The document is a letter, by the East Bay Asian Consortium, to the planning commission of the city of Oakland regarding the Environmental Impact Report for the Chinatown Redevelopment Project. The Asian Community Library was one of the participating organizations in the East Bay Asian Consortium.
The East Bay Asian Consortium was disappointed at the lack of attention, resources, and funding for the cultural center, housing, retail, and parking — especially when compared to the resources devoted to the EBMUD administrative building. Their letter points to the conflict that emerged between Asian community organizations and the developers who were engaged on the relevant projects.
The Consortium and the Coalition argued that the developers needed to fulfill their promise to fund the design of the rest of the project, to meet regularly with the Coalition to understand the community’s needs, and to hire an architecture firm that was local and familiar with the community.
Historically, redevelopment projects have served to displace ethnic minorities from their enclaves in the Bay Area. Redevelopment removed whole blocks of San Francisco’s Japantown and an entire ethnic enclave from Manilatown. (The planned demolition of Manilatown’s I-Hotel became a galvanizing cause for Asian Americans in the late-70s and early-80s.) Oakland’s Chinatown had faced similar challenges with redevelopment in the 1960s from BART, which displaced residents near Madison Park.
This document showcases the solidarity Pan-Asian organizations fostered to protect Chinatown and to ensure accountability for development that would benefit Chinatown residents. Organizations that served a specific ethnic population, such as Filipino Immigrant Services (represented by Lillian Galedo, former board member of Friends of the Asian Library) and Korean Community Center of the East Bay, advocated for a form of Chinatown redevelopment that served everyone in the area. In making the development of Chinatown into a Pan-Asian issue, they brought together that larger Pan-Asian community.
