Rethinking the Growth Machine: How to Erase a Chinatown from the Urban Core

Abstract

This article explores Houston's two Chinatowns within the context of the city's recent urban reinvestment and revitalization initiatives. It provides a history of the Chinatowns and examines their changing condition during the years that Houston was promoting ethnic diversity and urban revival. The analysis is framed within the growth machine perspective, as initially explored in Houston by Joe Feagin, and later by Jan Lin and Igor Vojnovic. Houston's late-20th-century urban redevelopment initiatives occurred during a period in history when Houston's Chinese entrepreneurs lost their influence over the local growth machine. The eventual outcome was the erasure of Houston's downtown Chinatown and the displacement of its residents from their lucrative urban core location. The disappearance of Old Chinatown and other urban ethnic neighborhoods—including Little Saigon and Freedmen's Town—from the urban core all took place as the Houston media and public were celebrating diversity, pluralism, and ethnicity in the city.

Key words:

• growth machine
• Houston
• Chinatown
• ethnic diversity

There is a Chinese saying, “‘If there's water, there's money' … water is seen as a symbol of fortune and wealth” (Yip, 1993a, p. D18). The City of Houston, Texas, which has benefited from its location next to the water, has a long history of aggressively promoting economic growth centered on petroleum and shipping. An outcome of the city's strong linkages to overseas trade has been its connection with global markets and immigration. Although Houston is most noted for its large Latino presence, the city is also home to a thriving entrepreneurial Asian population, which makes up 5% of the city's population, yet by 2002 they accounted for 25% of local Small Business Administration loans (Kaplan, 2002). Since the 1970s, there has been an organized effort among immigrant business interests, most notably the Chinese, to establish an ethnic business district in the city. With the creation of Houston's Old and New Chinatowns, Asian developers have marketed the districts both domestically and abroad. “Word is said to be spreading, especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong, that if you're moving to the U.S., Houston is the place to settle,” exhorts an article from the Wall Street Journal (Kaplan, 2002, p. A1). That same promotion also highlights Houston's appeal among foreigners, its low unionization and real estate costs. These accolades parallel those very values espoused by the municipal government and business leaders, reflecting the general support of a free enterprise business environment.

Much of Houston's growth in the 20th century has been based on energy. The decline of petroleum prices during the 1980s, however, revealed the city's vulnerability to such high levels of economic specialization. Consequently, since the mid-1980s, considerable resources have been devoted to Houston's economic diversification, with a particular focus placed on attracting specialized services and high-tech industries. In these diversification efforts it became apparent that the city's success was highly dependent on quality-of-life indicators, such as a safe and vibrant urban core, dynamic entertainment districts, and culturally and ethnically rich neighborhoods.

By the early 1990s, the city's new growth agenda had been set, and it included as part of its new growth strategy greater ethnic sensitivity and the revival of its urban core. Houston officials attempted to rebrand the city as culturally vibrant and ethnically diverse, boasting a rich collection of urban amenities. This is in contrast to much of its post-World War II development, characterized by rapid suburbanization and urban-core decline. Ethnic diversity, historically downplayed in this southern city, became a focus of attention in recent decades. One study asserts, “Houston's public and private leadership has been virtually unanimous in calling for the city to capitalize on its diversity in the new economy” (Klineberg, 2005, p. 31). This awareness is also evident among the general populace, where a citywide survey revealed that 61% of white residents polled believed ethnic diversity was good for the city (Klineberg, 2007).

This new attitude reflects rapidly changing demographic patterns in Houston, which has become a major gateway city for immigrants. In 1970, Harris County, which includes the City of Houston, recorded 44,515 foreign-born residents, 2.7% of the total county population, while by 2008 the foreign-born residents were estimated at 959,571, 24.5% of the county population (U.S. Census Bureau, 1970; 2008). This changing diversity reshaped the city's political leadership. In 1971, the first non-Anglo candidates were elected to positions within the city council. In 1997, the city elected Lee Brown as its first African-American mayor, and by 2009 six of the 14 occupied city council seats were held by minorities.

It was also evident that ethnic entrepreneurs were increasingly shaping Houston's urban landscape. Jan Lin (1995) observed that immigrant communities were attracting the attention of Houston's growth machine, something not generally evident in previous growth machine literature. Given the impact of ethnic communities in Los Angeles (Light, 2002; Lin, 2008) and Miami (Nijman, 1997) in local growth coalitions, along with the celebration of ethnicity in U.S. cities in general, it could be assumed that Houston's appreciation of diversity could benefit the city and its ethnic minorities. However, the extent to which ethnic districts are incorporated into Houston's growth agenda is not clear, especially given the City's recent urban revitalization initiatives. Despite the local media and public celebration of diversity and pluralism, Houston's ethnic neighborhoods—Old Chinatown, Little Saigon, and Freedmen's Town—have all disappeared from their lucrative urban locations, as the ethnic populations that traditionally occupied the urban core were pushed out to the periphery of the city.

This article explores Houston's Chinese community within the context of the City's new growth agenda. It provides a history of Houston's downtown and suburban Chinatowns and examines their changing conditions during the years that Houston was promoting ethnic diversity and urban revitalization. The analysis is framed within the growth machine perspective, as examined in Houston by Feagin (1988), Lin (1995), and Vojnovic (2003a). The research has a qualitative component involving interviews with Houston officials and Chinese entrepreneurs as well as archival research of government documents, Chinese business and tourist magazines, and Houston newspapers. The study also examines changing socio-economic and ethnic conditions of Houston's neighborhoods by analyzing 1980 and 2000 census data. A principal components analysis and a k-means cluster analysis are used to compare Houston's urban districts, including its Chinatowns, and their changing condition within the context of Houston's urban renaissance.

CHINATOWNS IN A NORTH AMERICAN CONTEXT

Chinese settlement patterns in North American cities have been explored from a number of different theoretical perspectives. Kay Anderson (1987, 1988) has examined the conceptualization of Chinatown in Vancouver, Canada, as a white, European idea legitimized by the activities of various levels of Canadian government, from local to federal. She also examined the historical transition from racism to the more harmonious cultural pluralism experienced by the Chinese community with the emergence of the Canadian state's multicultural philosophy. As Anderson (1988, p. 144) argued, “[t]hat which was once the fearful embodiment of an alien and inferior ‘stock' had by 1969 become—in the words of a government report—‘an inestimable enrichment that Canadians cannot afford to lose'.” During the 1970s, Vancouver's Chinatown emerged as an ethnic asset for advancing commercial (such as tourism) and political interests (Canada's emerging mosaic ideology), with considerable government financial resources devoted to physically improving and marketing the neighborhood (Anderson, 1988).

Larry Ford and colleagues have explored the role of ethnic communities (Ford, 2003; Ford et al., 2008), including Chinatowns, in the revitalization of older, urban neighborhoods. While the New York and San Francisco Chinatowns provide classic examples—given the rich architectural styles, gates, colors, and signage—such neighborhoods and their role in urban revitalization are evident across American cities. Portland's Chinatown, for instance, provides such an example, where the neighborhood is integrated into a historic district and has been part of the City's urban revival initiatives (Ford, 2003). Ford and colleagues argue that when evaluating strategies of urban revitalization, “Chinatowns are typically the most completely commodified of the many ethnic tourist districts” (Ford et al., 2008, p. 93). In fact, they argue that “[t]he Chinatown concept seems to have become a major factor in promoting tourism around the world, even in China” (ibid., p. 94).

Another approach to the study of Chinese settlement patterns in America was advanced by Wei Li (1998a, 1998b). In her research on the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County, Li developed the concept of the ethnoburb, which she defined as “suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas” (Li, 1998a, p. 482). An important aspect of the ethnoburb is that it is comprised of multi-ethnic communities, in which any one of the ethnic minority populations has significant concentrations, but does not comprise a majority. For instance, in 1990, the San Gabriel Valley was comprised of more than one-third non-Hispanic white, almost one-third Hispanic, almost one-fifth Asian and Pacific Islanders, and less than 5% African-Americans. The Chinese population, with more than 158,000 people, made up some 10% of the total population of the San Gabriel Valley, a lower share than in downtown Chinatown, but a higher share than the county average (Li, 1998a, p. 480). Li (1998b) finds the ethnoburb Chinese to be highly educated, wealthy, with close ties to international businesses. She describes the ethnoburb as a “global economic outpost with extensive international connections and striking internal stratifications” (Li, 1998a, p. 497).

Chinese population concentrations in the U.S. have also been explored within the context of local growth machines. Growth machines are coalitions between governments and local business interests, maintained by a political consensus to pursue local development and growth. Ivan Light (2002) argued that the erosion of Los Angeles's traditional growth machine enabled local immigrant groups, such as the Chinese in Monterrey Park (California), to form their own growth coalitions and to shape local ethnic development. More recently, Jan Lin (2008) explored the rise of the ethnic growth machine in Los Angeles's downtown Chinatown. The coalition includes property owners, Chinese and white developers, and the City of Los Angeles, which has invested extensively in local infrastructure and has provided tens of millions of dollars to facilitate ethnically driven developments. In the growth machine literature, government subsidies to private development projects, as illustrated by Lin in Los Angeles, have been a consistent theme in identifying growth coalitions (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Feagin, 1988; Vojnovic, 2003a).

Jan Lin (1995, 1998) also explored the role of ethnic groups—including Chinese ethnic place entrepreneurs—in influencing the local growth machine within Houston, Texas during the 1980s. In the study of Houston's ethnic neighborhoods, Lin argued that there was a growing local appreciation of pluralism and diversity, which gave the Chinese community a new influence over Houston's growth machine and in shaping local development.

This research continues the exploration of Houston's Chinese community within a growth machine perspective. It examines the development of Houston's Chinatowns during Houston's late-20th-century urban revival efforts. This is a period in history, as will be demonstrated by the lack of government support for Chinese investors—and particularly in light of extensive public aid granted to urban redevelopment projects in the City—when Houston's Chinese entrepreneurs had little influence over the local growth machine. The eventual outcome was the erasure of Houston's downtown Chinatown and the displacement of its residents.

THE CITY OF HOUSTON, THE GROWTH MACHINE, AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE

Houston is perceived as the model laissez-faire city. This free enterprise environment is supported by strong cultural beliefs in individualism and self-reliance. Consequently, the city has refrained from participating in several aspects of urban management traditionally associated with local government. For instance, despite being the fourth largest city in the United States, Houston does not have formal zoning or a comprehensive master plan. Restrictive covenants, legal associations, and master planned private developments substitute for public zoning laws.

Among the 10 largest U.S. cities, Houston's taxes and expenses are consistently the lowest, some 43% of the major-city average (Vojnovic, 2007). Houston maintains a particular disinterest in public welfare. In 2001, while annual per capita welfare expenditures were $447 in Los Angeles, $630 in San Francisco, and $1,042 in New York City, Houston's expenditures on public welfare were $5.29 (Vojnovic, 2007). This minimal government philosophy is also supported by the state. Texas does not levy personal income or corporate taxes, and like Houston, it is also aversive to public welfare.

However, despite local claims of laissez-faire, a number of works have challenged the assertion of minimal government in the Houston economy. In Free Enterprise City (1988), Joe Feagin recognized that Houston's business-friendly atmosphere has been influenced by a succession of local business leaders and politicians. Building on the growth machine framework of Molotch (1976) and Logan and Molotch (1987), Feagin argued that growth in Houston has been shaped by an alliance between land-based elites (including developers, bankers, and land owners) and government officials, forming an urban growth coalition. The outcome of such a coalition has been the creation of a pro-growth local environment in which governance is tailored to the needs of businesses and individuals allied with the growth machine. State activity supporting a pro-business environment is evident in the low taxes, lack of public regulation (such as zoning and environmental emissions), and government subsidies to targeted private economic initiatives.

As Ivan Light (1984, 2002) has argued, every city has a growth machine, but they are just more effective in some cities than others. In Houston, Feagin (1988) traced a succession of growth machines that shaped Houston's development. The “8F Group,” for example, consisted of local elites with ventures in oil, real estate, and banking. Public policy under the 8F centered on developing transportation infrastructure and the oil industry (Feagin, 1985). Throughout Houston's history, extensive government financing of private economic initiatives, from corporate investments to development projects, emerges as a trademark of the growth machine.

Members of the 8F also helped Houston secure large-scale federal aid during the Depression. One important figure was Jesse Jones, a Houston booster who served as chairman of the Board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1933–1939), and then concurrently as the Federal Loans Administrator and as Secretary of Commerce (1940–1945). After studying federal appropriations during the 1930s, David McComb (1981, p. 116) maintained that “[b]ecause of Jesse Jones, the strength of local industry, and perhaps the ability of civic leaders to attract federal grants, Houston suffered relatively less than other cities during the depression.”

Federal funding in Houston was also linked to the defense industry. During World War II, Houston ranked sixth nationally in receiving wartime plant investments (Mollenkopf, 1983). Wartime funding was also crucial for establishing Houston's industrial base during the Cold War years. This is evident with the NASA complex, which by 1998 maintained annual expenditures of $4.45 billion and employed 3,000 civil servants and 13,000 contractors (Greater Houston Partnership, 2000).

By the early 2000s—with international immigration and a diversifying economic base——Houston's business community had evolved from the days of the 8F. Local government, however, continued to preserve a strong pro-business agenda, as evident with public financial support of selected private development projects. The growth coalition involved in Houston's urban revitalization consisted of principally white local entrepreneurs (ranging from local sports franchise owners to land developers), the city government (with close links to the development industry) and other public agencies (such as the Houston

Downtown Management District) ¹ , the Houston Renaissance, the Metro Transit Authority of Harris County, and local special interests and non-profits (including the Main Street Coalition and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership).

THE GROWTH MACHINE AND IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES

Logan and Molotch (1987) focused on the activities of the growth machine as implicitly controlled by the white majority. Ethnic minorities fell outside the decision-making process of the growth machine. Some argue, however, that the presence of a large immigrant community has the potential to shape local economic development. Immigrants may infuse new investment into economically depressed neighborhoods. Saiz (2003, 2007) asserted that potentially the biggest impact of immigration on cities is their effect on housing, as immigrants contribute to higher prices and rents. Pamuk (2004) presented evidence that during the past three decades, immigrants became the main demographic driver of housing demand in major American cities. Literature has also focused on the impact of ethnically owned financial institutions in facilitating development in ethnic neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Chinese Americans have access to ethnically owned banks and Chinese-based financial institutions within the metropolitan area, both of which offer alternative streams of credit (Li et al., 2001; Dymski and Li, 2004).

Some have even argued that ethnic groups have been playing an increasingly influential role in cities with established growth machines. Ivan Light (2002) contends that in the late 20th century, some immigrant groups became more active in the urban growth machine, primarily by establishing their own growth coalitions. Using Koreatown and Monterey Park (Southern California's premier Chinese community) as examples, Light (2002) argued that these neighborhoods did not occur spontaneously, but followed planned development initiatives orchestrated by highly organized coalitions of immigrant business leaders and politicians.

Jan Lin (2008) has also explored the evolution of the ethnic growth machine in Los Angeles's downtown Chinatown. During the 1960s, several Chinese banks established branch offices in the Los Angeles Chinatown, and they became closely involved in the development of local shopping centers. A growth coalition consisting of local property owners, Chinese and white developers, the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), and the City of Los Angeles ensured ongoing investment into the district, even as downtown Chinatown was in decline during the 1970s. This not only ensured the survival of Los Angeles's Chinatown, but as argued by Lin (2008, p. 122) “[r]ather than being victims of a conspiracy of interests as in the days of early Los Angeles, Chinatown is now part of the conspiracy of urban growth machine interests.”

Another example of a well-established growth coalition is evident in Miami, Florida. Jan Nijman (1997) has argued that the presence of a large, entrepreneurial Latino population effectively meshed with the city's growth agenda, centered on developing Miami as an international trading center. The growth machine enrolled Latinos, and particularly exiled Cubans, into its plan to make Miami a world city. Miami's elite crafted the local growth rhetoric to accentuate the city's multicultural and multilingual tradition in order to improve the attractiveness of the region to foreign finance.

Similarly in Houston, Jan Lin (1995, 1998) observed the revalorization of ethnic places by ethnic place entrepreneurs, who he argued were a growing influence on the local growth machine, particularly in the context of postmodernism and the growing appreciation of pluralism and diversity. In his discussion of Houston, Lin (1995, p. 629) maintained that:

[i]n the wake of a postmodern architectural building episode, which crowned the severe regional recession of the mid-1980s, ethnic “place entrepreneurs” have emerged to gain the attention of a municipal “growth machine” that selectively incorporates their efforts into central city redevelopment projects and urban tourism.

Lin argued that Houston's Chinese community had a well-developed coalition formed by an alliance of ethnic entrepreneurs, the Houston Chinese Chamber of Commerce, newspapers, overseas developers, banks, and elected officials. These members were motivated by a unifying goal to stimulate neighborhood revitalization and local growth. Lin had also argued that the ethnically driven developments had gained the attention of the city's growth machine, in part due to the severe local economic recession of the mid-1980s.

By the early 1990s, Houston witnessed the development of downtown and suburban Chinatowns, as well as pockets of Korean business development, and a Vietnamese “Little Saigon.” There were also the Mexican-American barrios in the Second Ward and Magnolia and the African-American “Mother Ward,” Freedmen's Town. Lin reasonably interpreted these developments as an illustration of the growing influence of Houston's ethnic place entrepreneurs.

However, by 2010, many of the neighborhoods that Lin used as case studies have been erased from Houston's landscape. The exodus of Chinese businesses from the core over the last two decades had left a noticeable void in what was once Houston's only Chinatown. Little Saigon has been displaced from its original Midtown location to the edge of the city. Freedmen's Town has been torn down, while the Hispanic-themed El Mercado del Sol shopping center has been a disappointment and has failed to produce spillover effects for surrounding Hispanic neighborhoods.

Some two decades of urban revival initiatives were slowly displacing ethnic communities from Houston's prime downtown-area locations. Similar to the economic transformations of the past, extensive public funding—in the form of public subsidies, public-private partnerships, or direct public investment—was provided to facilitate Houston's urban renaissance. In addition, despite Houston's celebration of diversity, ethnic entrepreneurs investing in Houston's downtown and surrounding areas did not receive the public subsidies that other developers and competing projects received in Houston's revival efforts. Without this public aid, ethnic entrepreneurs were simply not as competitive as their publicly funded rivals, and ethnic communities were slowly squeezed out of Houston's downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. In exploring this history, we will first examine Houston's new growth agenda and the city's revitalization program, and then review the history of Houston's Chinatowns.

ETHNICITY, A NEW GROWTH AGENDA, AND URBAN REDEVELOPMENT

Much of Houston's growth is attributed to oil. By 1990, energy accounted for 60% of Houston's economic base (Smith, 2000). However, the collapse of oil prices during the 1980s, and the resulting economic downturn revealed to city leaders Houston's vulnerability to an energy-based economy. Diversification became part of a new local discourse, as efforts focused on attracting high-tech industries and specialized services. This became evident in public documents and in the local media, which started to campaign for building a high-quality urban environment to draw these industries. This was a different development path for Houston, which in the post–World War II period was characterized by rapid suburbanization and urban decline.

During the mid-1990s, Imagine Houston, a steering committee created by the mayor's office, submitted a visioning report proposing a plan “to celebrate and promote Houston as a vibrant, multi-cultural and international center…” (Imagine Houston, 1995a, p. 1). Houston's Department of Planning and Development also touted the importance of culture, noting that:

Cultural attractions can stimulate tourism and add to the City's tax and business revenues…. Cultural tourism can bring visitors to a city and can keep visitors coming to the city for other reasons such as business, conventions, shopping, medical treatment, or mild winter climate. Cultural resources can attract corporate relocations and stimulate initiation and growth of community-friendly industries and service professional firms. (City of Houston, 1992, p. 25)

Another report from Imagine Houston listed the following “pathways to progress”:

Ensure that Houstonians have access to a multilingual network of information, education, and other services to encourage participation in community life, promote greater involvement by Houston's ethnic communities in economic development initiatives, particularly international trade, [and] hold inter-ethnic forums to identify and explore issues affecting our success as a multicultural community (Imagine Houston, 1995b, p. 11).

As argued by Vojnovic (2003a, p. 615), capitalizing “on the Hispanic culture, already proven successful in San Antonio and developing Chinatowns around the growing Asian community, became new elements of the pro-growth agenda as Houston began celebrating ethnic diversity.”

With regard to urban development, since the 1980s, Houston's growth agenda encompassed urban revitalization. Imagine Houston envisioned a reinterpretation of the city, proposing that Houston become a “city of urban villages” (Mason, 1995, p. A13). This set the groundwork for creating Houston's urban districts, whose changing socio-economic and ethnic conditions will be assessed with quantitative analyses later in the article (see Figs. 1 and 2). It is immediately evident that while New Chinatown is included, Old Chinatown is not part of Houston's urban districts. In addition, Houston's urban core, although a commercial success given its major corporate offices and headquarters, lacked a residential presence. In 1990, downtown housed roughly 7,000 residents, but market studies showed that nearly 100,000 residents would consider living in the downtown (Williams, 1997b).

Fig. 1. City of Houston and City designated urban districts.

Fig. 2. Detailed map of Houston's urban districts.

The city used public agencies, tax credits, and subsidies to entice targeted developments into the core (see Fig. 3 and Table 1). In one of the first projects, a private developer received $12 million in public assistance for a $32 million renovation of the historic Rice Hotel into upscale lofts (Williams, 1997b). In addition, Bob Lanier, a suburban developer who served as mayor from 1992 to 1998, played a significant role in Houston's urban revival. Lanier selected Michael Stevens to head the Houston Housing Finance Corporation (HHFC), a city agency that managed federal funds to finance the construction of affordable housing. The HHFC bought and rehabilitated abandoned apartments and sold them to private developers for a profit. Restrictions kept 30% of the sold units affordable but these were not stringently enforced, leading some to question if the city had become too committed as a public real estate developer (Barna, 2003).

TABLE 1. Selected Urban Development Projects Receiving Public Funding

Project name	Year	Primary developer(s)	Public funding (mill. $)
Buffalo Bayou Waterfront	1986–present	City of Houston, Buffalo Bayou Partnership	331.1—580.6^a
Main Street Redevelopment	2004	Metropolitan Transit Authority	326.9
Convention Center Hotel	2003	City of Houston	285
Reliant Stadium	2002	Harris County Sports & Convention Corp.	284
Toyota Center	2003	Harris County Sports & Convention Corp.	182
Minute Maid Park	2000	Harris County Sports & Convention Corp.	180
Convention Center Expansion	2001	City of Houston	165
George R. Brown Convention Center	1987	City of Houston	104.9
Cotswold Project	2006	City of Houston, Downtown Management District	68
Discovery Green	2008	City of Houston, Downtown Park Corp., Discovery Green Conservancy	41
Bayou Place Phase 1A	1997	City of Houston, The Cordish Company	23
Rice Lofts	1998	The Randall Davis Company	12
Club Quarters Hotel	2004	City of Houston, Downtown Management District	10
Fourth Ward Redevelopment	1994—present	City of Houston, Renaissance Inc., HHFC	10
Southeast Quadrant Streetscape	2004	City of Houston, Downtown Management District	8
Jones Plaza	2001	City of Houston	6
^a Projected costs.
Source: Williams, 1997a; Brewer, 2001; Dawson, 2002; CDS Market Research, 2005; Houston Downtown Management District, 2009.

Fig. 3. Major publicly funded redevelopment projects in downtown Houston.

Local development initiatives in Houston also involved public-private partnerships. Two downtown examples include the $800 million development of Buffalo Bayou, Houston's historic waterway (Thompson Design Group Inc, 2002), as well as Discovery Green, a 12-acre $122 million park (Snyder, 2008). Houston's revitalization was also facilitated by direct public investment in downtown. In 1987, the opening of the George R. Brown Convention Center, a $104.9 million project built and operated by the City of Houston, was the first large-scale project of its kind in downtown. ² In 2001, a $165 million expansion, which included a 1,200-room hotel, increased the size of the convention center to 167,226 m² (GRBCC, 2009). In addition, extensive public subsidies, which totaled over one-half billion dollars in public aid, were used to build two sports projects in downtown (Minute Maid Park and the Toyota Center) and a new football stadium in south Houston (Reliant Stadium).

The downtown Main Street project is one of the more ambitious Houston redevelopment initiatives. One part of this project entailed the construction of a light-rail line along Main Street that connects several districts, including downtown, midtown, the museum district, the medical center, and Reliant Stadium. The initial 12 km track was completed in December 2003, and an additional 35.5 km of track were expected to be completed in 2012 (Wall, 2003).

The city also engaged in community clearing and land assembly in redeveloping the city's Black neighborhood in the Fourth Ward. In 1994, the Houston Renaissance, a non-profit, was created by the City and developers to assemble properties in the Fourth Ward. Some $10 million was granted to the Renaissance by the City and the Houston Housing Finance Corporation to purchase properties (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2002). The city originally planned to subsidize the construction of 350 affordable housing units, but the project was eventually downsized to only 150 units (Verhovek, 1998). The remaining land was sold to developers at $16 per square foot, far below the $100 to $125 per square foot price of adjacent parcels (Sarnoff, 2000). The low price, along with the displacement of residents and the assembly of the land, made this once-risky community attractive to developers.

While locals celebrate minimal government, Houston's development into a major city is a testament to the effective lobbying by the city's business interests to get public fiscal aid for private economic initiatives. Houston's urban revival is a recent reminder of the relevance of government in this city. Public financing facilitates investment synergies, as the $1.5 billion in public funding in the downtown over the last decade has leveraged new private reinvestment. In addition, the City's willingness to intervene in politically sensitive projects, such as the Fourth Ward, ensures increased security for developers. These policies and the resulting gentrification, a key aspect of Houston's revival efforts, are transforming the city's urban core (Vojnovic, 2003a, 2003b; Podagrosi and Vojnovic, 2008; Podagrosi et al., 2011). This will be evident in the PCA and cluster analysis presented later in this article. The following discussion will show, however, that not all business interests are treated equally in securing public funding, and this is especially true for ethnic minorities.

THE RISE OF OLD CHINATOWN

Old Chinatown was located in the Second Ward, east downtown, with businesses along St. Emanuel Street serving as the main strip. During the 1970s, Lang Yee “Bo Bo” Woo, a Cantonese restaurateur, was a major immigrant entrepreneur marketing Chinatown to a broader audience. Woo was also president of a Chinese development firm that aggressively built up the district (Karkabi, 1982). The completion of the first phase of the Houston Center, a downtown shopping and office complex, and the construction of nearby hotels placed Chinatown within proximity of local tourists. The result was a collection of strip malls with green-tiled Chinese roofs and a plethora of Chinese signs in an area spanning two city blocks.

Initially, Old Chinatown received interest from the non-Chinese community. Texas governor Dolph Briscoe presided over the red ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly constructed Chinese Cultural Center and Houston's mainstream newspapers, the Houston Post and Houston Chronicle, often published stories promoting the district's cultural assets. The cultural center was built on land that Woo purchased out of pocket. Woo had personally purchased about 3,700 m² from the On Leong Merchant's Association, the Houston Independent School District, and individual homeowners (Budd, 1978). By the early 1980s, Woo invested about $2.5 million in Chinatown, “a good reason for his opposition to Chinatown's move to another area such as southwest Houston, as has been suggested by some” (Karkabi, 1982, n.p.).

In 1981, the Houston Center Improvement Committee proposed the construction of a world-class convention center (the George R. Brown Convention Center) on the east side of downtown, directly adjacent to Old Chinatown. In addition to boasting easy access, unlimited parking, the opportunity to acquire free land, and room for future expansion, the committee also noted that the project “would enhance the development of Chinatown, the planned Mexican-American Mercado (Mercado del Sol) and business in general” (Convention Center Improvement Committee, 1981, n.p.).

In 1981, Woo secured $1.5 million in private funding from the DMA World Corporation to expand Old Chinatown. The project included a 900-seat movie theater and a twostory retail complex (Houston Post, 1981). The expansion was meant to capitalize on the proposed convention center. Lin (1995, p. 636) noted that “the construction of the Brown Convention Center on the downtown's southeastern periphery near Chinatown [had] given the Asian community interests an opening.” Woo shared this sentiment, arguing that:

the growing [Chinatown] development will … act as a catalyst in the revitalization of the eastside area … and the variety of shops and services will represent another retail and entertainment asset for the attraction of convention groups to the proposed downtown Convention Center. (Houston Post, 1981, n.p.)

During the 1980s, the proposed Chinatown development projects became larger in scale. The Continental King Lung Group, a Hong Kong conglomerate, acquired land in Chinatown in order to construct a condominium tower, bank, restaurant, and nightclub, which according to Woo, would be financed mainly by Chinese money from Hong Kong and Singapore (Hooper, 1981). One of the more ambitious proposals was a seven-story, 200-room Asian-themed luxury hotel (Mandarin Plaza International Hotel) to be constructed near the convention center, directed by Woo's Chinatown Development firm and Hong Kong-based Y.S.Y. Credit Investment.

Chinatown's entrepreneurs also attempted to attract investment from local and foreign governments. Chinatown developers planned to use City of Houston's industrial bonds to finance the hotel. In the mid-1980s, Woo's development firm also opened an office in Mainland China to spur investment into Chinatown. Sonny Woo, vice president of Chinatown Development, stated that historically “Chinese-Americans haven't been real receptive to courting the PRC (People's Republic of China) because they're communists … but now they're seeing it as a way to bring investment to the Chinese community” (Longeway, 1985, p. D1). Old Chinatown also received a 30-foot-high Chinese gate as a gift from Taipei, Taiwan. By 1989, however, little progress had been made in the expansion of Old Chinatown. Mandarin Plaza was still on hold and Asian developments remained relegated to a few city blocks along St. Emanuel and McKinney streets.

OBSTACLES TO CHINATOWN'S DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT

Several problems plagued the location of Old Chinatown. Development projects were privately financed, severely limiting the ability to purchase additional land if prices swelled. This was the case in east downtown, where property values inflated once the city announced that it would build the convention center (Hooper, 1981), hindering the future expansion of Old Chinatown. Aging sewer lines also prohibited the expansion of Old Chinatown on land already owned by Chinese entrepreneurs. The city admitted that the “lack of sewer capacity has been a deterrent to development” (City of Houston, 1986, p. 35). Although the moratorium was lifted with the opening of a new wastewater treatment facility, developers who planned major projects needed to petition for additional sewer capacity. According to one entrepreneur

… growth screeched to a halt in the mid-1980s, partly because of a lack of sewerage capacity. … [I]f someone wants to open a restaurant in Chinatown, he or she would have to buy existing sewerage rights at $8 to $10 a gallon. (Yip, 1993b, p. D1.)

In addition, the George R. Brown Convention Center, which was expected to be a boon to Chinatown, became a disappointment for Chinese entrepreneurs. As noted by one observer, the anticipated results from the center, which was “expected to increase business, as conventioneers could walk under U.S. 59 in search of a Chinese meal or Oriental gift … have been disappointing … as few conventioneers remain downtown after hours” (Baird, 1990, p. D1).

DOWNTOWN CHINATOWN IN THE POST-“BO BO” WOO ERA, THE 1990S AND 2000S

Dan Nip became the primary booster for the district following Lang Yee Woo's death. But by this time, private investment that was relied on to develop Old Chinatown was leaving the district, leading Nip to assert “if private investors cannot do it, the only way is to get the public involved” (Baird, 1990, p. D1). However, as ethnic entrepreneurs tried to reestablish Old Chinatown as a viable destination, government subsidies were being channeled into redevelopment projects in surrounding neighborhoods. In addition, the expansion of the convention center in 2001 permanently blocked off McKinney Street as an access route to Old Chinatown from downtown. The convention center occupies five blocks, with its main entrances facing Discovery Green, while its back service entrances face Chinatown (Fig. 4). The building created a barricade, cutting-off cross streets that had once connected Old Chinatown to central downtown. The expansion also interfered with the construction of the Chinese gateway arch. As Dan Nip noted,

Fig. 4. Eastex Freeway (U.S. 59) and back service entrance of George R. Brown Convention Center, as seen from Old Chinatown.

We wanted to break ground on the gate three years ago. But then the convention center said, “We're going to have an expansion, blocking off two more streets between Old Chinatown and downtown.” One of those streets was McKinney, which is what we'd picked as the center of Old Chinatown … they knew that we were supposed to build the gate there. But the convention center had more money and was seen as more important than Chinatown. (Chow, 2002, n.p.)

Old Chinatown is now being rebranded as East Downtown (EaDo) by the East Downtown Management District. The management district was established in 1999 and it is coordinating with the city to attract investment and to promote a revamped image of the district. ³ According to the district's Consulting General Manager, the area is being converted into a mixed-use neighborhood that does not follow any one theme (Araujo, 2009). Currently, only minor remnants of Old Chinatown remain in the Houston landscape (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Empty building with Chinese-style rooftop along St. Emanuel Stree, Old Chinatown. Lion statue at right guards the entrance to an abandoned Asian restaurant.

NEW CHINATOWN

New Chinatown, which is located along Bellaire Boulevard in the southwest neighborhood of Sharpstown, was started during the mid-1980s. Kenneth Li, a Taiwanese-born commercial real estate broker, and a family relative entered a joint venture with a Houston landowner to develop Di Ho Plaza, a Chinese shopping center located near the intersection of Bellaire Blvd and Beltway 8. This project would be the first major investment in New Chinatown by a Chinese ethnic enterprise (CIRE, 2003).

Both domestic and foreign Asian enterprises became important sources of investment into New Chinatown. Anticipating Hong Kong's unification with China, many overseas Chinese investors looked to the U.S. for investment opportunities (Swanland, 1995). Funding also came from ethnic banks that established offices in the neighborhood. MetroCorp Bank, an Asian-American owned bank that caters to Asians, financed the construction of Hong Kong Market, which is managed by a Chinese-Vietnamese developer, and the Chinese gateway arch in New Chinatown (Wang, 2009). Development in New Chinatown, as in Old Chinatown, is supported through private funding. Kenneth Li (2009) stated that all major developments were based on market research and the presence of ethnic developers interested in turning a profit. The City has not financially contributed to these developments (Li, 2009). Li attributes the lack of financial support to the local government's culture that “enterprises must go at it alone.”

The reality that New Chinatown is predominantly private and has little to offer in terms of public spaces is a pressing concern for local entrepreneurs. This was voiced at a public meeting hosted by the Sharpstown Management District in 2008 (Sharpstown Management District, 2008). Proposed solutions to enhance the district addressed the poor condition of sidewalks, the lack of pedestrian-friendly spaces, and the absence of multi-use public spaces. In order to improve pedestrian traffic, the management district encouraged private commercial landowners to allocate property to expand public space along major right-of-ways. This space would receive improved landscaping, signage, crosswalks, and walkways funded privately by the Asian businesses. The management district meeting illustrates the distinction, even with basic service provision, between New Chinatown and other neighborhoods that have received extensive public funding for infrastructure improvements.

Nevertheless, the city continues to use New Chinatown to promote its image to visitors and residents (Figs. 6 and 7). Its 2008 official Visitors Guide prominently lists New Chinatown along with the Theater District, Galleria, Kirby, and Rice Village neighborhoods as a “city explorer” destination (GHCVB, 2008). In addition, the Chinese business community, with help from the city, published a bilingual map of New Chinatown (CIRE, 2003). Li notes that this is the extent to which the Chinese community worked with the city, and Sharpstown still remains underserved in infrastructure, while a higher level of services is available in the Galleria and other competing districts (Li, 2009).

Fig. 6. New Chinatown Gate, Hong Kong Mall.

Fig. 7. Asian-American banks along Bellaire Boulevard, New Chinatown.

In reviewing the history of Houston's Chinatowns, it is evident that a number of forces have shaped the present spatial outcomes. Houston's Chinese economic and cultural centers continued to move around downtown as a response to the encroaching redevelopment projects before finally relocating to the suburbs. The convention center and the sports stadiums pushed up property values, limiting the expansion of Old Chinatown due to high land costs. Yet, the emergence of the downtown Chinese business district, and its potential to open new channels of foreign investment into Houston during the late-1980s and early 1990s, had initially attracted the interest of city hall and the local growth machine. However, as the Houston economy recovered during the 1990s, Old Chinatown failed to sustain this attention.

In addition, government financial assistance for selective projects has been critical in determining the financial competitiveness of local ventures. The over $1.5 billion in public expenditures (including public subsidies, public-private partnerships, and public investment) spent over a decade in the redevelopment of Houston's downtown, surrounding districts, and along Main Street, has reduced the cost of many private redevelopment initiatives. However, despite Houston's celebration of ethnicity and diversity, local Chinese entrepreneurs were not privileged to the public funding that competing private development projects received. Without the public subsidies, the Chinese-American entrepreneurs could not compete with their publicly funded rivals, and were slowly squeezed out of the Houston core.

CHANGES IN HOUSTON'S CHINATOWNS AND URBAN DISTRICTS, 1980–2000

A principal components analysis (PCA) and a Euclidean distance k-means cluster analysis are used to examine Houston's development within the context of its urban revitalization strategy (Reibel, 2011; Vicino et al, 2011). These analyses use 22 variables derived from the 1980 and 2000 U.S. census data. ⁴ We selected 1980 as the initial year due to the large wave of Asian immigrants arriving in Houston during the 1970s and the Chinese entrepreneurial activities in Houston that emerged during the late-1970s.

The PCA is first used to reduce the 22 variables listed in Table 2 into a handful of generalized components, providing insight into those fundamental variables underlying the demographic and housing dynamics for the city (Vicino et al., 2011). ⁵ Table 3 indicates the variables that are highly loaded within the components, while Table 4 contains the definitions assigned to each component and the highly loaded variables. These extracted components explain 68.6% of the total variance in the data set. Standardized scores (factor scores) are assigned to each census tract based on how the characteristics of the tract matches the components.

TABLE 2. Variable Categories and Definitions^a

Category	Definitions
Population	Percent change in tract population (1980–2000)
Race/ethnicity (change 1980–2000)	Change in percent non-Hispanic white (1980–2000)
	Change in percent non-Hispanic black (1980–2000)
	Change in percent Hispanic (1980–2000)
	Change in percent Asian (1980–2000)
	Change in percent Chinese (1980–2000)
	Change in percent Vietnamese (1980–2000)
Race/ethnicity (status 1980)	Percent non-Hispanic white (1980)
	Percent non-Hispanic black (1980)
	Percent Hispanic (1980)
	Percent Asian (1980)
	Percent Chinese (1980)
	Percent Vietnamese (1980)
Immigrant	Change in percent adults not fluent in English (1980–2000)
	Change in percent foreign born (1980–2000)
Socioeconomic change	Percent change in college graduates (1980–2000)
	Change in percent employed in professional sector (1980–2000)
	Change in percent female-headed families w/ children (1980–2000)
	Change in percent poverty (1980–2000)
	Percent change in average income per household (1980–2000)
	Percent change in average income per family (1980–2000)
Housing	Percent change in owner-occupied property values (1980–2000)
^a Source: Geolytics, 1999; U.S. Census 1980, 2000.

TABLE 3. Five-dimensional PCA Loadings Matrix (Varimax Rotation)^a

Variable	1	2	3	4	5
Percent change in tract population (1980–2000)	0.017	0.673	0.064	−0.077	−0.148
Change in percent non-Hispanic white (1980–2000)	−0.541	−0.243	−0.151	−0.646	−0.291
Change in percent non-Hispanic black (1980–2000)	0.63	0.382	0.114	−0.129	0.366
Change in percent Hispanic (1980–2000)	0.172	−0.05	−0.177	0.928	0.039
Change in percent Asian (1980–2000)	0.025	0.141	0.939	0.025	0.121
Change in percent Chinese (1980–2000)	−0.299	0.031	0.691	0.002	0.016
Change in percent Vietnamese (1980–2000)	0.21	0.059	0.787	0.148	0.052
Percent non-Hispanic white (1980)	0.063	0.742	0.181	0.039	0.233
Percent non-Hispanic black (1980)	0.007	−0.737	−0.029	−0.206	−0.28
Percent Hispanic (1980)	−0.148	−0.1	−0.32	0.272	−0.089
Percent Asian (1980)	0.113	0.074	0.2	0.067	0.896
Percent Chinese (1980)	0.2	0.097	0.329	−0.039	0.753
Percent Vietnamese (1980)	−0.119	−0.064	−0.178	0.141	0.773
Change in percent adults not fluent in English (1980–2000)	0.204	−0.062	0.064	0.901	0.047
Change in Percent foreign born (1980–2000)	0.131	−0.017	0.179	0.931	0.119
Percent Change in college graduates (1980–2000)	−0.104	0.638	0.038	−0.108	−0.229
Change in percent employed in professional sector (1980–2000)	0.027	0.739	0.027	−0.143	0.086
Change in percent female-headed families with children (1980–2000)	0.727	0.28	−0.045	−0.011	0.098
Change in percent poverty (1980–2000)	0.513	−0.26	−0.007	0.522	−0.085
Percent change in average income per household (1980–2000)	−0.847	0.142	0	−0.253	0.077
Percent change in average income per family (1980–2000)	−0.751	0.127	−0.025	−0.303	0.147
Percent change in owner-occupied property values (1980–2000)	−0.694	0.088	−0.043	−0.173	−0.17
Percent of total variance explained	16.248	13.427	10.947	16.525	11.435
Cumulative percentage of variance	16.248	29.675	40.622	57.147	68.582
^a Factor loadings greater than 0.6 are indicated in bold type.

TABLE 4. Component Definitions and High Loading Variables^a

Component definitions and variables	Loadings
Component I: Economically Depressed Black Neighborhoods
Change in percent female-headed families with children (1980–2000)	0.727
Change in percent non-Hispanic black (1980–2000)	0.63
Percent change in owner-occupied property values (1980–2000)	−0.694
Percent change in average income per family (1980–2000)	−0.751
Percent change in average income per household (1980–2000)	−0.847
Component II: High Population Growth
Percent non-Hispanic white (1980)	0.742
Change in percent employed in professional sector (1980–2000)	0.739
Percent change in tract population (1980–2000)	0.673
Percent change in college graduates (1980–2000)	0.638
Percent non-Hispanic black (1980)	−0.737
Component III: Asian Growth
Change in percent Asian (1980–2000)	0.939
Change in percent Vietnamese (1980–2000)	0.787
Change in percent Chinese (1980–2000)	0.691
Component IV: Hispanic Growth
Change in percent foreign born (1980–2000)	0.931
Change in percent Hispanic (1980–2000)	0.928
Change in percent adults not fluent in English (1980–2000)	0.901
Change in percent non-Hispanic white (1980–2000)	−0.646
Component V: Asian Share in 1980
Percent Asian (1980)	0.896
Percent Vietnamese (1980)	0.773
Percent Chinese (1980)	0.753
^a The five-dimensional PCA accounted for 68.6% of the total variance in the dataset.

A Euclidean distance k-means cluster analysis was conducted on the five sets of factor scores extracted from the PCA (Reibel, 2011; Vicino et al., 2011). ⁶ Under k-means, the number of clusters to be extracted “k” must be defined prior to running the cluster analysis. We ran several iterations of the cluster analysis, incrementing the number each time in order to test the significance of each additional cluster extracted. ⁷ A total of 15 clusters was extracted for the final analysis, and each census tract was assigned to one of the 15 clusters. We could then describe each cluster, based on its characteristics such as race and income, which are represented by the component scores of the respective census tracts. For this study, we focused on those tracts that comprised the 12 urban districts in the City (Figs. 1 and 2). Seven of the 15 clusters extracted from the analysis are represented within these 12 urban districts (see Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Neighborhood clusters within Houston's urban districts.

Two additional census tracts were included in the analysis—those of Old Chinatown, which was excluded from the 2008 Houston Visitors Guide—in order to compare the Chinese ethnic concentrations to other major Houston urban districts. Of the 12 districts in the official city guide, 9 contain census tracts that are categorized as having increasing incomes and property values. These districts include Uptown/Galleria, Upper Kirby, Montrose, Rice Village, the Museum District, Midtown, Downtown/Theater District, Sixth Ward, and Houston Heights (Fig. 8).

The Medical Center (I) is characterized as an area that experienced growth in the Asian share of the population, along with declining incomes and property values. The increasingly affluent districts include Rice Village, Upper Kirby, River Oaks, and Greenway. These districts are also associated with Houston Heights, the Galleria, and the revitalized downtown, the center of several high-profile redevelopment projects that received public funding. These neighborhoods have experienced increases in income and property values, while also experiencing a decline in the share of ethnic minorities relative to the rest of the county. This analysis illustrates that Houston has been successful in its urban revival initiatives. This finding is also important because it shows that the displacement of the neighborhoods' original minority populations has been coupled with Houston's inner-city revival efforts (the city's subsidization of private development projects in the downtown and surrounding districts).

The Third Ward (F) is one of Houston's traditionally black neighborhoods, and it is one of the more economically distressed neighborhoods in the city. It is home to the University of Houston and Texas Southern University, a historically black college. The Third Ward is associated with increasing black and Hispanic populations. Along with the increase in minorities, this district is also experiencing a decline in economic conditions.

Southwest-Chinatown-Harwin (A), which includes New Chinatown, contains census tracts that are attracting new Asian residents. The tracts at the eastern boundary of the district are experiencing increases in the Hispanic share of the population. The census tracts neighboring to the west registered increases in both Asian and Hispanic population shares. The census tract directly to the south of New Chinatown is an area experiencing an increase in the black share of the population, as well as declining incomes and housing values. The neighborhood containing the core of New Chinatown and its business activity experienced a 23% drop in property values between 1980 and 2000, adjusting for inflation. In comparison, the downtown area, where extensive pubic subsidies were granted to private development projects, experienced a 40% increase in real housing values.

With regard to Old Chinatown, located to the east of downtown, the census tract that includes the northern portion of the district indicates increasing incomes and housing values, while the ethnic share of the population, including Asian residents, has declined dramatically. This rise in housing values may be attributed to adjacent redevelopment projects, including the convention center and the stadiums, which infiltrated the neighborhood once the Chinese interests disbanded. However, these projects were either planned without the participation of the local Chinese, or completed after these Chinese private interests conceded Old Chinatown to other developers during the early to mid-1990s.

By 2000, Houston's urban revitalization program resulted in the erasure of Old Chinatown and many other ethnic communities that traditionally occupied the downtown, hence evincing the classic signs of gentrification—capital reinvestment linked with displacement. While the urban core experienced social and physical upgrading—with an increase in white, well-educated, higher—income professionals-many ethnic minorities displaced from downtown relocated to the inner and older outer suburbs, which experienced declining economic conditions. New Chinatown is one such neighborhood, where despite extensive investment by Houston Chinese entrepreneurs, real income levels and housing values are declining, while poverty is increasing.

ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS AND THE GROWTH MACHINE

Unlike the Cuban entrepreneurs in Miami (Nijman, 1997) or the Asian entrepreneurs in Los Angeles and Monterey Park (Light, 2002; Lin, 2008), Houston's Chinese business elite have not been as effective in influencing the local growth machine. In Miami, while the old business elite were initially apprehensive, they did forge an alliance with select Hispanic entrepreneurs, which helped transform Miami into a world-class trading and tourist destination, extensively shaped by its link to Latin America and the Caribbean. By 1997, more than one-third of all U.S. trade with Latin America and more than one-half of all trade with the Caribbean were handled through Miami (Nijman, 1997). In Miami, the alliance between the Hispanic elite and the traditional growth machine was based on a strong materialist culture and an overlapping interest to transform Miami into an international trading center focused on the Americas.

Los Angeles's suburban ethnic entrepreneurs followed a different path to local influence. In Los Angeles, the traditional growth machine began to lose control during the 1980s, in part because of the sheer size of the city, but also because of other emerging interests and visions for local development (Light, 2002). These other interests included ethnic entrepreneurs from the Chinese and Korean communities, who established their own growth coalitions and adopted a classic growth machine strategy in developing ethnic neighborhoods (Light, 2002). With the city politically fragmented, and the traditional growth machine weakened, no one stood in the path of the development of Monterey Park by Chinese entrepreneurs or the development of Koreatown. As Light (2002, p. 225) has argued, the “trends point to an emergent Los Angeles growth machine, with immigrant leadership, that can continue the region's historic growth trajectory well into the twentyfirst century despite the collapse of growth ideology among native whites.”

In his assessment of Los Angeles's downtown Chinatown, Jan Lin (2008) indicates that the neighborhood partly benefitted from Los Angeles's transformation into a postindustrial city. Local leaders recognized that some of the losses in the declining manufacturing and warehousing districts could be replaced with economic activities in tourism, entertainment, and the arts. An ethnically based growth coalition emerged, consisting of ethnic and non-ethnic entrepreneurs, with government not only providing a metro station in Chinatown, but tens of millions of dollars in public financing for private, ethnic-based development projects (Lin, 2008).

In Miami, Monterey Park, and Los Angeles, ethnic entrepreneurs built their communities and local businesses. They also attracted investment capital, wealthier co-ethnics, and tourists, strengthening the economic position of these cities and their real estate markets. These cases reveal that ethnic entrepreneurs and ethnic communities have the capacity to play a significant role in urban redevelopment and the local growth machine.

The one period in Houston's history when Chinese entrepreneurs gained the attention of the city's growth machine was when oil prices and the Houston economy were in collapse. This was an interval in which Houston leaders were looking for alternative growth strategies, and for this period the interest of the growth coalition and local Chinese entrepreneurs overlapped. This was reflected in large development proposals in Houston's Chinatowns and also in financial arrangements with Asian investors from abroad. With the rebound in oil prices, the interest of the white-dominated growth machine to use Old Chinatown to drive redevelopment lapsed, and this became evident in the city's financial support for projects competing with those of Chinese entrepreneurs, eventually facilitating the collapse of Old Chinatown. It has been, perhaps, the revenues and stability from Houston's energy-based companies, and particularly given the profits and federal subsidies to the energy sector into the early 21st century, that have enabled the city's leadership to be dismissive of potential new coalition partners in Houston's urban revitalization. Despite the local political and media rhetoric celebrating ethnicity, diversity, and pluralism, the absence of growth partnerships has been especially evident with Houston's ethnic communities that have occupied and sustained downtown and surrounding neighborhoods for decades-ethnic neighborhoods that are now being erased and their populations cleansed from the urban core.

New Chinatown reflects both the resilience of Houston's Chinese community and of a failed local policy that restricted the development of new economic activity. While this policy enabled Houston's growth machine to select the projects that would reshape the urban core, it did come at a public cost of over $2 billion since the late 1980s. The City did not need to subsidize upscale developments, and certainly not to this extent. As evident in the review of Old Chinatown, considerable funding was available from overseas to facilitate the revival of parts of downtown, a financial inflow that was simply abandoned. In fact, between the public subsidies and the loss of Asian investment capital, the local initiatives, while beneficial to a small group of Houston investors, may have actually yielded aggregate economic losses to the region.

In New Chinatown, Chinese entrepreneurs have come to accept that their projects will not receive the type of public financial aid that projects in many other city neighborhoods receive. As evident in the Sharpstown Management District meeting, New Chinatown continues to develop largely by ensuring that the richness of infrastructure in other Houston neighborhoods, which are heavily subsidized by government, will be provided by Sharpstown businesses. However, declining property values and income levels in New Chinatown, as evident from the PCA and cluster analysis, show a very different reality from the suburban Chinese in San Gabriel Valley, as discussed by Ivan Light and Wei Li. This analysis not only reveals the true opportunities for the Chinese in Houston, but also perhaps the necessity of new investment and development strategies for local Chinese entrepreneurs.

The nature of these new investment and development strategies by Houston's local ethnic entrepreneurs will ultimately need to be based on how local growth coalitions envision the city developing. Insights to the Houston experience can perhaps be gained from the work of Katharyne Mitchell (1993, 1999) on culture, ethnic communities, and global economic processes. Mitchell's (1993) analysis of local conflicts and nuanced policy responses resulting from Vancouver's spatial integration into the global economy is especially relevant to the interpretation of Houston's ultimate dismissal of ethnicity in local economic development.

Mitchell (1993) focuses on the local contention and opposition generated by some one billion dollars of capital inflow annually into Vancouver from Hong Kong in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The pinnacle of the conflict occurred in December 9, 1988, when within three hours, 216 luxury condominiums in the Regatta, an exclusive downtown Vancouver development, were all sold to Hong Kong buyers. The political and media outcry was immediate, with Hong Kong investors being portrayed as “invaders flooding the city on a tidal wave of capital” (Mitchell, 1993, p. 288). In response, considerable strategic political effort—ranging from local to national—became evident in the reworking of multiculturalism as an ideology in the interest of preserving multinational capital inflows into Vancouver. With ongoing foreign and Chinese capital investment into the city over the last two decades, and with the Chinese making up some 18% of Vancouver's population by 2006 (and this figure is expected to increase), it is evident that the role of Vancouver within the global economy has been successfully preserved (Statistics Canada, 2010). Like Miami and Los Angeles, local investment and development in Vancouver is closely tied to ethnic communities and multinational investors.

Given the Vancouver experience, the dismissal of global capital by Houston's elites can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, the decision not to use local ethnic groups to more comprehensively integrate into the global economy can be considered a poor judgment call, with Houston leaders not recognizing the potential scale of global capital inflow. However, given that millions of dollars of committed Asian capital into Old Chinatown was simply dismissed, it might also be argued that local elites fully recognized the implications of being spatially integrated into the global economy and they wanted to strategically ensure—unlike in the cases of Miami, Los Angeles, or Vancouver—that they would limit international investment in order to preserve a more controlled, homogenous, and local, elite-based economy. A combination of these two explanations might have also resulted in the eventual outcome of ethnic erasure from Houston's urban core. However, particularly relevant to ethnic entrepreneurs, if the latter interpretation is correct, and the more that this cultural norm persists, the more likely that Houston Chinese and other ethnic entrepreneurs will confront local discrimination and political barriers, then ethnic groups will continue to be marginalized in the Houston economy.

CONCLUSION

In reviewing the history of Houston, local development since the 19th century has been extensively shaped by the activities of a highly organized and influential land-based elite. This elite engaged in local investment, through coalitions with government, whose officials actively subsidized private development projects with public funds. These subsidies altered the attractiveness of place by reducing the inherent risks of investment. What becomes evident in Houston is that ethnic-based development projects have been excluded from these public subsidies. As a result, they were not competitive vis-à-vis other publicly funded rivals that were encroaching into the downtown ethnic communities, which have been and continue to be slowly squeezed out of the Houston core, as evident in Old Chinatown.

Old Chinatown itself was developed by highly motivated Chinese entrepreneurs who had gained a financial stake in developing land in downtown. However, Chinese entrepreneurs were unable to capture the public subsidies offered to competing projects encroaching into their district. In this struggle over space and place, as subsidies reduced the cost of development for their competitors, the Chinese entrepreneurs were at a disadvantage, eventually being pushed out of the downtown and losing their initial investment advantage in this lucrative urban location.

Not only did the Chinese community not receive public funding for private development projects, Old Chinatown was not even provided with adequate basic infrastructure, such as sewerage lines, during a pivotal time in which the downtown's future development strategies were still under review. One might reasonably argue that this prolonged moratorium on infrastructure provision was purposefully orchestrated, limiting new developments that were not part of the city's core urban redevelopment initiatives.

Jan Lin's (1995) analysis of Houston during the 1980s and early 1990s argued that Old Chinatown's proximity to a revitalizing downtown, as well as the initial interest expressed by the City to this enclave's development, indicated that Chinese entrepreneurs had gained an opportunity to influence the trajectory of Houston's future growth. The early establishment of Old Chinatown, coupled with the new local celebration of diversity—and particularly in a national context where ethnic communities were becoming an important element of local development—led to a reasonable interpretation by Lin of the role of the Chinese community in shaping the Houston landscape. Observing changes in architecture, urban iconography, immigrants, and ethnic neighborhoods, Lin's recognition of the city of Houston's shift from a modern to a postmodern city, and what this meant for ethnic communities, was a sound assessment of the early 1990s. Some two decades later, however, most of the ethnically significant landmarks that Lin observed have been erased from Houston's landscape (including Old Chinatown, Freedmen's Town, and Little Saigon).

As various Chinese-directed projects foundered in Houston's urban core, other developments—and particularly private projects receiving extensive public financial support, such as the Rice Lofts, the Fourth Ward redevelopment, and the sport stadiums—established a new imprint on urban Houston. While local government and media were celebrating Houston's ethnic diversity, the initial landholdings of Houston's ethnic groups in the city were slowly disappearing. New developments emerged that were being supported by the extraordinary impacts of government, whether financial or authoritative, changing the relative attractiveness of place for targeted investors—the developers supported by government. As with much of its past, government has been critical in shaping the landscape of the laissez-faire city and in shaping the opportunities of its residents. However, the interests of government also continue to be limited to a small group of entrepreneurs and targeted investments, while Houston's ethnic communities remain excluded from the growth coalitions and large-scale public financial aid.

Myth is a powerful tool. Few in Houston question laissez-faire, despite the extensive evidence that this form of government does not, and has never, existed in this city. The same could be said for the national support across America of the minimal government philosophy, which continues to be a popular, and believable, political platform despite the fact that presidents advocating this position have consistently set new records on the scale of public expenditures and national debt (Vojnovic, 2007). Locally, Houston Chinese entrepreneurs hang on to the myth of laissez-faire even while acknowledging in interviews and in the local media that other Houston neighborhoods, and other private development projects, actually receive public fiscal aid and are treated very differently from the Chinese enclaves. However, despite the general discontent, there is no serious resistance to this form of governance, and this is revealed, as noted earlier, by ethnic entrepreneurs continuing to invest in public infrastructure that is actually funded by the city in proximate neighborhoods.

The second powerfully crafted myth in the city is the growing importance of ethnicity and diversity. While there is evidence from local surveys and in the city's political leadership that there has been a greater acceptance of ethnic and racial diversity in Houston, the economic reality for ethnic communities reflects a very different condition. While for Houston locals, generally, the slow disappearance of ethnic enclaves from some of the most valuable land in the city is commonly interpreted as a result of “market forces,” numerous studies have shown the extensive role of government in squeezing out ethnic neighborhoods from the increasingly valuable urban core (Vojnovic, 2003a, 2003b, 2007; Podagrosi and Vojnovic, 2008; Podagrosi et al., 2011). These studies show that there are two sets of rules and price structures for economic development in Houston, largely based on ethnic/racial background, with non-whites facing higher development costs and greater barriers than whites.

On a more personal level, when Houston Asians—entrepreneurs and professionals—are shown data revealing income and property value declines in New Chinatown, the response is generally surprise and bewilderment. It is perhaps that many Houston Chinese have accepted the loss of Old Chinatown, and its lucrative location, as a trade-off for New Chinatown, which is generally assumed to be reasonably developing. When confronted with the rapid property value increases in the Old Chinatown location, the significant property value declines in New Chinatown during the same period, and the knowledge of how differently city officials treated ethnic enclaves compared to the more preferred, surrounding urban redevelopment projects, a more confrontational response emerges. Possibly the diffusion of this full picture—ethnic enclave erasure in the urban core, differential and uneven development costs based to a large extent on ethnicity, and the downward economic trend of New Chinatown (falling incomes and housing values) despite the large-scale private investment in this neighborhood by ethnic entrepreneurs—might encourage greater resistance to Houston's traditional growth strategy.

As noted earlier, Houston's urban revival can also be viewed within the context of gentrification—capital reinvestment and displacement “on which fortunes are made” through the cleansing of traditional communities (Smith, 1986, p. 34; see also Clark, 1995; Filion, 1991; Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Hedin et al, 2012; Smith, 1979; Wyly and Hammel, 1999; 2001; 2004). Numerous studies have already explored gentrification processes in Houston's urban renaissance (Vojnovic, 2003a, 2003b; Podagrosi and Vojnovic, 2008). This research shows an extensive scale of population cleansing, and social and physical upgrading, covering an area of 75 km² just in Houston's urban core, within the 610 loop (Podagrosi et al., 2011). The erasure of ethnic communities in urban Houston should be considered part of wider gentrification processes in the city, which again reinforces the localized, narrow, controlled, and homogenous, Anglo-white vision of local economic development. In other North American cities—such as New York City or Toronto—the packaging of ethnicity and ethnic neighborhoods has actually been a driver of gentrification (Hackworth and Rekers, 2005; Mele, 1996). In Houston, in contrast, local developers and public officials ensured that there was little in terms of diversity and pluralism that remained evident in the urban core, again despite the loud and widespread celebration of ethnic diversity in the city.

In the U.S., ethnic communities can and do play a significant role in local growth machines, but this varies by city and individual economic circumstances. A local stress (the decline of manufacturing and the erosion of the traditional growth machine in Los Angeles, and the collapse of petroleum prices in Houston) or the potential to develop significant new investments (using Hispanic entrepreneurs to expand trade and tourism in Miami) allows ethnic groups an opening into growth coalitions. Ethnic entrepreneurs, however, must also maintain constant relevancy in a dynamic, globalizing world, because as the Houston experience has shown not only can minorities be (re)marginalized by the traditional white growth coalition, but their most important symbolic and real neighborhood identities can be erased from the landscape of the metropolis.

The U.S. urban experience also illustrates two very different approaches to maintaining constant relevancy. One approach, evident with Miami Latino entrepreneurs, is based on forming alliances with local growth coalitions. The alternative approach is to challenge and resist the traditional growth machine's vision of (re)development, which might lead to, as in Los Angeles, the deterioration of the traditional growth coalition's hegemony (Purcell, 2000; Light, 2002; Logan and Molotch, 2007). This might allow alternative local governance strategies to emerge, including ethnic and slow-growth options.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Elvin Wyly and the reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions that improved the quality of the article. The constructive input by Bruce Pigozzi and Patricia Machemer were also very important and greatly appreciated. The statistical methods employed, and views expressed herein, are those of the authors. No official policy or position of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Commerce, or the U.S. Government should be inferred.

Notes

¹ Formed by an Act of the Texas Legislature in 1995 with the authority to assess taxes on downtown businesses, the management district promotes new downtown revitalization projects by leveraging public funding with private resources.

²The Houston Convention Center Hotel Corporation, a non-profit corporation established by the City Council, funded, developed, constructed, and now operates and maintains the Hilton-Americas convention hotel.

³The management district is a neighborhood-level authority established by the state legislature, which allows private businesses to self-assess taxes to fund street and landscape improvements.

⁴Adjustments were made to the 1980 census tracts and data to reflect the 2000 tracts using the population weighting method recommended by the U.S. Census Bureau (2001) and Peters and MacDonald (2004).

⁵The statistical package was set to extract components that have an eigenvalue greater than 1.0. An additional variable was created from a random number generator in the dataset. A component for which this variable is highly loaded indicates that it is not revealing any meaningful information. The first PCA run returned seven components.

⁶F-statistics were calculated in order to assess the additional explanatory power provided to the analysis. Based on the calculated incremental F-statistics, the cluster analysis produced 15 significant groups.

⁷An incremental F-test was conducted using the descriptive statistics derived from each iteration of the cluster analysis in order to assess the additional explanatory power provided to the analysis by each cluster.