Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave

8. Residential Mobility and Ethnic Segregation

8 Residential Mobility and Ethnic Segregation Manhattan's Old Chinatown has always been a definable, contiguous geographic locality in which the Chinese are concentrated. However, today's Chinese are much more spread out than their predecessors . More than half of New York City's Chinese now live in Queens and Brooklyn in growing Chinese neighborhoods. The rapid residential dispersion of the Chinese population does not seem to have been accompanied by the decline ofthe original enclave, however. While other ethnic enclaves, such as Little Italy, have dispersed and then dwindled in significance Chinatown has survived for more than 140 years and has retained a strong ethnic economy and a full-fledged ethnic community. Immigrant Chinese continue to have an enormous incentive for self-segregation, being so totally alien to the culture and ways of life in the United States and with only a minimal number of predecessors available to help them. Patterns of in- and out-migration within the Chinatown boundaries often involve not dispersal but construction of new ethnic enclaves, where the Chinese, particularly immigrants, continue to cluster together and tie themselves to Chinatown. This chapter provides an analysis ofthe residential patterns and segregation of Chinese residents in and around New York City. The analysis is based on the assumption that residential mobility can serve as an indicator of the social position of ethnic groups.I It attempts to show how unique characteristics of the enclave economy, kinship ties of new immigrants to the ethnic community, and ethnic segmentation of the housing market work together to structure the pattern of residential mobility for New York City's Chinese. Copyrighted Material 185 186 Chapter 8 Growth in Chinatown: Neighborhood Take-Over In the 1860s when Chinese laborers began to be shipped in large numbers across the Pacific to the West Coast, there were not many Chinese in New York. The census of 1860 showed that only 120 Chinese lived in New York City, 0.2 percent of the total Chinese population in the United States, which then totaled 63,199. The first group of eastbound Chinese immigrants settled in a three-street area (Mott, Park, and Doyer) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.2 During the first few years of Chinese exclusion in the 1890s, New York City gained a few thousand Chinese, increasing the community by 147 percent, while the total U.S. Chinese population dropped by 16 percent from the previous decade. The city's Chinese population experienced some decline at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it increased steadily in the following decades. As a direct effect of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and more liberalized immigration laws, New York City's Chinese population increased by 73 percent in the 1960s, III percent in the 1970s, and 79 percent in the 1980s. Before 1965, most of the Chinese immigrants were concentrated in Manhattan's Chinatown. Although decentralization of the Chinese population began as early as the 1950S, substantial out-migration was not common until much later. Significant neighborhood take-over and population spread around Chinatown occurred only after 1965, when an unprecedentedly large volume of immigrants started to pour into the community. As a result, by 1970 about 26,770 Chinese were concentrated in the "extended Chinatown " (Table 8- I and Figure 8- 1).3In the I 980s, this number increased to 37,917, a 42 percent increase. Some tracts, such as 2.01 and 15.01, had only a few Chinese a decade before; by 1980 more than ten times as many Chinese had settled there. Tracts 2.02, 6, 16, 22.01, 25, and 43 increased by half or more of the 1970 population. Tracts 8, 18, 27, and 41 all experienced growth in the decade between 1970 and 1980; the proportion ofChinese living in tracts 8,16,29, and 41 increased by more than 60 percent from 1970 to 1980. Close to sixty thousand New York Chinese were believed to live in Chinatown in the 1980s, compared to fewer than twenty-fiye thousand during the 1960s. But, in fact, Chinatown has always sustained a much larger number of residents than reported. The discrepancy is due to the reluctance of the Chinese to cooperate with the census officials and also possibly to the presence of a considerable number of illegal immigrants.~ Copyrighted Material Residential Mobility and Ethnic Segregation 187 Table 8-1. New York City's Chinese Population within...