We Won't Move! Housing Justice and Community Organizing in 1970s New York City

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the discriminatory national-origins quota system and replaced it with a new system that prioritized family reunification, employment, and refugee status. The law allocated 170,000 quota slots to countries in the Eastern Hemisphere (which includes Europe, Asia, and Africa), based on a hierarchy of preferences for family members (80 percent) and occupations (20 percent), and set a cap of 20,000 per country.^¹ 

Following the passage of this act, immigration patterns, especially of Asian immigrants, started to shift drastically. Between 1966 and 1993, immigration from Asia totaled more than 5 million people. This led to a significant shift in the racial and ethnic demographics across the country: the population of Asian Americans grew from less than 1.2 million in 1965 to about 10.9 million in 2000.^¹ 

As a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, there was a significant influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States. According to the 1970 U.S. Census, the total population of people of Chinese descent reached 431,583, an 81.9% increase from 1960.^¹ In New York City specifically, the Chinese population increased from 36,503 in 1960 to 77,099 in 1970, a 111.2% increase.^¹ Many of these immigrants settled in Manhattan’s Chinatown. By the 1970s, the population had tripled from the 1960s, growing to an estimated 55,000 residents.

Note on Terminology: I am intentionally using the term “Asian American” to describe a pan-ethnic Asian identity that was initially formed to consolidate power. It is imperative to recognize that while “Asian American” is a powerful term that can unify diverse communities, it is also extremely broad and can potentially erase the wide range of experiences within different communities that make up Asian America. 

It is misleading to claim that prior to the 1960s and the rise of the “Asian American” movement, people of Asian descent did not engage in activism and political organizing. However, these efforts were typically organized under shared class and labor struggles, rather than a shared racial identity. The emergence of the “Asian American” movement did not mark a shift in the presence of activism, but in its political framing. The social movement that emerged in the late 1960s and spanned into the mid-1970s united various Asian ethnic groups under the term “Asian American” to fight for power and self-determination, and against racist and exploitative systems.^¹

The Coining of “Asian American”

The term “Asian American” was first coined in 1968 by UC Berkeley graduate students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee. Prior, individuals of Asian descent in the U.S. primarily identified themselves by their specific ethnic subgroup, or were labeled as “Oriental,” a term rooted in colonialism and a racial hierarchy that positioned Asians as fundamentally foreign and passive.^¹ Naming themselves “Asian American” was an act of resistance against dominant stereotypes of “Orientalism.” As Richard Aoki, a Black Panther who would later also become a spokesperson for the AAPA, said, “Up to that point, we had been called Orientals. Oriental was a rug that everyone steps on, so we ain’t no Orientals. We were Asian American.”^¹

Rejecting this racist and colonialist-imposed label, Ichioka and Gee articulated a new self-determined, pan-ethnic identity that would be able to consolidate political visibility and power. In an interview with Yến Lê Espiritu, the author of Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities, Ichioka says:

“There were so many Asians out there in the political demonstrations but we had no effectiveness. Everyone was lost in the larger rally. We figured that if we rallied behind our own banner, behind an Asian American banner, we would have an effect on the larger public. We could extend the influence beyond ourselves, to other Asian Americans.”^¹

The Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA)

Together, Ichioka and Gee founded the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), one of the first organizations to explicitly mobilize under this new “Asian American” identity. In its founding document called “Understanding AAPA,” the organization affirms: 

”We Asian Americans believe that we must develop an American society which is just, humane, equal, and gives the people the right to control their own lives before we can begin to end the oppression and inequality that exists in this nation.

We Asian Americans realize that America was always and still is a White Racist Society. Asian Americans have been continuously exploited and oppressed by the racist majority and have survived only through hard work and resourcefulness, but their souls have not survived.

We Asian Americans refuse to cooperate with the White Racism in this society which exploits us as well as other Third World people, and affirm the right of Self-Determination.

We Asian Americans support all oppressed peoples and their struggles for Liberation and believe that Third World People must have complete control over the political, economic, and educational institutions within their communities.

We Asian Americans oppose the imperialistic policies being pursued by the American Government.”^¹

The AAPA’s platform rejected assimilationist frameworks and directly challenged emerging “Model Minority” narratives that portrayed Asian Americans as compliant beneficiaries of American society and as “proof” of racial progress. Instead, their platform affirmed the right of self-determination, called out American exploitation, recognized the necessity of solidarity, and articulated a critique of the United States as a white supremacist and imperialist society. 

This political orientation reflected their alignment with Black Power, anti-war, and anti-imperialist movements, and the greater global Third World decolonization struggle.^¹ Rather than framing Asian Americans as a racial minority seeking inclusion within existing power structures, the AAPA positions them as part of a movement for “complete control of political, economic, and educational institutions within their communities.” Asian American liberation could not be achieved independently of broader liberation movements, and could only be achieved through collective organizing and resistance alongside other oppressed peoples. 

Yellow Power 

Across the nation, an emerging “Yellow Power” consciousness was reshaping how Asian Americans understood their racial position in the United States. In the first issue of Gidra, the inaugural Asian American newspaper started by UCLA students, published in April 1969, Larry Kubota’s manifesto “Yellow Power!” states: 

“Yellow power is a call for all Asian Americans to end the silence that has condemned us to suffer in this racist society and to unite with our black, brown and red brothers of the Third World for survival, self-determination and the creation of a more humanistic society.”^¹

Similarly, in her influential essay “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” Amy Uyematsu argued that Asian Americans could no longer remain on the sidelines of racial struggle, since they too were “victims… of the white institutionalized racism” that confined them to the margins of U.S. society.^¹ She directly challenged the emerging model minority narrative, criticizing those who took “false pride in their own economic progress” and believed that Black Americans could succeed similarly “if they only followed the Protestant ethic of hard work and education.” For Uyematsu, this thinking reproduced white racial logic as it framed Asian American economic mobility as proof that racism could be overcome individually, while ignoring structural inequalities. Assimilation into white middle-class America and the adoption of “the white man’s culture” did not eliminate racial subordination, but instead produced a “mistaken identity,” in which Asian Americans adopted white values yet remained excluded from full belonging. Yellow Power, arising as a direct outgrowth of the Black Power movement, therefore called for rejecting assimilation and forging solidarity with Black and Brown communities in a shared struggle for self-determination.

Post-1965, young Chinese residents in New York City’s Chinatown spearheaded a range of efforts to build community and secure critical resources for its growing neighborhood population. Through research initiatives, cultural production, and grassroots organizing, they documented their community’s marginalization and then implemented programs to actively fight against it. 

The Chinatown Study Group 

The Chinatown Study Group, created in December 1968, introduced a new framework of understanding Chinatown that relied on community-based research to document the lived realities of residents. From March to December 1969, Danny Yung, along with a team of eight other Columbia University Graduate students, led the first-ever community research project that focused on Manhattan’s Chinatown. They mobilized fifty bilingual college students to interview residents and twenty-five graduate students to conduct building surveys and make site evaluations to shed light on living and housing conditions in Chinatown.^¹ 

In the preface and introduction of the report, the authors articulate their goals being to fulfill the significant lack of “‘hard’ quantitative data adequately describing the nature of the and extent of conditions in New York City’s Chinatown” and “providing a foundation for the initiation of action programs.” They recognized the importance and interdependence of research and initiation of action programs as the “two necessary tools with which the problems of racial and cultural minority groups must be attacked,” and that “research without subsequent implementation is meaningless: action without basis is frustration.”^¹ This positioned data as a political tool that would be able to be used to advocate for their community’s needs. 

The findings revealed the dual reality of Chinatown. On one hand, it functioned as an essential ethnic enclave that offered social and cultural belonging and accessibility. When asked what they liked MOST about living in Chinatown, 29.2% of respondents identified shared language and culture as the greatest benefit of living in Chinatown, closely followed by “availability of Chinese foods and other articles” (28.3%), and then by proximity to friends and/or relatives (20.4%).^¹ 

At the same time, the most frequently cited drawbacks of living in Chinatown point to systemic urban neglect. When asked what they like LEAST about living in Chinatown, 28.1% of respondents described it as “not a safe neighborhood (too many thefts, muggings, murders, etc.), followed by 15.2% saying “too crowded, too many people,” and then 13.8% saying “not enough available housing.”^¹ Describing the importance of the study, Eleanor Yung, Danny Yung’s sister, writes how “The Chinatown Study provided much clarity on the living conditions and hardships of residents, and how they had to struggle to sustain their livelihood and survive in the United States.”^¹

The Chinatown Report was significant as it was the first participatory, community-centered research that focused on Chinatown. By producing quantitative evidence of overcrowding, housing shortages, and unsafe conditions, the Chinatown Study Group provided a foundation for future organizing. This report served as a hyperlocal source of data and research that would be able to be used to support community-based initiatives and action programs within Chinatown.

Basement Workshop

The Basement Workshop emerged organically from the Chinatown Study Group. Founded in 1970 by young Asian American artists and activists, many of whom were involved in the Chinatown Study Group, Basement would be a way to implement the research findings from the Study into action. 

Describing the emergence of the Basement Workshop, Eleanor Yung, who was involved in the Study Group and was one of the co-founders of Basement, writes: 

“In Spring 1970, I got a call from Danny to meet him at the basement of 54 Elizabeth Street. As I walked down the stairs into the basement, there he was standing in the center of the room, beaming, his arms outstretched, motioning the space to me, asking excitedly, 'What do you think!?'

Danny believed that materials we gathered from the community should remain in the community, and that accurate data would serve as the basis for relevant and necessary programs and actions. That spring, he rented the basement space for a two-year lease, to do just that and much more. The physical space was used not only to store materials, but also became a place where many people would gather, particularly college students and young people. For the student recruits of the Chinatown Study and their friends, it became a hub, a hangout place in Chinatown. 'Let’s go eat in Chinatown... I’ll meet you at the Basement,' became an often-heard phrase.”^¹

What started as a cultural space for young Asian Americans to build community became a site for community-based political education and organizing. The Basement Workshop’s projects included publishing Bridge Magazine, hosting art workshops, creating community education programs, and producing works such as the 1972 multimedia anthology Yellow Pearl. Members of Basement, including photographers, painters, musicians, playwrights, helped build a cultural infrastructure that developed Asian American political consciousness. To learn more about Basement, check out fellow youth researcher Inis Chen’s exhibit, When We Come Together, We Win. 

With Chinatown’s population rapidly growing and an awareness that federal funding, political representation, and social services were directly tied to official census data, in 1970, community members who were concerned about widespread undercounting formed the Chinese Community Census Committee to ensure maximized participation in the upcoming census.^¹ 

The census was exclusively offered in English, and for the first time, was being conducted through mailed questionnaires rather than in-person enumerators. The Committee charged that “Current data-gathering procedures planned for the 1970 Census to be taken in the spring, gravely threaten the constitutional rights of Chinese and other non-English speaking minorities.” Citing findings from the 1969 Chinatown Study Report, including that “80.7% of the families interviewed have no one in the household who can read English” and “close to 10% of those surveyed reported that they shared apartments with one or more families,” they warned that many “will not be able to understand the full meaning of the 1970 Census” and “will fill out the Census forms improperly or not at all.”^¹

The Committee’s efforts were not confined to New York City. They consulted community organizers in San Francisco’s Chinatown in order to plan actions in response to “the pressing need for accuracy and justice in the 1970 Census.”^¹ This coast-to-coast collaboration reflects how communities across the country actively fought against the institutional marginalization of immigrant, non-English-speaking populations. 

Legan Wong, a college student who was a part of the Chinatown Study Group, describes: 

“I participated in doing a survey of every single building in Chinatown and the surrounding Lower East Side. This is when I realized that behind these old tenement buildings was a hidden building. If you kept going towards the back where there’s no light and where all the garbage cans are, across a little alleyway there was a whole other set of apartments. There were literally hundreds of Chinese living there who were not being counted. In our broken Chinese, we would try to talk to them about the census, but there was a lot of fear. Many were undocumented, having come under false papers, which is the history of our first generation of Chinese Americans.”

In a letter sent to members of other community organizations across the city, the Committee emphasized its goals of wanting to “publicize the importance of the 1970 U.S. Government Census, and ensure maximum participation in the census by Chinatown residents.”^¹ In order to accomplish these goals, their plans included launching a multilingual publicity campaign and setting up neighborhood assistance centers to help residents complete census forms accurately.

I Wor Kuen in New York City’s Chinatown

In 1969, amid the rise of the broader Asian American movement and the emerging “Yellow Power” consciousness, a group of young Asian Americans, many who came from Asian Americans for Action (AAA), the AAPA chapter at Columbia University, formed I Wor Kuen (IWK).^¹ 

Similar to the Basement Workshop, IWK shared concerns about Chinatown’s poor living conditions and lack of social services. Carmen Chow, one of the leaders of IWK, described Chinatown “a ghetto community which has one of the highest suicide rates, highest tuberculosis rates, the most congested housing facilities of any ghetto in New York City.” Thus, trying to provide Chinatown with needed social programs, IWK launched campaigns including running free health clinics and creating political education programs. 

However, what distinguished IWK was that it framed these issues more explicitly as products of capitalism, imperialism, and racial exploitation. As an organization, IWK claimed an Asian American revolutionary identity and saw itself as part of a broader movement in solidarity with other non-white communities to overthrow U.S. imperial and capitalist systems.

“We are not out to demand this phoney [sic] reform or that, but to fight for the total self-determination of the Asian people of Chinatown. Our programs are a step on the road of a thousand-li that leads to the freedom and power for all non-white (YELLOW, BROWN, BLACK) peoples of this community. POWER TO THE COURAGEOUS, HARDWORKING, PROUD, ASIAN-AMERICAN PEOPLE!” - Carmen Chow^¹

Radical Political Organizations  

While The Black Panther Party, I Wor Kuen, and the Young Lords, three radical political organizations, emerged from distinct racial and national contexts, their party platforms articulated a shared political analysis: that racial oppression in the United States was inseparable from capitalism, colonialism, and U.S. imperial expansion overseas.

The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Platform demanded “freedom,” “full employment,” “decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings,” and “education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.”^¹ The Panthers characterized Black communities in the U.S. as internal colonies and the police force as an occupying force.^¹ Housing, education, and military conscription were framed as mechanisms of racial domination embedded within capitalism and imperialism. 

Similarly, I Wor Kuen’s Twelve-Point Program, echoed many of the Panthers’ demands. It called for self-determination for all Asian people, “decent housing, health, and childcare,” and “education that exposes the true history of this racist and imperialist society.” Like the Panthers, IWK opposed U.S. military aggression abroad and wanted ends to the “Amerikan military” and “Amerikan imperialism,” explicitly connecting domestic anti-Asian racism to American imperialism in Asia.^¹

The Young Lords Party’s Thirteen-Point Program advanced parallel demands for Puerto Rican and Latino self-determination, “community control of our institutions and land,” “a true education of our Creole culture and Spanish language,” and the “withdrawal of U.S. Military forces and bases from Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and all oppressed communities inside and outside the U.S.”^¹ Led largely by Puerto Rican youth born in the mainland United States, the Young Lords linked the colonial status and liberation struggle of Puerto Rico to the poverty and neglect experienced in their urban neighborhoods.^¹

These organizations not only shared ideological frameworks, but often operated in close proximity and were influenced by one another’s organizing strategies. The Panthers’ “Serve the People” programs, including free breakfast initiatives and community health clinics, directly influenced both IWK and the Young Lords, who subsequently launched their own community survival programs. They also became involved  in grassroots organizing, working alongside tenants to resist displacement, demand building repairs and upkeep, and challenge rent increases. In doing so, they fought to defend their communities against the profit-driven priorities of city officials, landlords, and corporate developers, thereby extending their anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics into the everyday struggle over housing. 

1970 marked a turning point in New York City’s housing struggles as tenant activism started to coalesce into an emerging tenant movement that would continue to grow throughout the decade. In response to rising rents, urban renewal displacement, and severe landlord neglect, tenants started to organize. They demanded the restoration of strict rent control, an end to the warehousing of vacant apartments, a halt to building demolitions, and the construction of new low-income housing. Across the city, there were various direct-action campaigns reflecting growing resistance to the systemic neglect of black and brown working-class residents. 

Rent Control and Tenant Strikes 

In early 1970, the renewal of New York City’s rent control law became the grounds for a political struggle between tenant advocates and real estate interests. Because the law required periodic renewal, landlords and industry leaders used the March 1970 deadline to push for significant changes. Studies commissioned under Mayor John Lindsay’s administration—already sympathetic to the argument that the rent control system kept rental income from keeping pace with rising operating costs— including one by the Rand Corporation that blamed housing deterioration on the gap between controlled rents and so-called “economic rents” needed to maintain the buildings, convinced city officials that rent control had contributed to building abandonment. Consequently, in July 1970, the Lindsay administration passed a law introducing the Maximum Base Rent (MBR) system which imposed an immediate 15 percent rent increase on approximately 1.3 million rent-controlled apartments, followed by annual increases averaging 10 percent if landlords met maintenance standards.^¹ 

In response, the Metropolitan Council on Housing called for a citywide rent strike, launching a Tenant Strike Campaign in August 1970 where “thousands of tenants in rent-controlled apartments throughout the city prepare to go on strike, withholding their rents to protest the destruction of rent control and to demand a pro-tenant housing program.”^¹

At the same time, borough-based coalitions linked local struggles to citywide demands. In the Bronx, the Bronx Housing Crisis Coalition and the Bronx Clergy Coalition, supported by groups like the Young Lords and Black Panthers, called for a citywide rent strike to protest the proposed rent increases and broader housing neglect. 

Urban Renewal and Squatting Movements 

By the late 1960s, housing conditions in many New York City neighborhoods were shaped by aggressive urban renewal policies that prioritized redevelopment over the needs of working-class residents. Under urban renewal plans, thousands of low-income, predominantly minority tenants were displaced as old buildings were demolished to make way for high-rise subsidized apartments and market-rate housing.^¹ These plans often included “warehousing” apartments, a tactic where the city, large institutions like Columbia University, and private landlords intentionally kept apartments vacant in anticipation of redevelopment that would increase rental values, leaving large numbers of families without affordable homes even as housing needs mounted.^¹ 

In the spring of 1970, the death of fifteen-year-old Jimmy Santos from carbon monoxide poisoning in his family’s apartment after their landlord refused to repair a boiler sparked a multiracial, intergenerational squatting campaign known as Operation Move-In. Organized primarily by Black and Latino activists, the movement mostly targeted vacant buildings scheduled for demolition under urban renewal plans in the West Side Urban Renewal Area, directly challenging the city’s practice of warehousing apartments while residents faced displacement and unsafe conditions. What started with four families quickly expanded to more than 200, with takeovers concentrated in the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights. Squatters also built systems of mutual aid, including childcare collectives, community kitchens, volunteer medical support, and a bilingual political newspaper, framing their occupation not only as a protest against warehousing and demolition, but as a community-led alternative to the city’s neglect.^¹

Although the struggle against the New York Bell Telephone Company was rooted in Chinatown, it was not an isolated fight. Rather, the “We Won’t Move” campaign unfolded as tenant activism across New York City was escalating into a broader movement. The cross-racial coalition formed in Two Bridges, which brought together Chinese, Italian, Puerto Rican, Black, and Jewish tenants, reflected a growing recognition that displacement, corporate redevelopment, and housing neglect were citywide problems requiring collective resistance.

In summer of 1969, the New York Bell Telephone Company bought out several residential buildings in Manhattan’s Chinatown with plans to demolish them by the end of 1970 and use the property for the construction of a new telephone switching station. Nearly an entire block bordered by Market, Henry, Catherine, and Madison Streets was targeted, placing approximately 300 predominantly Chinese families across 18 buildings at risk of eviction. At a time when overcrowding in Chinatown was already severe, with some families forced to share three-room apartments among a dozen people, the destruction of existing housing intensified an already critical shortage.

While roughly 70 tenants vacated their apartments as a result of harassment, the majority refused displacement and organized. They formed picket lines outside the buildings chanting “Ma Bell, We Won’t Move!” and carrying bilingual signs in Chinese and English that read, “N.Y. Telephone Stop Wrecking Our Homes” and “N.Y. Telephone, Agent of the Rich.”^¹

With support from the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council and the Metropolitan Council on Housing, residents formed the “We Won’t Move” Committee. The Committee organized two demonstrations. There was first a small-scale demonstration at the downtown New York Bell office; then on July 18, 1970, after advertisements in IWK’s Getting Together, several hundred Chinese, Italian, Puerto Rican, Black, and Jewish residents gathered on Market Street in a mass demonstration, reflecting the emergence of a cross-racial, working-class coalition against corporate displacement.^¹

Despite public protest, the company continued efforts to clear the buildings and did not allow tenants who were displaced to return. On the morning of September 25, 1970, in the “liberation” of housing, 24 Chinese families unlocked the apartments vacated by the company with the assistance of I Wor Kuen and the Two Bridge Neighborhood Council. Organizers reported that when tenants were forced out, company contractors had deliberately smashed windows, ripped out plumbing, and destroyed fixtures to prevent reoccupation. Nevertheless, families began moving back in, declaring their refusal to remain overcrowded or displaced. In response, the company increased police presence, hired relocation contractors, and allegedly used undercover surveillance to intimidate residents.^¹

In Getting Together, I Wor Kuen framed the struggle as part of a broader fight against capitalist exploitation and community destruction, arguing that the company’s land acquisition represented an attempt to dissolve the community in Chinatown: 

“Undoubtedly, what this all represents is all attempt to break up the Chinatown community, an attempt to disperse all our people and prevent us from getting together. Our land, which is being robbed from us under our very noses by this monstrous, land-hungry corporation, is a deliberate attempt to break up our community. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that if we lose this block of Greater Chinatown, we will lose other blocks until nothing remains but restaurants and gift shops on Mott Street.” 

Although the company initially refused to allow displaced tenants to return, in 1971, mounting public pressure and damage to its corporate image led to an agreement granting tenants ten-year leases and relocating the switching station to an alternative site.^¹ This struggle is a significant instance of working-class Chinese tenants openly confronting a powerful white-owned corporation and rejecting “model minority” stereotypes of political passivity. It is evidence of the power of unified grassroots action and organizing. 

The Young Lords, Black Panthers, and IWK not only attended each other’s respective demonstrations, but even held a collective mock trial in coalition at Columbia University on the issue of the displacement of poor people in housing in December of 1970. 

The steering committee of the Housing Crimes Trial was made up of members from the following organizations: the Black Panther Party, I Wor Kuen, Metropolitan Council on Housing, Movement for Puerto Rican Independence, United Puerto Rican Students of Columbia University, and the Young Lords.^¹ Expressing the necessity of the Housing Crimes Trial, the steering committee writes: 

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the American people to take into account the inconsistencies of their judicial system and to assume the powers of that system in order that justice prevail, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that the people declare the causes which impel them to take this action.”

In the mock indictment, the Grand Jury of the People of the City of New York charged the Government, the Landlords, and the Banks of the City of New York with thirteen counts of housing crimes: slum conditions, criminal neglect, no fundamental services, firetraps, racism, evictions, harassment, criminally high rents, no people’s housing, no fit housing for welfare recipients, bad city-owned housing, conspiracy of the city government, and conspiracy of the banks. 

Testimonies from victims of housing crimes lasted more than six hours. Witnesses included tenants involved in Operation Move-In and tenants involved in the “We Won’t Move” committee against the New York Telephone Company. 

One witness describes their involvement in Operation Move-In: 

“[...] within a week I was one of fifteen families that took over and liberated a building with nothing, no toilets, no windows, everything destroyed — there was nothing there, and like all of the 200 families in Operation Move-In, we ourselves put in the windows and the toilets and the walls and the floors, and literally built the house that we now live in.” 

 In Getting Together, IWK describes the We Won’t Move Committee: 

“When our people are forced to barely subsist in criminally overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe housing, then we have a right to take housing in our own hands. One set of witnesses [in the Housing Crimes Trial] came from Chinatown. They were involved in the “We Won’t Move” block that Bell Telephone Co. is trying to evict to make way for a switching station. Through blatant criminal acts. Bell Telephone Co. has tried to take over the land and housing, the very livelihood of our people, for its own miserable profit. If people had not organized to resist this act of blatant raping thievery, there would be a switching station in our community by now.”

More than 1,000 people attended the People’s Housing Crimes Trial, bringing significant public attention to housing issues and uniting tenants from across racial communities. By placing the city government, landlords, and banks on trial, organizers framed housing injustice not as individual misfortune but as a systemic crime against poor and working-class communities. The trial united Black, Latino, and Asian organizers in a shared indictment of urban renewal, rent increases, and displacement, demonstrating that struggles from Chinatown to the Upper West Side to Morningside Heights to the South Bronx were part of the same structural housing crisis created by putting corporate interests and profit over New Yorkers’ needs and wellbeing. 

The various organizing efforts that unfolded in post-1965 Chinatown challenge dominant historical narratives that cast Asian Americans as politically passive. Rather than conforming to the emerging model minority myth, Chinatown residents documented overcrowded housing and systemic neglect, and fought to protect their community. Revolutionary groups such as I Wor Kuen framed local struggles as products of capitalism and structural racism, aligning their demands with those of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords in calling for self-determination for their communities, decency in living conditions and services, and collective power of minoritized communities. These localized histories demonstrate that Asian American political activism in New York City was not peripheral to the era’s radical movements but deeply embedded within them. Furthermore, they highlight the necessity of acknowledging the interconnectedness of different struggles and thus, the necessity of organizing and solidarity across different communities. 

The urgency of these historical struggles resonates starkly with today’s housing crisis in New York City. Decades later, the city continues to face soaring rents, gentrification, and shortages of affordable housing. In Chinatown, rapid gentrification threatens the neighborhood’s affordability, cultural identity, and long-term residential stability. As property values and rents rise, long-time residents are increasingly priced out, and designated “affordable” units often remain unaffordable for many local families due to income-based eligibility criteria that do not reflect Chinatown’s economic realities.^¹

The lessons of 1970, including that communities must document their conditions, build community-based institutions, and unite to confront structures of power, remain relevant today, as local tenant organizations and community groups continue to assert that housing is not a commodity, but a human right. 

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