8 - Consuming Chinatown: Gentrifying through Taste and Design

Summary

Bellaire Street, the primary road running through Houston's Asiatown, is as familiar to me as the memory of the Corolla my grandfather drove to run our weekly errands. The ink of every Sunday's Chinese newspapers staining my fingertips, the weight of Hong Kong Food Market grocery bags, the taste of custard- filled Taiwanese pastries; such visceral memories of my childhood are starting places for me to map the aesthetics and food cultures of the racialized geography that makes up Asiatown. From the first strip mall built in the 1980s to the gentrification pioneered by international restaurant chains today, the transformation of Bellaire Street is reliant on the evolution of traditional Asian aesthetics and food/ ie cultures to sustain commercial (re)development.

An ethnic enclave with a decades- long history and rapidly growing residential/ retail opportunities, Asiatown exemplifies how Houston came to be one of the most diverse cities in the US (CultureMap, 2021). This narrative of multiculturalism has simultaneously justified the displacement of long- time Asian/ Asian- American, Latinx, and Black working- class residents in the south- west corridor of Houston. Since 2004, Houston's Asian- American Business Council estimates that land values along the Bellaire strip have increased between 25 and 50 per cent (Gray, 2008) as developers invite over 2 million square feet of construction of high- end residential and retail opportunities under the guise of expanding Asiatown's diversity (Gray, 2008).

This chapter utilizes the lens of radical food geographies (RFG) praxis to examine how restaurants, particularly those within an ethnic enclave, are critical places in which gentrification unfolds while also challenging scholars and activists to consider the visual, cultural, and culinary indicators and consequences of displacement. I ask the research questions: what does gentrification look, taste, and feel like in the spatial imaginary of Houston's Asiatown? The evolution of Asian aesthetics, food trends, and consumer cultures that make up the social representations of Asiatown as a place and space are shaped by those impacted by gentrification and those who influence gentrification alike. Enactors of Asiatown's gentrification, mainly public-private partnerships, ethnic entrepreneurs/ developers, global restaurant franchises, and upper- / middle- class consumers, economically and socially benefit from Asiatown's redevelopment, while Black, Latinx, and Asian/ Asian- American long- time residents face rising poverty levels and expensive housing markets.