COMMENTARY
Chinatown residents showed us how to stop wrecking balls

By Joy Wong

How will the radical re-interpretation of the concept of eminent domain issued by the Supreme Court last week play out in Hawai'i, with our land tenure situation, leasehold-conversion issues, concerns of our native population and unique community dynamics?

Here, our well-established group, People Against Chinatown Evictions or PACE, considers this question from a different perspective. We look at it from the viewpoint of the continuing struggle of workers, especially the aging laborers and service workers who have long made Chinatown their home, and who are continually facing loss of their homes within a supportive community and eviction in the name of "improvement" and "economic development."

Chinatown, next to Honolulu Harbor, was once the heart of Honolulu. The harbor was the major port in Hawai'i providing jobs in shipping, transportation, tourism, retail and service trades. Many workers in Honolulu, both Native Hawaiians and immigrants, worked long hours at low wages, powering the economic development of the territory and, by their labor, laying the economic foundation of the Islands.

Because of its central location and cheap rooms for laborers, Chinatown became a thriving multi-ethnic community. English was not the first language of these early residents, who often communicated in a mixture of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Ilocano and Tagalog, but their ties through shared economic struggle overcame their cultural differences.

After statehood, downtown business declined as tourism moved from the port to Waikiki. Additionally, retail businesses moved to large shopping centers such as Ala Moana.

Those with economic power sought "revitalization," and rich and highly placed businessmen urged the federal government to declare old Chinatown an urban renewal area, using public tax money, laws and the courts to evict hundreds of residents.

They offered no relocation compensation — all in the name of gentrification and private economic development. Urban renewal projects for Chinatown soon became known as "People Removal," but few outside the community spoke up for the displaced residents and the "Mom & Pop" businesses that were the economic and social heart of the community.

The Chinatown community watched the city and private landlords evict longtime friends and neighbors from their homes and force closure of small businesses. In the wake of the bulldozers, they saw the neighborhood shrink and become increasingly homogeneous as gentrification pushed forward.

Those early experiences forced the remaining Chinatown residents to acknowledge they had a right to remain in Chinatown and the power to defend their community from mass evictions.

In the early 1970s, Chinatown residents and small businesses, threatened by city and private eviction, organized People Against Chinatown Evictions. Most PACE activists were elderly, retired people — typically Native Hawaiians and immigrants with low, fixed incomes — people who had worked in pineapple, sugar and tourism, and as tailors, cleaners, stevedores, cooks and firefighters. Because many of these PACE members had been active members in their labor unions, they understood the necessity of building a strong community-based movement and the power of solidarity.

This ideological foundation enabled PACE to successfully launch a broad grass-roots tenants' housing rights movement in Chinatown and throughout Hawai'i, to fight for decent affordable rental housing.

Chinatown residents were not connected to the rich and powerful, so they could not rely on the good will of the politicians or courts as could better-connected groups. This political struggle had to rely on people power to support the right for decent, affordable housing, regardless of income.

PACE's tenant housing rights campaign conducted educational programs with Chinatown tours, a speaker's bureau, slideshows and outreach to schools, unions, churches, ethnic clubs and the University of Hawai'i.

PACE also supported other community eviction fights throughout the state. When the mayor and private landlords refused PACE's repeated requests to negotiate, members rallied and demonstrated at City Hall, landlords' homes and at the state courthouse.

In one noteworthy incident, a private landlord refused to meet with PACE and instead sent the sheriff to deliver writs of eviction to Aloha Hotel tenants, as well as moving vans to remove their belongings. PACE had no alternative but to occupy the hotel until the city finally negotiated a just settlement for tenants.

Through such perseverance, PACE eventually won the struggle for permanent, subsidized Chinatown housing for its working-class community. These housing victories included renovation and construction of over 500 government-subsidized rental housing units in Chinatown.

Honolulu's Chinatown is now recognized nationally as one of the very few communities in the country that remained intact during urban renewal. No tenants in PACE were ever evicted, because the strong tenants' association stopped all evictions until affordable replacement housing was built. All of these housing victories were a result of PACE's organization of a strong, broad, statewide tenants movement. Today, PACE is still the voice of Chinatown residents whose labor helped build Hawai'i's economy.

So what does the June 23 U.S. Supreme Court decision mean for Chinatown residents?

The answer doesn't lie in the hundreds of blogs that followed this decision, nor the learned debates among constitutional law experts. Neither does it lie in the posturing of the libertarian vs. public-good factions. Rather, it lies in the words of the PACE Community Steering Committee leader Charley Correa spoken in April 1979:

"PACE has given me one thought — these courts and politicians are not for the people. They work for themselves (and) their own pockets. When you're old they don't want you, they've drained your sweat and blood. We should have what is due to us, but we never received a penny from the politicians to make Chinatown a decent place to live. We know what we are fighting for i housing and our survival as a community. It's a worthwhile fight."

Joy Wong has long been a coordinator for People Against Chinatown Evictions. She wrote this article for The Advertiser.