CHINATOWN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CENTER
San Francisco, California
Story and Photos By Mary Jo McConahay

In San Francisco, with some of the most astronomically high priced real estate in the country, thousands of low income residents including the elderly and immigrant families constantly face effective banishment from the place they feel they might best survive: Chinatown. Twenty-five years ago, grassroots volunteer groups banded together to preserve housing and advocate for residents. Today the Chinatown Community Development Center not only has become a city-wide force for tenants rights, housing and transportation safety and civil liberties; now the residents it works with take the lead in lobbying for decent living conditions and even political initiatives that affect affordable housing.

Li Yi Wu slips down one of dozens of alleyways in one of the country's most populous Chinatowns. The sweet aroma from a fortune cookie factory wafts through the air, and sunlight falls in shafts between buildings across a narrow pavement, but Li Yi has no time to note the fine details of her trip home. Unlocking a skinny metal-grated door, she hurries up a dark flight of stairs to a tiny cell. Charles, 3, dozes on a mattress, watched over by a neighbor. But whenever Li Yi is away from the boy, she worries, because he is fast.

"He plays in the hallway, and always wants to run to that single open window, where he could fall out," she says, gathering the boy into her arms. There is no porch, no yard. Charles shares a mattress at night with his parents on a bed which fills half the room. Like many single room occupancy hotel (SRO) residents, the Wu family's entire world is contained in the space of what might be a walk-in closet in some suburban homes; a top bunk is crammed with clothes, and a dancer's lion's head someone gave the boy. Pink and red plastic blossoms bloom deliberately from small vases, like an attempt to bring color into a cave. Down the hall, a communal bathroom. Hot water for bathing comes and goes, shared among too many. On the single stove in the common kitchen a man has just finished cooking supper, although it's only mid-afternoon – a survival strategy. "Later, between about 5 and 7 in the evening, with fourteen families trying to prepare food, it would be more difficult," explains Li Yi.

What will happen as Charles grows older? "It's one of our biggest worries," she admits. "We can't afford a bigger place."

Thousands live in the warrens of this city's Chinatown, among California's most densely populated urban areas including hundreds of families with children under age 18. On crowded main streets shoppers and tourists jostle before windows filled with ivories and silks. Food markets spill onto sidewalks with rich displays – leafy bak choi, spiky durian, cherries, live crabs in tanks, brown chickens strutting in wooden cages. Look above the sidewalks, however, and you can spot the splash of laundry hanging on a fire escape, or gritty windows that signal a building is an SRO.

Above one humming sidewalk, 51-year old Shao Zhen Li welcomes visitors to a room she laughingly calls "the size of a gold fish pond." An incense cone burns. Strategically placed mirrors are meant to expand the look of the place, but their reflections only repeat tightly packed clutter: microwave, rice-cooker, hanging cloth shoe-holders stuffed instead with books, mail, toiletries and other items that normally might be found in a chest of drawers. Shao Zhen was a schoolteacher in China, but without English language skills, can find only minimum wage jobs here caring for Chinese-speaking seniors. Her disabled husband works for a florist making wreaths, paid simply with a good lunch. The door to the room is left open a crack to help the air circulate, and at one moment a disembodied arm reaches in, a package of spaghetti in hand. "Neighbors bring things to each other," Shao Zhen says.

She reciprocates. As a member of the Chinatown Community Development Center's (CCDC) fire prevention project, Shao Zhen looks after the elderly in her hotel who forget to turn off hotplates. She makes sure smoke detectors work. Fire in the close-packed SROs would be catastrophic, and the old especially worry. The CCDC has helped run prevention and education workshops inside more than three dozen of the neighborhood's 120 SROs, with hands-on training in using extinguishers, locating exits, and accessing Chinese-language help through 9-1-1. Shao Zhen says she learns from neighbors, too. "Before, if I smelled something burning at 4 a.m., I knocked on every door until my knuckles hurt and looked scratched," she recalls. "Then an old lady told me, 'just use the palm of your hand.'"

One brilliant afternoon Shao Zhen and Li Yi sit across a table from each other among a dozen other women who also inhabit the city's tiniest rooms, part of a collaborative of SRO families which CCDC supports. Some report on a recent survey they made of 81 households, asking about health concerns. (Highest on the list: sanitation and upkeep, and the danger of lead poisoning for children from deteriorating paint.) Two women suggest other articles for the group's quarterly newsletter: how best to fight dandruff, and a translation of a proposed municipal ordinance on surplus land which might be used for affordable housing. Three at the table also come on Thursday afternoons to CCDC offices, where they learn computer skills to compose and print the newsletter themselves.

As the women meet, the San Francisco Bay spreads clean and azure in mid-distance through a window, and part of Angel Island is visible. That benign-looking island was a rock of tears for decades, where Chinese immigrants were detained within barbed wire fences, subjected to humiliating imprisonment in packed barracks, and many were deported. Today, Chinese American kids fill the highest-achieving schools in the area. Their parents may live in any neighborhood in the city, including the toniest.

But the image of Chinese Americans as the "model minority" – one which has risen quickly and amassed riches – leaves the people he knows behind, says 17-year old Wendell Lin, who gives tours of historic alleyways for tourists and students as part of a CCDC youth group. "My friends' parents – the other kids in the group – work in restaurants or sewing factories – you call them urban sweatshops," says Wendell.

"The stereotype is Chinese becoming wealthy, but there are the poor too," says Gordon Chin, who founded the organization in l977 that eventually became the CCDC. "We represent the segment that hasn't been recognized." No one wants to bulldoze the residency hotels, no matter how stifling their rooms, says Chin. "The idea is to preserve existing housing stock and build new housing, keeping rents affordable – from that comes everything else."

It is a vision that has shaped CCDC's belief that all neighborhood residents, including the youngest, the poorest, and the oldest share a basic right to a safe and decent place in which to live. The belief means CCDC takes on many roles, including as developers and managers of affordable housing, as neighborhood advocates, organizers and planners and promoters of activist volunteer associations. Organizing tenants themselves is the key to CCDC's success.

A resident may begin as a block captain or fire captain, like Shen Zhao, and become increasingly involved in CCDC's citizenship classes and voter registration drives. These and other CCDC programs are designed to help residents build the political strength necessary to improve the lives of their families and communities, helping pass favorable bond issues, for instance, or confronting City leaders to oppose hurtful zoning changes. Tenants may begin by gently but firmly insisting landlords to keep places clean and pay the light bills – actions that not only improve conditions of everyday life but give residents confidence. "We're building a base for social change," says Chin.

Some steps look small only from the outside.

Recently, Shao Zhen Li successfully organized over 100 neighbors in her hotel to demand the building owner stop changing water faucet handles, because the new ones were too hard to manipulate, especially for old people. Tenants dragged chairs into the hallway to confront the landlord at a meeting, but Shao Zhen said she had sought counsel from CCDC that helped smooth the situation: "I gave him hot tea, and explained to the residents that being angry doesn't solve anything. 'These aren't the faucets we had when we signed the lease,' I said."

"At first the landlord replied, 'This is my building and I can change what I want.' But we knew the rules."

"'No you can't,' we said."