Legacy Businesses in Immigrant Neighborhoods
Trudi Sandmeier 00:00
Today on Save As …
Xiaoling Fang 00:02
These small places might not look fancy or unique or iconic from outside, but it’s such an important pinch point for the community.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:12
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award winning podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 00:31
And I’m Cindy Olnick. So Trudi…
Trudi Sandmeier 00:34
Yes, Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 00:36
Today, we’re talking about legacy businesses, which have been around for a minute. But it’s this idea of conserving not just a building, but its use.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:45
Which is kind of a new angle, honestly, for heritage conservation, because it’s been so building focused in the past. And so it’s exciting to get beyond just the box, and talk about the culture and the community that’s within.
Cindy Olnick 01:02
Exactly exactly.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:04
Our producer Willa Seidenberg had a conversation with a recent graduate, Xiaoling Fang, who really dug in to the stories of the businesses in Chinatown. This was kind of a personal journey for her. She spent a lot of time walking the streets and eating in restaurants and talking to owners of businesses and going to tons of community meetings and really, really trying to understand what was happening in the community beyond what you just see when you go there as a tourist or a casual visitor. And I think her thesis really reflects that in depth approach that she took, which is exciting. So without further ado, let’s listen to Willa’s conversation with Xiaoling.
Willa Seidenberg 01:53
Welcome Xiaoling to the Save As podcast. I’m excited to talk to you because that’s one of the fun things about doing this podcast is getting to talk to my classmates. But first, will you introduce yourself to our listeners.
Xiaoling Fang 02:09
Thank you so much for having me in the podcast. My name is Xiaoling Fang. I’m born and raised in Guangdong Province, China. I moved to LA for graduate school, and studying heritage conservation and urban planning.
Willa Seidenberg 02:26
What got you interested in the field of heritage conservation?
Xiaoling Fang 02:30
When I was doing undergraduate in China, my major is cultural industry management. So a lot of topics we touched on is like how to sustain and revitalize ancient villages in China. That gets me really curious, how do people do it in Western countries. So I came here to learn more about the history and the practices for the professionals in this field. And as I go deeper in the heritage conservation, I feel like urban planning is such an important part in this industry. It’s like, you can’t do heritage conservation without thinking of planning policies.
Willa Seidenberg 03:23
Yeah, they really go hand in hand, don’t they?
Xiaoling Fang 03:27
Yes, right. Exactly. And I feel like for my thesis, I can’t really finish my thesis without having both of those backgrounds and knowledge.
Willa Seidenberg 03:37
Okay, so the name of your thesis is Legacy Business Program Implementation in American Urban Immigrant Neighborhoods. What led you to this topic?
Xiaoling Fang 03:50
As an international student from China, it’s very natural for me to visit Chinatown in Los Angeles. It’s such a famous spot for even people in China, right? As I am Cantonese and Cantonese is my mother tongue, people are speaking Cantonese when they were in a restaurant, and even when I just walking around the neighborhood, I hear people talking in Cantonese. So I have this instant personal connections with the neighborhood.
Willa Seidenberg 04:27
I can imagine it must have felt really comforting to be able to listen and speak in your native language.
Xiaoling Fang 04:34
Exactly, exactly. And fast forward to 2022, I revisited Chinatown in the Spring Festival or Lunar New Year. So I noticed that there are so many development projects going on in a neighborhood and you can’t really ignore the construction site wherever you’re walking in the neighborhood. So as a heritage conservation student, it immediately got my attention. That’s kind of the inspiration of my thesis topic, like, oh, I noticed that there must be gentrification is going on. And like, after I looking up the development projects on the websites of some of the developers, you know, and most of them are like, luxury, residential apartments, commercial complexes, office building and stuff like that. It’s not real estate in the built environment of the existing community. After knowing more about the future projects, of Chinatown, I started worrying about, are the existing commercial or residential tenants going to be evicted by these projects, are the rents are going up? This is like one important factor that drove me to learn more about the community’s future. Right. And another one is that as a visitor in Chinatown, you know, you can tell the cultural identity of the owner or the employees, you know, and get to know, the people there, the culture there. So the small businesses are such important amenities for outsiders of the community. And I can imagine, it’s also important for the long-term residents as well, because Chinatown is a very famous immigrant gateway in history. And there must be a lot of unique needs for the residents there, right, because they are from like, a very different culture background.
Willa Seidenberg 06:52
So what exactly is the definition of a legacy business?
Xiaoling Fang 06:58
That’s a term that’s used by a lot of our heritage conservationist. It’s really the long-term, long-standing small businesses in the community. It serves local residents. And sometimes it serves visitors and people outside the community as well. And most of times such legacy businesses, they are also a very important place for community members to gather, to communicate, and to pass their culture to next generations. That is just very day-to-day life, very organic place that transmittal of cultures happening. It’s a very important place outside of home and work.
Willa Seidenberg 07:50
So that’s what you mean about a third space? Yeah. You mentioned that term in your thesis as a place that’s outside of home or work, and how they’re culturally significant because they add so much historic culture to a neighborhood. And typically, these legacy businesses are small and often family owned, right?
Xiaoling Fang 08:16
Yes, right. We had a class studying the Watts Coffee Shop.
Willa Seidenberg 08:24
Yes, the Watts Coffee House in Watts.
Xiaoling Fang 08:26
That’s another inspiration source of my thesis as well, because we really get to learn how these small places might not look fancy or unique or that iconic from outside. But it’s such an important pinch point for the community, especially for a community with minority background, because there might not that many places for them to gather. That’s why small businesses, especially the popular one, the historic one, in a neighborhood is so important.
Willa Seidenberg 09:05
We should point out that your thesis not only looked at Chinatown, but also the Little Tokyo neighborhood. What were some of the small legacy businesses that you discovered in these communities that felt culturally significant to you?
Xiaoling Fang 09:20
Both Little Tokyo and Chinatown, are historic neighborhoods in L.A., right, and many of the small businesses can be traced back to 1880s or even earlier. The stories of the families that running the business are really the touching part for me. Many of these immigrants, they went through such devastating traumatizing moments, and they show this resilience running across generations and still keep their family business survive. That’s the part that really amazed me. Some of the small business owners that I interviewed, they don’t really make it a big deal “Oh, this is my family history.” It’s just for them, it’s such a natural thing. And some of them grow up with the family owned store, right? So they don’t really think oh, that’s historically significant or culturally significant. From my point of view, the spirit and history that reflect the whole immigrant community are embedded in their family histories and needed to be well-documented, which we have not been doing so far. Yeah, especially for the families immigrant neighborhoods.
Willa Seidenberg 10:50
Was there one business that you could tell us about that has a particularly interesting story?
Xiaoling Fang 10:56
So that the one that comes to my mind is the Phoenix Bakery.
Willa Seidenberg 11:01
Yes, Phoenix Bakery. That’s a really well known place in Chinatown that I think people all over the city know about.
Xiaoling Fang 11:09
Yes, exactly. But as I go deeper to the family histories, I surprisingly found that their founder of Phoenix Bakery, he was also the founder of two other local Chinese American-owned banks, which is Cathay Bank and East West Bank. The reason why he co-founded the Cathay Bank is that he found it was extremely difficult for him to secure loan for his business, despite the success of Phoenix Bakery at that time. It could be the reason of, you know, racial hatred or discrimination. So he and other community leaders in Chinatown founded Cathay Bank to fill the gap. So the Cathay Bank and East West Bank really acted as a facilitator for the local immigrant community. Phoenix Bakery also have this great reputation of maintaining good relationships with the community members. So I interview one of the operators, Kenneth Chan, the second generation of the Chan family. So his father founded Phoenix Bakery. He told me that one of his customers, who was originally the long-term residents in Chinatown, and then moved to Nevada in her 70s or 80s. And her grandchild have to drive back to Phoenix Bakery to to buy her grandma, this strawberry signature cake every year. Because their grandma just reject any other cake. You know?
Willa Seidenberg 13:02
That’s really funny.
Xiaoling Fang 13:03
Yes. And also Phoenix Bakery provided so many employment opportunities for the community. So our Ken told me that many of the kids growing up in Chinatown, have had part-time jobs in Phoenix Bakery to earn their allowances. He also told me that one of their long-term employees who have Latinx background, and he worked at Phoenix Bakery for over 20 years. So recently, he retired, but asked to go back to work at Phoenix Bakery again, because he missed the atmosphere, the community there. So yeah, we can really see like the social relationships and around the community and how the Phoenix Bakery as a small businesses in the community really facilitate those social relationship.
Willa Seidenberg 13:59
You also wrote about a sweet shop in Little Tokyo called Fugetsu-Do. And that business was started around 1903, which is pretty early on in Los Angeles history. Can you tell us about that one?
Xiaoling Fang 14:15
Yeah. So the history is of the families that run that business is really also a history of the Japanese American communities in America. Their business was disrupted because of World War II. Many Japanese immigrants were you know, forced to those camps.
Willa Seidenberg 14:37
Right, the internment camps.
Xiaoling Fang 14:39
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So they have to stop their business and relocated to other places. That also happened to other historic, small business in Little Tokyo as well. Many of them rejected to return to L.A. because of their traumatizing And like this family, they returned back to Los Angeles and continue their family business. You know, it shows high level of resiliency.
Willa Seidenberg 15:30
So what kinds of challenges or threats are these kinds of businesses in immigrant urban enclaves facing today?
Xiaoling Fang 15:39
I think the property ownership is always such a critical decisive factor contributing to the continuity of small businesses. Because of the real estate market, in downtown area and near downtown areas so desirable for the developers, the rents really goes up like crazy in Chinatown, and so many commercial landlords see the opportunities there. And some of them were not willing to have this formal lease. So tenants have to be in this constant fear of being evicted anytime, which is very unsettling thing because like, many of them, told me that, oh, they don’t think their landlord will, like really kick them off, like in a short term, but without a formal lease agreement they can’t get other financial services, for example, if they want to upgrade their equipment, you know, to do maintenance, and they need financial assistance, they can’t apply for any loans, or even government grants without a lease. So that’s one very big threat that these small business owners are facing.
Willa Seidenberg 17:11
Yeah. And because of these luxury apartment buildings going up, a lot of people from outside the community are moving into the Chinatown and Little Tokyo neighborhoods. And I imagine it must be putting a lot of pressure on the neighborhoods to have different kinds of services.
Xiaoling Fang 17:31
Yes, right. Exactly. So there are many fancy coffee shops popping up in Chinatown, the cup of coffee will never be affordable for some of the long term residents there, because the median household income of residents in Chinatown is low for the city’s average, and low for the country’s average as well. And these new businesses also give the pressure for the existing long-term businesses in terms of rents, and the shifts ofthe demographics of the communities also make the long-term business owners feel worried about their customer base. Some of them have to, you know, adapt to the new customers’ demographic, and they don’t know how to deal with it, and they have to compromise their cultural identity. Another thing I like to mention is that this working- from-home trend, also kind of shaking the customer base of some of the small businesses in Chinatown because the proximity between Chinatown and Downtown L.A. Many of the customer base of the restaurants in Chinatown are from office workers in downtown L.A. So they traveled to Chinatown to grab a great lunch meal during the lunch time. So yeah, but because of the working from home trend, so many of the restaurants are seeing a drastic decline in their customer base.
Willa Seidenberg 19:17
You talk about some of the legacy business programs around the country such as San Francisco and San Antonio. And then here in L.A. we have a fairly new legacy business program. Could you talk about the L.A. program when it was passed and what some of the features are?
Xiaoling Fang 19:36
Well, L.A. right now have like two legacy business programs. One is already fully rolled out by L.A. Conservancy. So it’s a nonprofit professional organization in L.A. So they worked with Wells Fargo Bank to distribute grants for eligible small businesses in L.A. So another one is the one that was just approved by the L.A. City Council in July, in 2022. The one that I am talking about here is the one that is run by the city. But the program that approved by the city haven’t fully rolled out yet. But we can see this detail measures that they are going to implement from this documents that the city published online, even though it’s not fully rolled out yet, but I think there’s like a lot of innovations. The major one is they have this weighted matrix to evaluate the eligibility of small businesses, for example, the income level of the neighborhood that their small business is located in into account when they assess the eligibility of these small businesses. So this is a new one across the programs in the States. Another one that is really fascinating is that they take the language they use and items that small business provided as important indicators for the cultural significance of that small businesses. So that’s also targeted at immigrant neighborhoods, when they can speak their mother tongue to assess those vital goods is very important for the people there. The third one is that L.A.’s program also consider the availability and capacity of applicants to provide documents of proof when they applying for the registration. So, for example, many of the business owners were not aware of the importance of, you know, keeping documents the history of their families, and some of them, they don’t even have an actual lease with their landlords. So for the L.A.’s program, they don’t require actual proof or documents from the applicants, but they need to provide the bank statements or the utility bills as the way to evaluate the continuity of the business that makes sure this program would be inclusive as much as possible.
Willa Seidenberg 22:36
How often is it that the small legacy businesses own their own buildings? Is that not common?
Xiaoling Fang 22:43
No, definitely not. It’s a very rare situation. So that’s why so many legacy business are struggling with survival. That’s why the rents and power against the commercial landlord is so important for them. And I know that Little Tokyo, they are exploring this new form of community-owned land trust, to you’re trying to secure and control some buildings have the significant spots to support their legacy businesses. There are other neighborhoods use land trust as a new tool to control the property ownership for their legacy businesses. I know, for example, on Chinatown in Chicago, and Boston, in San Francisco, some communities used Community Benefit Agreements, as a way to negotiate the newcomers of the communities. The Community Benefit Agreements is the legal contract that negotiated between the developers or the companies moving into the neighborhood. They can use this tool to convey their concerns and channel back resources to the community.
Willa Seidenberg 24:10
And for most of the programs that you studied, what is the age the business has to be to qualify for the program?
Xiaoling Fang 24:20
Most of them use 30 years as a universal threshold.
Willa Seidenberg 24:26
Do legacy business programs need to be paired with historic preservation ordinances? Or are there any instances where a city might have a legacy business program but not have a historic preservation ordinance?
Xiaoling Fang 24:41
So for the legacy business programs that I looked at, many of them found the existing historic preservation ordinances not helping with the existing small businesses. There is a historic community marketplace called Dynasty Center, it’s facing eviction. And the there are hundreds of small businesses owners who are the commercial tenants of that market. So I asked them, have you considered, you know, apply for historical landmark. And many of them told me that they already looked at those tools, but feel none of them really helping their situation. So that’s why we need legacy business program. It’s a combination of economic development tools, economic development policies, and the historic preservation. These legacy business programs are more geared to where you know, marketing assistance, financial assistance, business, operation, education, but for the historic aspects of the small business, sometimes can get ignored. Of course, we acknowledge that we have to make sure it can survive, right. So right now, the effort, that legacy business program is putting to document those histories, or cultural aspects of the small business only exists in the application process, where the applicants have to submit this historical narrative statements, they will share their family histories, or the associations between their business and community or the neighborhoods they are located in. But they receive few guidance. I can see the potential of using this historical narrative forms to use it as cultural heritage inventory, right for the city. It’s a pity, not seeing many of the legacy businesses program use that part, you know, to share the histories of those legacy business to a broader community.
Willa Seidenberg 24:42
So it’s really important that these business owners know how important their cultural history is not only to them, but to people outside of their community. Yeah. And we need to help them know about the tools to document their history.
Xiaoling Fang 27:26
Yeah, exactly. And for the immigrant communities to be also having this language barriers, right. So that’s why I also advocate in my thesis that the city run legacy business program should work with local partners, who build a trust with the small business owners there, and also speak their own languages.
Willa Seidenberg 27:52
And that’s why we need diverse people in the heritage conservation field. People like you who can connect with these communities, speak the language and understand the cultural legacy that’s there. So we need more people like you. So I noticed in your thesis that you said, Los Angeles is prioritizing low income and ethnic neighborhoods. And I would imagine that this maybe would help with economic development in those neighborhoods. You know, especially since right now, we’re in a moment where there’s a lot of interest in shopping local.
Xiaoling Fang 28:33
Yeah, right. I feel like L. Allah is not only, you know, using this legacy business program as a preservation tools, but also use it as a economic development policies to mitigate some of the social issues, for example, income disparity, and, to empower the traditionally underserved neighborhoods, right. That’s the measures that we haven’t seen in other cities legacy programs. We can definitely see the potential of combining historic preservation strategy and broader urban planning tools or community development tools there.
Willa Seidenberg 29:20
So was there anything that surprised you in the research and the interviews that you did for the thesis?
Xiaoling Fang 29:28
So when I was doing research in Chinatown, I imagine that they are maybe a common vision come from the community, right. But I ended up finding that the community inside is very diverse. I definitely see the great variants of the visions and solutions to the existing issues that come up from different generations of the community members. So I think that it’s an interesting part that I learned from my experience.
Willa Seidenberg 30:05
So just to wrap up our conversation, you graduated in May, and what are you doing now?
Xiaoling Fang 30:11
I am now working as a regional planner at Southern California Association of Governments. I am working with amazing coworkers who are experts in transportation planning field, trying to study the impact of, for example, the eCommerce Industry, we are seeing a lot of, more and more deliveries coming from, for example, like Amazon or Walmart, you know, and this trucks are going around our neighborhood, so we are doing this research about how these, you know, increase of eCommerce shoppings are going to impact our neighborhoods, inequalities, and how does that impact this rebuild a disproportionately among the neighborhoods.
Willa Seidenberg 31:00
Well, that’s great work.
Xiaoling Fang 31:02
Yeah, thank you.
Willa Seidenberg 31:03
Well, thank you, Xiaoling for chatting with me today. And I think we’ll all be curious to see how the legacy business program progresses.
Xiaoling Fang 31:13
I definitely see the potential of leverage historic preservation strategies to broader social issues, how to mitigate the social inequity in our society. And that’s an exciting field out there for our preservationists to do.
Willa Seidenberg 31:32
Thank you so much for being on Save As.
Xiaoling Fang 31:36
Thank you, Willa, we have such a nice talk today.
Trudi Sandmeier 31:45
Thanks, Willa for a fun conversation with Xiaoling, exploring the neighborhood and it makes me want to go for a walk in Chinatown. I have to say,
Cindy Olnick 31:53
Yeah, I’m getting a little hungry myself. But I’m always hungry. So.
Trudi Sandmeier 31:59
And if you’ve never been to the Phoenix Bakery to have that strawberry cake, oh, my goodness, people you need to go, do not do not pause. But immediately journey there. It’s delicious.
Cindy Olnick 32:10
Absolutely run, don’t walk. And Phoenix Bakery is one of the official legacy businesses of the Los Angeles Conservancy. So we are going to put a hyperlink to their page on our episode page at SaveAs.place.
Trudi Sandmeier 32:26
There’s been a lot of attention this last year on the situation in Chinatown and what’s going on there. And in part because there was a big anniversary that was acknowledged last year of the Chinatown massacre, which was this terrible event that happened and really was a formative moment in L.A.’s history. And our sister podcast at the Institute of California and the West, which is a joint USC-Huntington project has dedicated an entire season to the story about Chinatown and about this Chinatown massacre. And there’s a really interesting design competition that’s going on right now to create a new memorial in Chinatown to the victims of the massacre and a lot of interesting public debate about this issue and sort of raising awareness about this seminal moment in L.A.’s history. So it’s kind of exciting.
Cindy Olnick 33:22
Yes, yeah. So we will link to Western Edition on our episode page as well. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Save As, leave us a review and tell a friend.
Trudi Sandmeier 33:34
Tune in next time when we take you to Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, a town founded by African Americans in the early 20th century in the Central Valley. We’ll hear about some interesting things going on to conserve this really unique community.
Sherry Hunter 33:50
They had the same dream as we had to be able to go somewhere, live independently and free without prejudice. So everybody’s searching for a place called freedom.
Trudi Sandmeier 34:15
This episode was produced by Willa Seidenberg. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley. Additional music for this episode was created by Teddy Seidenberg. Save As is a production of the heritage conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
