Brightline Podcast

Episode 2: 80 Square Feet of Chinatown

In this episode, we take a deep dive into San Francisco Chinatown’s Single Room Occupancy hotels, or SROs. We’ll take a look at what it’s like to live in such extreme density, why open space is a critical resource for residents, and how local community organizations are tackling a set of escalating environmental health crises here.

Transcript:

GORDON: Because when you look at a family thats living in a single room on Clay St, or on Stockton St, one begins to understand the challenges they face, and the fact they’re living in a single room as a family of four people…well I think it’s really at the core of environmental justice.

MAYA : This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice issues, or EJ issues, in the broader Bay Area, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. My name’s Maya.

AUBREY: And my name’s Aubrey. You’ll be hearing a lot more from me.

MAYA: Today, we’re covering an issue outside of what folks might traditionally think of as “environmentalism.” and I think it’s really important that we keep challenging those ideas we have of what makes something an environmental issue.

AUBREY: Yeah, environments can be wildlife refuges and conservation areas, but they’re also wherever people live!

MAYA: And if people are experiencing harm from their environments, especially in underserved communities? That’s an environmental justice issue.

AUBREY: Exactly. Thanks Maya. And with that, let’s talk about San Francisco Chinatown. If you’ve been there, you know that the place is bursting with life. From the hustle and bustle of people passing beneath colorful storefront banners to the rich smells wafting out of restaurants, there’s a lot going on. But today we’re taking a look at a piece of this neighborhood that might not be so obvious from just walking down the street.

MEIFENG: If you step foot into Chinatown, there’s a lot of buildings that you look at the outside, you see next door maybe just a business but next to it there’s a tiny door. Once you get in there and you walk up the stairs, all rooms are next to each other on a hallway…[it’s like] maybe walking into a maze, everywhere you turn you just see more rooms next to each other.

AUBREY: This is Meifeng. And for thirteen years, she lived in one of Chinatown’s [slow] Single Room Occupancy buildings, or SROs for short.

MEIFENG: Every unit is a very tiny room. In my room, it only fits a bunk bed and if you have a folding table, if your folding table is wide open, the door cannot be open fully.

AUBREY: Meifeng, her mother and older brother immigrated to the United States from China in 2006. They were looking for a community where people spoke their language and shared their culture. And this neighborhood turned out to be just the place.

GORDON: Well San Francisco Chinatown is the first Chinatown in the history of America.

AUBREY: This is Gordon Chin. He’s the founding director of the Chinatown Community Development Center.

GORDON: Quite simply, the Chinese who moved here in the 1840’s and 1850’s could not live anywhere else. The Chinese were restricted to really a twelve square block area which is still Chinatown.

AUBREY: At 73 years old, Gordon has spent decades serving this community and its SRO residents.

GORDON: Chinatown has always been primarily single room occupancy housing. Basically dormitory type housing to serve the workforce. Particularly an immigrant workforce. They were very cheap, they were very small, the conditions were not that good. They basically served workers who couldn’t afford anything more.

AUBREY: But today, instead of the solitary, itinerant male workers that they were originally built for, people like Meifeng and her family reside in the 105 SRO buildings that remain in Chinatown.

MEIFENG: People decided to live in SRO because they want a place to settle in as an immigrant. They don’t need to know English to have a sense of community whenever they go out the door, they can easily ask for help.

AUBREY: This neighborhood and its SROs have served as a gateway for thousands of immigrant families. But the buildings themselves present their own set of serious challenges.

MEIFENG: Our building has three floors, and every floor has about 20+ units. There’s no other common spaces, only the kitchens and the hallway where everyone walks around.

AUBREY: San Francisco Chinatown has been described as the densest urban areas west of Manhattan, and you won’t find more extreme density than in an SRO. The average unit is around 8 by 10 feet long, with anywhere from a single elderly person to an entire family of five or six sharing one room. Space is really tight.

MEIFENG: We also need to share kitchens, share bathrooms, all the shared spaces are shared by the entire buildings. You can imagine that whenever it gets to dinner times or shower times, everyone’s waiting in line to cook or shower. I experienced showering in the cold because the heater was off and there’s no electricity, no hot water, you don’t know what’s around you. Some cockroaches walking on the wall

AUBREY: In such congested living conditions, health and hygiene become real concerns. And among pests and unreliable utilities, another silent threat lurks in these buildings. Poor air quality.

MEIFENG: Our windows in each of our rooms are all facing inward inside, the windows are facing each other between neighbors. So there’s not actual ventilation or air coming from outside. Whenever there is people cooking, you can smell it throughout the whole floor. Whenever things get burned, you can hear an alarm going off and traveling through the whole floor.

AUBREY: Because of outdated ventilation systems, outdoor air pollution, and the sheer number of people sharing these spaces, simply breathing inside of an SRO brings its own complications. In one 2016 study, the San Francisco Department of Health found that in zipcodes with the densest SRO housing, hospitalizations for adult asthma were double the city average. Rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were nearly triple.

MEIFENG: So besides from the kitchen, there is only one tiny window on the opposite end of the building. Whenever there is people cooking, you can smell it throughout the whole floor. Whenever things get burned, alarms get set off, the smells travel through the whole floor.

AUBREY: The 2020 wildfires and the covid-19 pandemic have made the need to address air quality and congestion in these buildings more urgent than ever. For many community leaders here, SROs are always top of mind.

MALCOLM: My name is Malcolm Yeung, I am the current executive director of Chinatown Community Development Center.

AUBREY: As part of his work at Chinatown CDC, Malcolm thinks a lot about affordable housing, and the role that SROs play.

MALCOLM: Roughly 80–90% of the residents of Chinatown are low-income to extremely low-income, so it is, unfortunately, an area with one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the city, in the state, and probably in the country as well. Roughly 40% of the housing stock consists of Single Room Occupancy hotels, and that is again, both an asset and a challenge for the community.

AUBREY: In a city with some of the most expensive housing in the country, SROs are vital for low income, elderly, and foreign-born residents. But not everyone agrees on what to do about the buildings themselves.

MALCOLM: You know, we’re always hearing people coming in and calling for a demolition and rebuilding of Chinatown. Like, how can people live in SROs? But the challenge behind that is how do you demolish and rebuild and still maintain affordability and equity? The reality is that the kind of resourcing that it would take isn’t there. And we haven’t ever seen that kind of commitment from the city or the state.

AUBREY: When it comes to rebuilding SROs, leaders like Malcolm fear that residents who are forced to relocate temporarily might not ever be able to return. So instead, organizations like Chinatown CDC have focused on improvement, rather than replacement. They’re advocating for better code enforcement, upgrading existing infrastructure, and implementing air monitoring and filtration programs. But improving the quality of life for residents doesn’t stop at improving SRO buildings.

MALCOLM: A significant component of what we do is advocating for more and higher quality open spaces. We just saw the renovation of one of the most important open spaces on Chinatown called Chinese Playground. It’s a place to exercise, play, play tennis. In the old days you could dry vegetables there, but I guess you can’t do that anymore. And that open space advocacy is incredibly important and actually ties into equity and social justice. And if you ever are able to come to Chinatown again and you go into an SRO, you’ll immediately understand why open space is a social justice issue.

AUBREY: Amidst all of these challenges, it’s worth mentioning the environmental footprint of SRO-type housing. So, when broken down to its simplest form, Chinatown contains several key ingredients of sustainable urban development.

MALCOLM: I think you can say that in many ways Chinatown is a 15 minute community, a role model for high density, compact land use situations.

AUBREY: From low energy usage to high neighborhood walkability, a lot of these environmental markers sound good on paper. But environmental justice is about way more than sustainability in a vacuum- it’s about empowering the people in underserved and overburdened communities and advocating for equitable access to a high quality of life. And right now, government policy is not prioritizing equity.

MALCOLM: The new rules, how the state distributes affordable housing bond dollars, completely overlook communities like Chinatown, other immigrant gateway communities like the mission, and inner city black and brown communities. Instead, sort of pushing affordable housing resources out towards the suburbs and other places that are classified as “high opportunity areas.” It can’t and it shouldn’t come at the expense of neighborhoods that are already affordable but really need investment to make them healthy, safe, and environmentally just.

AUBREY: After serving Chinatown for decades, Gordon Chin knows that in order to understand the issue of SROs, we can’t just study them from a city planner’s point of view. Instead, we have to pay close attention to this community’s history and the everyday lived experiences of its residents.

GORDON: When you look at a family who’s living in a single room on Clay St or Stockton St. What led them to have to live in this place? How are their kids doing in school? How is their health, how has their mental health as a family been affected by not having any indoor or outdoor open space? We learned early on to look at these issues not in isolation, and to look at them in the context of environmental justice. The environment as defined by that family. Which is that 8 by 10 room, their hallway, their floor, their building, their block, their community. And we need to do justice to each and every one of those levels.

AUBREY: SRO residents face a set of really difficult environmental problems. But there’s a lot more to these places and communities than just their struggle.

GORDON: You cannot divorce how people live from how people acculturate, how people celebrate, and perhaps a high density, sometimes overcrowded community, has this critical mass of energy that does, I think, contribute to culture.

MALCOLM: So while some people think of Chinatown as a museum, they look at the architecture, to us, the culture is really about the people who live there and how they’re reformulating that culture on a daily basis. Because what’s a place without the people?

GORDON: You know my mom grew up in Chinatown. In fact, my grandmother was born in this country. And one of the places they lived was on Grant Avenue. It was 1049 Grant, which is currently the Sun Sing Theater. My mom and her family lived on the second floor of that building. One of their neighbors was a Chinese Opera couple. And that couple happened to have a one year old son whose name was Bruce Lee. Eight years later, I was born, and Bruce and I were both born at the Chinese Hospital around the corner. And that’s Chinatown, man. This is SRO housing. And that’s still there, the building is still there. That’s history, that’s culture, that’s housing, that’s health…that’s Chinatown, man.

AUBREY: Here at Brightline, we’re working with SRO communities in Chinatown to advance equitable access to safe and healthy living conditions. Eddie, can you fill us in?

EDDIE: Sure, Aubrey. As we’ve heard, SRO communities have always been under incredible pressure, and COVID-19 has only increased the pressure. Throughout the early months of the pandemic in 2020, Brightline directly delivered food to SRO residents to lessen communal kitchen use. A year later in March 2021, the nation has been rocked by anti-Asian violence from the Bay Area to Georgia. So we’re also grappling with existential questions in environmental justice: what does it mean to be Asian in America as our climate crises escalate?

AUBREY: Yes — some really big and challenging questions for Asian-American communities and EJ activists. And at Brightline, we’ve focused a lot of our own efforts in Chinatown on SRO air quality. We touched on this in the last episode, but can you tell us a little bit more about that part of our work?

EDDIE: Well Brightline has worked in partnership with Chinatown Community Development Center to install 2 air quality sensors in the neighborhood as part of our community-based monitoring network.

Beyond outdoor air quality, Brightline is also working on indoor air quality. And as SRO residents deal with the catastrophic air quality impacts from the wildfires, we’re working to bring air filtration to SRO buildings as well. We’re doing extensive surveying to get a better sense of specific public health issues and air quality — for SRO residents living not only in Chinatown, but also the Tenderloin, the Mission District, and South of Market in San Francisco.

AUBREY: Thanks, Eddie! And that’s it for today. Thank you all so much for tuning in to this episode of The Brightline Podcast, from Brightline Defense.

This episode was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway. It was fact-checked by Eleanor Kim with additional help from Daniela Cortes and Tan Chow. Editing and original music by Maya Glicksman. Thank you to Eddie Ahn for support on research and writing, and to all the folks we spoke to for this episode: Meifeng Deng, Gordon Chin, and Malcolm Yeung.

For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org. And finally, don’t forget to give us a follow and leave a review if you enjoyed the show. We are so excited to continue exploring Bay Area environmental justice issues with you, so please stay tuned for more from us, wherever you get your podcasts. Take care.

Thank you to Inspector J of Freesound.org for the use of Dripping, Fast, A.wav” and “Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav”