How American Chinatowns are fighting new redevelopment projects they say will harm their communities
- Chinatown communities in the US are uniting and rallying against projects including a new ‘mega jail’ in New York and a sports stadium in Philadelphia
- Activists say North American Chinatowns need to band together to promote and amplify each others’ issues to a wider audience
Demolition is under way at two jails, jointly known as “The Tombs”, that have been standing next to New York’s Chinatown since the early 1980s, to make way for a “mega jail” that will be about as tall as the Statue of Liberty and stretch over three blocks in each direction.
The authorities have said this new jail would be outfitted with state-of-the-art rehabilitation facilities to foster a more “humane” environment for detainees, and would also be less crowded.
Since 2019, Jan Lee and his fellow members of the Neighbours United Below Canal – Canal being Canal Street, the primary thoroughfare of Chinatown – have been trying to stop the estimated US$8.3 billion project, asking the municipal government to instead pursue the route of adaptive reuse, retrofitting the existing jails to meet current building codes instead of knocking them down.
“What we’re against is creating a jail that’s oversized, that is out of scale, and ultimately will be incredibly dangerous for the residents and the businesses of Chinatown,” Lee explains.
“So what we’ve said is, you can adaptively reuse the two jails so that they remain jails, because jails have been there for a very long time, and nothing more.
“So we are OK with having jails. But we want them to reuse the buildings that are there so that the predictability of the size and scale is known to us.”