but the book does not have one central character. That’s because the central character is Chinatown, “One of the ten best neighborhoods in America.”