The Fight for Community Ownership in Los Angeles Chinatown via the LA Chinatown CLT

Over the past few years, the community land trust (CLT) movement has held a significant amount of attention across North America, and particularly in a number of Chinatowns, including Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto. As a member of a local grassroots organizing group, Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED), I was part of the initial conversations and eventually the founding board of directors for the LA Chinatown Community Land Trust. This CLT in Los Angeles’ Chinatown is at the nexus of the burgeoning land-trust movement in Los Angeles and in multiple Chinatowns across North America. This case study will lay out the neighborhood and local context within which the CLT began, as well as some challenges and directions moving forward.

Background

Los Angeles Chinatown is located close to downtown Los Angeles, bordered by two freeways. As is the tale of many North American Chinatowns, its current location is not its first : the original was razed to build Union Station almost a century ago (Hom 2022). Figure 1 highlights the geographic boundary laid out by the Historic Cultural North Neighborhood Council. Per the census, foreign-born residents make up 55.6% of the population in the community, compared to 33.1% of residents in Los Angeles County, and 15.7% of residents are Asian, 45% Latino, and 6.40% Black. The reported median income is $55,024, which is almost approximately two thirds of the County of Los Angeles median income of $83,411. [1]

It is abundantly clear that the community is changing, and has been for the past few decades : important community-serving institutions like the Pacific Alliance Medical Center shuttered in 2017, after 157 years, when the company running the hospital decided against necessary seismic retrofitting improvements for the building (Martínez 2017). Ai Hoa, Chinatown’s last full-service grocery store, was forced to relocate away from the community in 2019 due to high rents (Barragan 2019).

Moreover, the City of Los Angeles seemed to drag its feet on supporting the development and proliferation of affordable housing : in 2019, the City approved the Harmony high-rise development (ibid.), but it contains 187 market-rate units and only nine affordable housing units. That same year, the City approved the Llewellyn project with 318 market-rate units and no affordable housing units (Sharp 2021).

One tool in the toolbox

Over the past decade, Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED) has supported Chinatown tenants, unhoused community members, and business owners in building power against corporate landlords, neglectful slumlords, and broader gentrifying sources. As an example, tenants are leading an ongoing mobilization for eminent domain at Hillside Villa apartments (Tso 2024), where the landlord filed notices for rent increases almost twice the original amount.

The plight of 920 Everett, a building of Southeast Asian immigrant and refugee tenants, underlined the necessity of long-term anti-displacement solutions. The tenants first received eviction notices in 2019, successfully organized and fought back against the landlord, who then decided against eviction and instead sold the building. The building was then sold to a new landlord, who harassed the tenants with vandalism, disrepair, and illegal eviction notices during the Covid‑19 pandemic [2] and eventually succeeded in evicting the tenants years later.

What if a community-oriented buyer were able to purchase the building after tenants successfully organized against the first landlord ? What if this buyer were able to give this building to tenants or keep it permanently affordable for them ?

The broader land-trust conversation

Across the continent, there has been increasing interest in the community land trust model in Chinatowns across North America : the oldest Chinatown CLT, located in Boston since 2015, was a project of local activists (Rios 2023), and the Toronto Chinatown Community Land Trust, formed in 2019, was as a direct response to the displacement and speculation faced in the community. Chinatowns face a particular challenge owing to the nature of building ownership in these communities : many buildings are owned by family associations or elder landlords with children who work more white-collar, professionalized jobs. These children, upon receiving these buildings as their inheritance, do not wish to continue operating as landlords, and sell them.

The movement gained momentum in Los Angeles around the late 2010s, building on the solid history of cooperatives in the city over the previous few decades. As an example, Beverly–Vermont CLT, founded in 2007, came out of the Los Angeles Eco-Village neighborhood that had its beginnings in 1993. In 2019, a group of community organizations in East Los Angeles conducted community-based research to address displacement and climate change : this led to a number of policy recommendations, all oriented around the development of a CLT in the area (Donlin-Zappella et al. 2022). Recommendations included a new acquisition and rehabilitation fund for naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) and at-risk deed-restricted multi-family properties, and conveying acquired, surplus, abandoned and tax-foreclosed properties to CLTs (ibid.). The Covid‑19 pandemic, which laid bare the housing and displacement precarity that many middle- and low-income residents faced, was reminiscent of the devastating displacement effects of the 2008 foreclosure crisis (2020 UCLA Community Collaborative 2020). Grassroots organizations and groups were mobilizing, and in July 2020 a coalition of Los Angeles CLTs, community development organizations, and other community entities formed a Los Angeles Acquisition-Rehab Working Group. Later that year, the LA County Board of Supervisors passed two separate motions to pilot a CLT partnership program, and then to allocate $14 million for the purchase of “unsubsidized multifamily properties suitable for permanently affordable housing” (ibid.). These homes were to be acquired with the eventual intention of tenants becoming owners of their homes through zero- or limited-equity housing cooperatives.

By May 2022, the coalition, which included the Beverly–Vermont Community Land Trust, Liberty Community Land Trust, El Sereno Community Land Trust, Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre, and T.R.U.S.T. South LA, had acquired 43 units in eight 2- to 11-unit buildings, stabilizing households with an average of 49% area median income (CCLTN 2022).

The development of the LA Chinatown CLT and learnings

While there have been some wins in Chinatown (like 920 Everett tenants successfully fighting a landlord who threatened eviction), it became clear that something crucial was missing : a vision of permanent homes that were community-led and community-centered. Amid the broader land-trust movement sweeping across Los Angeles, numerous members of the community, including planners, longtime organizers, researchers, and residents, came together to form the LA Chinatown CLT during the pandemic. It has now been almost half a decade since the CLT was first starting to be formed, and a few reflections have emerged.

Trust-building in the community

In the first years of the CLT’s inception, there was mistrust and a lack of knowledge around the CLT model. CCED, in particular, had spent much of its history rallying against landlords, and was thus suspicious of a new model that seemed, on its face, about owning land. While the board of directors worked to establish the CLT’s legal structures, members of the CCED expressed hesitation and concern over a lack of engagement with community members, despite many of the directors being former or current members of this group.

Recognizing the need to slow down and build an ongoing dialogue, members of both groups saw the importance of taking the time to parse the conflict and establish some level of understanding—leaning into adrienne maree brown’s concept of “moving at the speed of trust” (brown 2017). Dialogues between the two groups began and have continued in different ways, including structured meetings, formal presentations, informal conversations and political education with individual building associations, shared group chats, and continued attendance at various tenant association meetings. These have been both traditional presentations—but also mahjong sessions with food (as seen in other Chinatown CLTs across North America).

Another key piece to building relationships and trust has been overcoming the ongoing challenge of communicating the sometimes complex legal and financial structures of the CLT to Chinatown’s oftentimes monolingual Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Spanish base. This has meant building informational materials (like infographics and flyers) to make information accessible, but also hiring interpreters for simultaneous interpretation.

Membership models

Relationship and trust cultivation raise another important question : when it comes to relationships, who is the CLT building with ? In short, who comprises the membership of the organization ? Who guides the direction of the organization, and how are these members determined ?

A “classic” CLT model has two membership categories : residents of the CLT-owned land, and other members of the community supportive of the CLT’s goals (White 2018). However, as the demographics of a neighborhood shift due to gentrification, how does a CLT continue to center the working-class, racialized, and otherwise communities they intend to serve ? To solve this issue, specific membership categories were demarcated. Inspired by how land trusts like T.R.U.S.T. South LA [3] limits general membership to low-income residents who live or work in the area (Hernandez et al. 2020), the LA Chinatown CLT demarcated membership into three separate categories : people who leased land or housing from the LACCLT (or from any other type of corporation or landlord) ; people residing in Chinatown interested in supporting the mission of the CLT and who also fall under the California Housing Department’s definition of low-income ; and people not residing in Chinatown interested in supporting the mission of the CLT.

In the last few board elections, there have not been any lessee members or directors because the CLT has not yet acquired any land or housing (in this case, potential board directors are pulled from community or general members). Because of the lack of lessee members and directors, particular attention is being paid to building a strong community membership using the tactics mentioned in the previous section : building relationships in the community, and building trust, power, and education.

Future financing and fundraising

The CLT has been attempting to acquire a multi-unit building in Chinatown that has been facing an eviction from a small landlord. The residents of this building were already organized when they approached a community-housing lawyer, and the building became a natural candidate for a CLT purchase.

While there are some potential funding opportunities in Los Angeles, they require sustained advocacy and lobbying on timelines too long for the immediate purchase requirements. The LA Chinatown CLT is instead exploring alternative sources of funding, including credit unions, and more grassroots efforts such as fundraising from higher net-wealth individuals committed to redistributive action rather than charity. Other CLTs and community-centered land-ownership organizations have taken advantage of similar efforts : the East Bay Permanent Real-Estate Collective offered “investor shares” that allowed community-minded individuals to “invest” in liberating property. [4] However, while there is interest from these potential sources of funding, there is high risk aversion, particularly because this would be a first acquisition project for the CLT. The difficult negotiation for these funds is ongoing, amid an unfriendly fiscal climate.

Concluding remarks

The LA Chinatown CLT was born out of the fight against displacement in the Los Angeles Chinatown community. While the CLT is one potential model—it is just one model. The process of developing the CLT has not been without its issues and challenges : building trust in the community and with its membership, and also searching for the appropriate financing for its project acquisitions. However, the success of the CLT will not just be through its community-stewarded land ; it will also be through how it gets there. Continuing to build closer relationships with residents and organizers, and ensuring everyone in the community is brought along together, will be how the LA Chinatown CLT succeeds.

Bibliography

• Barragan, Bianca. 2019. “Ai Hoa Market will relocate after 30 years in Chinatown. Residents blame the landlord”, LA Curbed, October 31. Available online at the following URL : https://la.curbed.com/2019/10/31/20940579/chinatown-tom-gilmore-ai-hoa-market-closed.
• brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy. Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Chico : AK Press.
• California Community Land Trust Network (CCLTN). 2022. “Community Land Trust Innovations from Across California”, proceedings of the Community Land Trust Conference held on 13–14 October in Los Angeles. Available online at the following URL : www.cacltnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/CLT-Innovations-Slides.pdf.
• Donlin-Zappella, Natalie ; Gugich, Chul ; Carter, Hilary ; and Gacao, Gerrlyn. 2022. “Preventing Tenant Displacement through Community Ownership Pathways”, October. Available online at the following URL : https://libertyhill-assets-2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/documents/FY23_CLT_Report_Lesar_FINAL.pdf.
• Hernandez, Ashley Camille ; McNeill, Sandra ; and Tong, Yasmin. 2020. “Increasing Community Power and Health Through Community Land Trusts”, The California Endowment. Available online at the following URL : https://trustsouthla.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Increasing-Community-Power-Thru-CLTs-REPORT-TCE-BHC-Dec2020.pdf.
• Hom, L. 2022. “Displacing Los Angeles Chinatown : Racialization and Development in an Asian American Space”, in E. Gonzalez Romero (ed.), Gentrification, Displacement and Alternative Futures, Abingdon : Taylor & Francis.
• Martínez, George Louis “A”. 2017. “The Closure of this Chinatown Hospital is the Latest Blow in The Gentrifying Neighborhood”, LAist, 19 December. Available online at the following URL : https://laist.com/shows/take-two/the-closure-of-this-chinatown-hospital-is-the-latest-blow-in-the-gentrifying-neighborhood.
• Rios, Simón. 2023. “Nonprofit buys Chinatown homes to keep them affordable—and preserve history”, WBUR, 21 February. Available online at the following URL : www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/21/affordable-housing-real-estate-money-neighborhood.
• Sharp, Steven. 2021. “A look inside the big apartment building next to L.A. State Historic Park”, Urbanize Los Angeles [online], 4 August. Accessed 30 June 2025, URL : https://la.urbanize.city/post/chinatown-llewellyn-apartments-1101-north-main-street.
• Tso, Phoenix. 2024. “Chinatown tenants at Hillside Villa are one step closer to affordable rent”, Los Angeles Public Press [online], 31 January. Accessed 30 June 2025, URL : https://lapublicpress.org/2024/01/chinatown-tenants-at-hillside-villa-are-one-step-closer-to-affordable-rent.
• 2020 UCLA Community Collaborative. 2020. De-Commodifying Housing During Covid‑19. Available online at the following URL : www.cacltnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/De-Commodifying-Housing-During-COVID-19.pdf.
• White, Kirby (ed.). 2018. Community Land Trust Technical Manual, Portland (Oregon) : Grounded Solutions Network, p. 59. Available online at the following URL : https://groundedsolutions.org/wp-content/uploads/2018-10/Community%20Land%20Trust%20Technical%20Manual_0.pdf#page=52.