Brightline Podcast Ep. 2: 80 Square Feet of Chinatown
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to Episode 2 of the Brightline Podcast, which explores San Francisco Chinatown.
As the oldest and largest Chinese community in North America, San Francisco’s Chinatown is defined by a history of poverty, prejudice, and resilience. Today, it is one of San Francisco’s top tourist attractions - yet the area has one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the city, in the state, and probably in the country as well.
Picture Credit: Chinatown Community Development Center
Roughly 80-90% of Chinatown residents are low-income to extremely low-income. In a city with some of the most expensive housing in the country, Single Room Occupancy hotels (SROs) are often the only feasible living option; the average unit is around 8 by 10 feet long, with anywhere from a single elderly person to an entire family of five or six sharing one room.
“That’s history, that’s culture, that’s housing, that’s health...that’s Chinatown man.”
Your hosts Aubrey and Maya explore environmentalism and environmental justice in Single-Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels, which house low to very low-income tenants. In this episode, we’ll take a look at what it’s like to live in such extreme density, why open space is a critical resource for residents, and how local community organizations are tackling a set of escalating environmental health crises here. Illustrating the close-knit nature of Chinatown, Gordon Chin tells the remarkable story of how his mother lived next door to a Chinese opera performer couple, who had a one-year-old son named Bruce Lee.
1940 photos of Bruce Lee’s father, Lee Hoi-Chuen, on the left, with two other opera actors, and Baby Bruce Lee on the right (courtesy of Gordon Chin)
Thanks to Meifeng Deng, Gordon Chin, Malcolm Yeung, and the Chinatown Community Development Center for their participation in this exciting project!
Also related to heightened visibility around anti-Asian violence and language in the last year, the Brightline Air Quality Program’s air quality sensor network serves communities threatened by not only climate change but also violent racism. As mentioned in the Brightline Podcast, CCDC and Brightline have partnered to install local sensors to serve San Francisco Chinatown.
Central City SRO Collective tenant leader Reggie Reed, left, and Eddie Ahn, executive director of Brightline Defense, were among those distributing environmental awareness posters throughout the Tenderloin, Mid-Market and South of Market neighborhoods. (Courtesy Central City SRO Collaborative)
The Brightline Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, including APPLE and SPOTIFY. If you’d like to support the work we do, give us a follow and leave a review.
A transcript of this episode is available on Brightline’s Medium Blog.