From San Francisco to Montreal, there are around 50 Chinatown neighborhoods still around in North America. They've had to survive a tremendous number of existential threats. To keep these neighborhoods around for generations to come, leaders of Chinatowns around the U.S. and Canada are turning to community land trusts.

In today's episode, we hear from Chiyi Tam, a board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust, and Lydia Lowe, the executive director of the Boston Chinatown Community Land Trust, about how they're preserving their neighborhoods and residents' stability amid an uphill battle against property taxes, speculative investors and displacement.

“It feels like for as long as Chinatowns have existed, there has been a movement to save Chinatown,” Tam says. With more and more emergent CLTs popping up and gaining ground in other neighbourhoods around downtown Toronto, local Chinatown organizers began to wonder if it might be a tool to take control in their generations-long battle. “When fighting and fighting and fighting is extremely eroding to your spirit, isn't regenerative to your relationship to place, what could we build instead?”

To hear more about how Chinatown CLTs are learning from one another and achieving wins large and small, listen to this episode and subscribe to the Next City podcast. And be sure to watch our full webinar with Chinatown community land trusts from across North America.

This episode is part of our series, CDFI Futures, which explores the community development finance industry through the lenses of equity, public policy and inclusive community development. The series is generously supported by Partners for the Common Good. Sign up for PCG’s CapNexus newsletter at capnexus.org.