An Abolitionist Approach to Housing Justice: Lessons Learned from Chinatown

• In Event: Democracy and Organization in the American Context

Abstract

From multiracial coalitions for sex work decriminalization to campaigns to stop the construction of new borough based jails, this paper explores the emergent connections between housing precarity, carcerality, and abolition in Chinatowns across North America. This paper draws from interviews conducted with tenants, sex workers, mutual aid collectives, organizers, and youth activists in several North American Chinatowns to reveal the innovative ways that Asian Americans are engaging in cross-sectional organizing to build a more inclusive and intergenerational movement for housing justice. In particular, the paper focuses on the historic formation of a national coalition called the Chinatown Coast to Coast Network and what ordinary people are doing to imagine alternatives for their neighborhoods. As aggressive surveillance policing enters more public, low-income, and affordable housing complexes across the country, those vulnerable become even more at risk for eviction—sex workers, migrant workers, domestic workers, undocumented residents, and street vendors. What insurgent practices already exist within our communities that center collective needs and community visions for safety? What would a commitment to abolition in housing justice work require from movement and university-based scholars? My work intervenes to contextualize the contemporary organizing for housing justice within longer genealogies of resistance, revealing how Asian Americans are expanding the confines of democratic citizenship to include abolitionist practices of reclamation and community connectedness.

Author

• Diane Wong, Rutgers University, Newark