TKTK
Today, Flushing is celebrated as one of the largest and fastest-growing Chinatowns in the world. But this label masks a more complex history of immigration and neighborhood change.
Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwanese immigrants' arrival marked the beginning of downtown Flushing’s evolution from a disinvested neighborhood hollowed out by “white flight” into a dense, multiethnic, and cosmopolitan one. While often grouped under the umbrella of “Chinese,” immigrants from Taiwan arrived in the United States with their own distinct political and social history.
Though Taiwanese immigrants laid down roots in many New York City neighborhoods, including Elmhurst and Corona, this exhibit focuses on Flushing, where Taiwanese residents became the most prominent and visible force in the neighborhood. Through top-down forces of transnational capital and large-scale development paired with bottom-up civic organizing and community organizations, a new global immigrant neighborhood emerged. It was a landscape of contradictions: while new high-rises and surging immigration signaled neighborhood revitalization, they also symbolized deepening class inequality and the persistent tensions between long-standing residents and those newly arrived.
Taiwanese Americans were not the only community to lay claim to Flushing; multiple groups called the neighborhood home, often at the same time. But this exhibit argues that it was during the mid-to-late 20th-century wave of Taiwanese immigration into Queens, particularly among a select group of Taiwanese developers and entrepreneurs, that pathways were forged for subsequent Asian migration in the 21st century.
The story of Little Taipei in the late 20th century is more than an isolated chapter in immigration history, but rather a testament to how neighborhood identity is contested, layered, and reclaimed. This exhibit challenges traditional understandings of the immigrant enclave, offering a window into how contemporary immigrants forge spaces of belonging and claim space in an increasingly globalized and capital-driven world.
Modern-day Flushing is known as an epicenter for new immigrants in New York City. But long before the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that invited Asian immigrants to the neighborhood, Flushing served as a safe haven for those facing religious persecution and as a launchpad for new immigrants. Despite political changes, new urban policies, and immigration reforms, that legacy lives on in its diverse houses of worship, multilingual streetscapes, and ethnic community centers. A select few episodes of Flushing's early history offer context into the neighborhood's shifting identity — as well as some of its consistent characteristics — over the centuries.
Flushing as we know it today was once the marshy banks of Flushing Creek. It was originally inhabited by Indigenous people, including members of the Algonquin nation.¹ The Dutch West India Company established a colony there, with farming as its dominant industry.² Dutch settlers named it “Flushing” after the Dutch city of Vlissingen, which was the largest port as of 1645. The colony was populated by many English settlers, particularly Quakers, as well as French Huguenots, who followed a different form of Catholicism.³
Flushing's earliest iteration was known for its religious tolerance. In 1657, residents wrote the “Flushing Remonstrance,” a petition to establish Flushing as a township where everyone could practice their faith freely. Residents successfully pressured the Dutch West India Company to allow them to worship freely, despite the Dutch colony's Director-General, Peter Stuyvesant, fearing that other religions would undercut his political power.⁴ It is believed that this collectively organized victory for religious freedom in Flushing inspired the U.S. Bill of Rights.⁵
In the 1800s, Flushing was home to one of the earliest free Black communities in New York City, anchored by the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church, created in 1811.⁶ It is widely believed to have been one of the stops on the Underground Railroad.⁷⁸ After the Civil War, some formerly enslaved people were given property in Flushing, while others worked as oyster or ferry men. At the same time, an influx of German and Irish immigrants to the neighborhood helped Flushing earn it the nickname “Black Dublin,” referring to a neighborhood where both Black and Irish people lived in close proximity. Flushing also became a weekend getaway and commuter town for residents of Western Long Island.⁹ Flushing itself was considered to be a part of Long Island until 1898, when it was formally incorporated into New York City.¹⁰
Like other historical free Black communities in New York City, such as Seneca Village in Central Park or Brooklyn's Weeksville, the community of Black Dublin was eventually upended due to processes of urban renewal and neighborhood redevelopment.¹¹ New Deal reforms and urban renewal programs left Flushing vulnerable to top-down large-scale development processes. Because of the presence of African Americans, the neighborhoods of Downtown Flushing were deemed “high-risk” investments and redlined, making its residents ineligible for federally backed loans. This left the neighborhood and its residents vulnerable to top-down redevelopment.
Robert Moses and Queens Borough President James A. Burke took advantage of Title 1 of the 1949 Housing Act, which provided federal financing for cities to begin a slum clearance initiative that would use eminent domain—the government seizure of private land for public use. As urban scholar Tarry Hum has found, in comparison to the City’s claims that Black Dublin was blighted and therefore in need of urban renewal, photos taken by the NYC Department of Records in the 1940s for tax purposes contradict this, showing modest yet well-kept homes and a commercial center.¹²
In this oral history clip, Jay Williams (a member of Macedonia AME Church) describes how they saved it from demolition because of the church’s cemetery remains.
In 1948, the City used eminent domain to clear Black Dublin to create a municipal parking lot for shoppers and modern low-rent public housing. The only structure that was spared was the Macedonia AME Church, whose leaders successfully argued that the site contained human remains (the site of various historic burial grounds) and could not be moved. Ultimately, about 250 families were displaced. While those displaced were promised preferential units in the new development, their relocation was segregated: Black residents shipped off to the Bland Houses, while white residents sent to the Pomonok Houses. The City also demolished a local bus depot to accommodate more car traffic.¹³
Centuries before colonizers established outposts, around 6,000 years ago, Taiwanese indigenous peoples settled the island. Maritime records show that Portuguese ships first encountered the island in the 1500s but did not claim it as their territory; in the late 16th to 17th centuries, though, Taiwan was colonized by the Spanish and then the Dutch. The Dutch East India Company established an outpost on the island in 1642, not only seeking to control the island's rich natural resources but also to "civilize" its indigenous inhabitants through religious conversion and linguistic standardization.¹ Under Dutch rule, large-scale Han Chinese immigration began.² In 1683, Taiwan was annexed by China’s Qing Dynasty; later, China would cede Taiwan to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The Republic of China (ROC), under the Kuomintang (KMT) leader Sun Yat Sen, overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and assumed control of Taiwan after Japan’s surrender in World War II. Following their defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and roughly 2 million mainland Chinese retreated to Taiwan in 1949.
The history of displacement, political transition, and instability makes Taiwan, as historian Arif Dirlik describes it, the “land colonialisms made.”³ Consequently, the Taiwanese identity is fluid, political, and contextual. Rather than a label of origin, it serves many as a blend of history, ethnic background, and political origin. In this exhibit, “Taiwanese” refers to those from Taiwan as evidenced in the historical record, as well as those who self-identify with Taiwan politically, ethnically, socially, or geographically.
During the mid-20th century, Taiwan became essential to U.S. militarism in Asia, especially after the country’s strategic value was recognized during the Korean War in 1950. The U.S. government believed that maintaining Taiwan's democracy would prevent the spread of communism in Asia. After the Chinese Civil War concluded and the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the U.S. poured military and economic aid into Taiwan. They deployed a Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to block any PRC attempt to take over Taiwan by force. Taiwan and the U.S. then signed a mutual defense treaty in 1954 and continue to maintain diplomatic ties.
The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, repealed earlier Chinese exclusion laws and allowed many non-European immigrants to enter the U.S. But this did not mean that large numbers of immigrants from Mainland China came upon the law’s passage. After the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China prevented many people from leaving the country. Therefore, most of the immigrants who fulfilled the new Chinese quota came from Taiwan or the British colony of Hong Kong until the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. According to the late Betty Lee Sung, around 205,107 Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong came to the U.S. between 1966 and 1975.⁴
The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, an effort spearheaded by activists in both Taiwan and the U.S., provided some security for Taiwan’s political future. In the 1970s, the U.S. began normalizing relations with communist China, and the United Nations recognized the PRC, not the KMT, as the state of China. This act allowed Taiwan to receive its own immigration quota, separate from the PRC, as well as U.S. military support if they face any threats. In the absence of recognition as an official state and the constant threat of invasion by the PRC, emigration provided some generational stability; having at least one member in the U.S. could ensure the future immigration of other members should tensions between Taiwan and China escalate. In 1979, Taiwan also began allowing its residents to apply for tourist passports; many Taiwanese who could afford to travel left and changed their tourist visa status once in the United States.⁵
Taiwanese emigrants took advantage of the U.S.’s Hart-Celler preference system to recruit highly skilled workers, driven by the U.S.’s desire to bolster its scientific defenses against the Soviets.⁶ Most Taiwanese who immigrated before the 1970s were elite graduate students, many of whom used the H-1B visa system to change their legal status from students to workers.⁷ Under KMT rule, the government launched a widespread campaign to modernize and expand Taiwan’s education system, investing in vocational and basic education. As a result, many seeking advanced degrees went abroad, leading to a “brain drain” as educated elites departed their developing homelands to work in advanced economies and did not return.⁸ Since the 1950s, nearly 80,000 Taiwanese students have pursued graduate education in the US, and only 20% returned to Taiwan. This phenomenon has slowed since the mid-1980s, though, as Taiwan’s economy and policies encouraged their return.
Why did Taiwanese immigrants choose to settle in Flushing, Queens?
In the 1950s, Flushing’s Main Street was lined with department stores and small businesses serving working-class, mostly white ethnic and some Black residents.¹ It was overwhelmingly white, with data from 1960 data showing that 97% of Flushing’s population was white.² After the 1965 Immigration Act, an influx of Taiwanese, Chinese, Koreans, South Americans, Russians, and Indians moved to Flushing, drawn by its proximity to two major New York City airports and affordable housing. While there were only very few Asians already living in the neighborhood after the 1965 World’s Fair, most of these newcomers were well-educated middle-class people from Taiwan and South Korea.³
Flushing’s real estate was affordable during the 1970s because nearly half of the storefronts in downtown Flushing were vacant due to a citywide economic downturn stemming from the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and the shuttering of factories.⁴ A combination of these economic reasons, incoming immigrants, and the broader appeal of the suburbs drove a wave of white residents out of Flushing, a phenomenon called “white flight.”⁵
It is difficult to quantify exactly how many Taiwanese immigrated to Flushing because federal census records did not classify Taiwanese as a distinct category prior to the 2000s and 2010s.⁶ As a result, research on Taiwanese immigrants must rely on journalism, community surveys, and organizational archives. For instance, the Flushing Chinese Business Association estimated that in 1990, 40% of Flushing's Chinese population was from Taiwan. Paired with a 1989 Queens Daily article that estimated the total Chinese population in Flushing at 60,000, data suggests that there were approximately 24,000 Taiwanese residents in the neighborhood by the turn of the decade.⁷
As anthropologist Hsiang-Shui Chen notes in Chinatown No More, the conventional image of Chinatown as compact, homogenous, and insular did not reflect the mixed neighborhood of Flushing.⁸ Popular discourse labeled Flushing as a new or second “Chinatown” in part because Taiwanese immigrants were represented visually in the neighborhood’s landscape through development projects. Taiwanese immigrants post-1965 often brought capital with them and sometimes invested in ventures before arriving.⁹ While sociologist Jan Lin attributes the rise of satellite Chinatowns in New York to congestion in Manhattan’s Chinatown, sociologist Weishan Huang asserts that Flushing was not a secondary settlement; instead, it was “based on a careful calculation that Taiwanese immigrants were seeking a politically, socially, and ethnically different settlement area than that of traditional Chinatown,” which had older immigrants from Taishan, Canton, and Hong Kong.¹⁰
Grassroots communication networks and community organizations played a role in the development of this distinct settlement. For instance, Aunty Win’s Hotline was run by Flushing resident Susan Wu Rathbone, who provided advice and information to Chinese immigrants in Flushing starting in the 1940s. The Flushing community later helped her organize her hotline, which later became Chinese Immigrant Services, Inc. in 1984.¹¹
Community organizations also brought people together to recognize the growing Taiwanese population. Funded entirely by Taiwanese community members through private donations, the Taiwan Center was established in 1986 and became the country's first overseas community center.¹² Because of Flushing’s skyrocketing real estate values, they used a 37-shareholder method to buy the property. When the US stock market crashed in 1987, two Taiwanese American banks, Asia Bank and Great Eastern Bank, helped to refinance their loans.
Religious institutions in Flushing further reinforced bonds between Taiwanese residents. Western missionaries established churches in Taiwan, which acted as cultural bridges to the West. They not only introduced Christianity abroad, but also fostered an active church membership that many immigrants maintained in the U.S.
In this oral history clip, Aili Chu, who immigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s, reflects on her life in Flushing, which she describes as the heart of the Asian immigrant community. She recalls how, in Taiwan, local churches utilized grassroots outreach, such as sending cards and giving candy to children. These early interactions eventually led her to join the Faith Bible Association in Flushing, illustrating how religious institutions provided both spiritual and social continuity for the Taiwanese diaspora.
Unlike traditional clan associations that anchored Chinatowns during the exclusion era, Flushing’s new organizations actively engaged with the broader multi-ethnic community. Groups such as the Flushing Chinese Business Association (FBCA) and Chinese American Voters Association (CAVA) worked to give back to their communities while also fostering cross-cultural understanding. For example, the FBCA partnered with Flushing’s Korean community to clean up the downtown Main Street subway station.¹³ Similarly, CAVA sought to welcome all Chinese communities by strictly avoiding foreign political alignments. Instead, they focused on increasing civic engagement and encouraging participation in the U.S. electoral system.¹⁴
From the 1970s to the 1990s, Flushing changed from a majority-white to majority-minority neighborhood. In 1970, Flushing was 76.2% white and 5.6% Asian. By 1990, white residents made up only 28.9%, and Asians were the largest group at 35.8%.¹ Most of the Asian population was of Chinese and Korean descent, alongside a growing Indian population.²
This demographic shift coincided with New York’s 1975 fiscal crisis, when the city nearly went bankrupt. As the city’s tax base was shrinking due to white flight, the municipal government prioritized market-based investments and incentives and rolled back the direct provision of government services.³ Queens Borough President Donald Manes epitomized this political shift by courting foreign investment to aid the borough’s recovery. He dreamed of transforming Flushing’s strip of auto shops and vacuum-repair stores into a high-end district of luxury co-ops. He believed Taiwanese developers could make that vision a reality, and he took several trips to Taiwan to attract investors.
Flushing’s resulting transformation was not only seen; they were felt by residents in their homes and workplaces. While many scholars have argued that the influx of transnational capital from Asia and commercial development insulated Flushing from the regional recession that hurt most of New York in the 1980s and 1990s, this prosperity was not universally shared.⁴ These investments also replaced the neighborhood’s working-class character with a new landscape defined by stark economic inequality. Behind and between the facades of new high-rises, the very capital that revitalized Flushing masked a quiet class struggle for those struggling to make ends meet.
Focusing on two prominent local figures from the 1980s and 1990s in this section and the next, Taiwanese-born developer Tommy Huang and Councilwoman Julia Harrison, reveals how anti-immigrant sentiment in Flushing manifested as anxiety about local overdevelopment. Ultimately, these high-profile culture clashes obscured the neighborhood’s growing class inequality, a systemic issue that harmed both vulnerable longtime residents and the newly arrived Asian immigrants bearing the brunt of the criticism.
“Business is the fuel, and real estate the engine."
— Hsiang-shui Chen, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan; describing the neighborhood’s two greatest forces.⁵
Huang Jong-Loui (Tommy) was one Taiwanese-born developer who worked with Manes to bring new development to Flushing. Like many other Taiwanese in the 1970s, he migrated to the U.S. for college. After graduation, Tommy aggressively purchased cheap real estate around Flushing’s Main Street, reportedly using his wife Alice Liu’s inheritance. Within five years, he owned four low-rise apartment buildings.⁶
Tommy later built mixed-use structures like those in Taiwan with retail on the ground floor, rental units in the middle, and owner-occupied spaces on top, a model that attracted buyers who could generate income from retail while offsetting mortgages with rental payments. Featuring Chinese-language signage and facilitating higher population density, these buildings contrasted sharply with Flushing’s single-family lots and single-story storefronts. Tommy circumvented New York State development rules by building commercial and residential structures on commercial lots, bypassing regulations that barred developers from borrowing against unfinished residential units, thereby accelerating construction cycles.⁷ Tommy was nicknamed the “Asian Donald Trump” and rumored to own more buildings than any other Asian American in New York City.⁸
New government policies and banks made it much easier for developers like Tommy to start local development projects. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, federal and state legislators wanted to cement New York City’s position in global finance. To achieve this, they passed the Federal Banking Acts of 1978 and 1981, which allowed foreign banks to enter the US retail banking market more easily and created tax-free International Banking Facilities (IBFs) to attract foreign investment. In 1983, 500 IBFs existed in the U.S. Over half of these IBFs, holding more than three-fourths of all IBF assets, were in New York. That same year, the U.S. Federal Reserve also raised interest rates to draw more capital to the U.S., a move that cash-strapped local governments eagerly welcomed.⁹
Beyond inviting global banks to invest in the U.S., Asian immigrants, particularly Taiwanese, began opening their own locally oriented banks to serve other immigrants. For example, founded in 1980 by Taiwanese-born Jentai Tsai, Asian Bank provided financial infrastructure for sustained capital investments by Taiwanese immigrants who struggled to obtain loans from American banks. Other Taiwanese American banks, such as Great Eastern Bank and China Trust Bank, were also headquartered in Flushing, which prompted U.S. commercial banks to follow suit.¹⁰ In lockstep, Queens real estate agents advertised properties abroad, recruiting Taiwanese and Korean developers, along with new immigrants, directly to Flushing.
In 1984, property values in Flushing had doubled over four to six years, with buyers of East Asian descent accounting for about 60% of sales. Nearly 1,000 new units were under construction within a four-mile radius of downtown, and most storefronts had opened within the past five years.¹¹ As a lifelong resident and vice president of the Off-Broadway Homeowners Association, Ms. Keating argued:
“Buildings used to be three stories, now they’re 10,12. It’s going very vertical very suddenly. There’s no place for anyone to park who would go shopping there. The congestion is impossible. The crowds are oppressive.” ¹²
The figure of the wealthy Asian developer became a way for long-standing residents to racialize and oppose their new neighbors. They specifically invoked narratives of nostalgia, with the RKO Keith’s Theater as its touchstone, to oppose Asian immigrants’ changes to Flushing’s built environment in the 1980s and 1990s.¹
RKO Keith’s on Flushing’s Main Street had been a significant gathering place for East Queens since it opened in 1928; it was a movie theatre and hosted high school graduations and weddings for the self-described “old-timers” of Flushing.² But when Tommy purchased it in 1986, the theatre was suffering from low attendance rates commensurate with the rise of television, suburbia, and shopping malls. Alongside Flushing’s economic decline, both the theatre and the neighborhood were associated with “blight.”³ Two years before Tommy closed on the theater, Manes used his seat on the city Board of Estimates to argue for its development and successfully reduced its landmark status to the lobby and grand foyer only, allowing Tommy to build luxury condos around those sections.⁴
Despite Tommy’s stated plans for the theater, RKO Keith’s was plagued by arson, asbestos, vandalism, and an oil leak during his decades-long ownership. One of the most troubling events was a fire inside the locked theatre in 1990. Tommy was initially cleared of responsibility, but four years later, a reporter spotted him meeting with numerous city officials, including the fire marshal who had cleared him, to discuss developing RKO Keith’s.⁵ Similar fires of unknown origin had occurred at Tommy’s earlier developments: in 1982, Tommy wanted to develop a 16-story condominium, but the bank refused to sell to him. A Molotov cocktail was hurled into the restaurant at the proposed site and destroyed several shops. Tommy immediately increased his offer, and the bank sold it to him. Nobody was charged, and Tommy denied any involvement in the fire, though public suspicion grew. Flushing State Senator Leonard Stavisky reflected on both fires, remarking, “I can’t prove he was responsible, but wherever Huang went, fire followed.”⁶
In 1999, Tommy pled guilty to allowing hundreds of gallons of heating oil to spill into the basement of RKO Keith’s and was sentenced to five years' probation.⁷ Tommy’s extraordinary influence had proved both unsustainable and ultimately harmful to the broader perceptions of Asian Americans in New York City. Democratic district leader Ethel Chen condemned Huang’s destruction of the theatre, but called out critics for not taking the initiative to develop the site themselves and for being envious of Huang’s role in Flushing’s 1980s comeback.⁸ In a 1997 interview, she recalled that in the 1970s, she took her two young sons to RKO Keith’s for the first time to see Star Wars. She was horrified by the ticket lobby that reeked of urine and the drugs from the sales that occurred inside and outside the theatre. She asked her brother to chaperone her sons during the film while she waited in her car. She remarked, “People talk about the good old days, but sometimes the good days are not as good as nowadays.”⁹
Many long-term residents felt alienated by Flushing’s rapid transformation, and Flushing Councilwoman Julia Harrison became a key voice for their concerns. Harrison initially made efforts to appease the Asian American community by promising increased Chinese representation in local civic organizations in exchange for their endorsements. By the late 1980s, however, Harrison shifted her focus to addressing what she perceived as the "overdevelopment" of Flushing. She introduced a bill requiring all storefront signage to include English, saying the Chinese signs made "people feel they are being locked out of their neighborhoods." She also created the Coalition for a Planned Flushing, a group composed of members from local civic associations, businesses, and churches.¹⁰ Over the next decade, Harrison used this coalition as a platform to control the growth of downtown Flushing, blocking a wide range of projects from Tommy’s controversial redevelopment of RKO Keith’s to a critical renovation of Flushing Library.¹¹ Harrison’s coalition included those who were alarmed by Tommy’s failure to meet building codes and his track record of construction flaws, workplace injuries, and fatalities. Yet these concerns became entangled with broader anxieties about demographic change and anti-Asian sentiment.
Tensions boiled over when Harrison described the arrival of Asian immigrants as "an invasion, not an assimilation” in a 1997 New York Times interview. She stated that new Asian immigrants in Flushing, unlike her grandfather who arrived at Ellis Island "hungry," were "more like colonizers than immigrants, they sure as hell had a lot of money, and they sure as hell knew how to buy property and jack up rents of retail shops and drive people out.”¹²
Harrison's "invasion" comments prompted the formation of the Asian American Empowerment Coalition, a hastily organized group of 40 social, religious, and business groups that rallied over 2,000 at City Hall. They called for Harrison's resignation and censure by the City Council's ethics committee, pressuring her to read a public apology.
Harrison believed she retained support despite Flushing’s demographic changes, stating that voters were "the little old men and ladies in walkers and wheelchairs," or the “old-timers” of Flushing. In 1997, people of Asian descent made up over a third of Flushing’s population but less than 10% of registered voters, holding no elected office beyond school boards.¹³ After she was term-limited out, Flushing’s local civic organizations mobilized voter-registration campaigns and focused on representational politics, hoping that Asian American elected officials would best serve their predominantly Asian residents. Many first-time voters were drawn to the polls, culminating in Taiwanese immigrant John Liu's 2001 victory as the first Asian American to represent the district, and the first Asian American elected official in New York.¹⁴ Within a few years, additional Asian Americans gained historic positions in New York politics.¹⁵
Despite the media attention on Tommy Huang, most Taiwanese immigrants were also victims of soaring real estate prices.¹⁶ Many Taiwanese were part of Flushing’s working class, employed in the restaurant industry, retail, or garment factories.¹⁷ Asian immigrants faced discrimination in the housing market; many did not rent to Asians, charged Asians more rent, and did not provide heat, hot water, and repairs because many Asian immigrants did not know they were entitled to it. In many cases, Asian renters were forced to pay “key money,” a non-refundable, upfront payment to a landlord or property owner for the right to rent a specific property, a.k.a. a bribe. To cope with the high cost of living, many families informally shared living spaces, despite the practice being illegal.¹⁸
In 2012, Flushing was home to the third-largest immigrant population in New York City, with over half of its residents foreign-born. Flushing's nickname, "Little Taipei," had faded. Many Taiwanese moved to the suburbs, and an influx of mainland Chinese immigrated to Flushing after the Cold War. In 2012, the largest immigrant population in greater Flushing was from mainland China, at 29.4%, while Taiwan accounted for only 4.2%.
Immigration from Taiwan slowed for numerous reasons: the growth of Taiwan’s tech industry, improved living conditions, and expanded educational opportunities slowed Taiwanese immigrants to the U.S. and also encouraged return after education in the U.S. The U.S. passed the Immigration Act of 1990, which increased the annual per-country quota to 700k and loosened Cold War-era restrictions on migration. As a result, more mainland Chinese immigrants settled in Flushing from various class strata, mostly working-class, particularly those from Wenzhou and Fuzhou. As a result, the Taiwanese and other ethnic groups began to decline. For example, Koreans moved East of Flushing to the Queens neighborhoods of East Flushing. Murray Hill and Bayside, and South Asians moved South to South Flushing and Queensboro Hill; between 2000 and 2010 Korean and Indian populations declined by 30%.¹
Long-standing residents correctly anticipated that the influx of Asian immigrants would radically alter the scene in Flushing; however, the widespread luxury boom that they feared did not define the neighborhood’s general economy. A 2019 report found that 87.4% of businesses in Flushing were microbusinesses with fewer than 10 employees, although many of these are now threatened by international food chains and fine dining.² Flushing did not follow a typical pattern of gentrification characterized by above-average wealth.
Many of Flushing’s residents are not renters—not owners. The 2016 median household income in Flushing was only $39,565, well below the citywide average of $52,259.³ These facts beg the question: who are these luxury developments for? From 2009 to 2019, Flushing had the second-highest number of condominium units constructed, at 3,075, behind only Williamsburg, Brooklyn. With median sale prices reaching $650,000, these luxury developments do not target current residents of Flushing but rather wealthy transnational buyers.⁴
Flushing’s luxury boom is the result of specific economic and municipal policies that prioritized real estate interests and the free market over community stability. In the early 2000s, Michael Bloomberg identified the Flushing waterfront as “underutilized” and ripe for development. When the 2008 investment crisis made American banks hesitant to lend, real estate investors in China stepped in to secure assets in Flushing for their children.⁵ Supported by a legacy of late-20th-century financial policies that made Flushing a hub of bank branches, it remains a financial hotspot for international investment.
Recent real estate projects continue to prioritize luxury condos over affordable housing. In 2020, despite fierce community opposition, the City Council voted to approve a land-use application for a “special Flushing Waterfront District” that will create 13 towers on 29 acres of Flushing Creek waterfront, with 1725 luxury condos and only 61 affordable housing units. Similarly, Tangram Mall, built by F&T Group, was founded by two Taiwanese immigrants, Sunny Chiu and Michael Lee. Opened in 2019, two-bedroom units start at 1.15 million.⁶
The forces that invited investment and immigration also rendered residents vulnerable to displacement. Flushing’s evolution stems not only from the individual decisions of new immigrants to move, invest, and lay down roots, but also from layers of local municipal policy, federal economic policy, and global financial markets.
Flushing’s development at the turn of the century departs from the familiar history of gentrification in New York, which often focuses on young professionals moving into immigrant, working-class neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, or white middle-class couples seeking authenticity in the brownstones of Brooklyn. Nor does it fit into the common paradigm of white residents displacing communities of color—a narrative often used to describe how older Chinatowns and other urban ethnic enclaves are being threatened today. Instead, Flushing’s transformation highlights a different story: a neighborhood growing not in spite of gentrification, but because of an immigrant-led, foreigner-capital-driven version of it.¹
Flushing continues to serve as a launchpad for many immigrants. Beyond the glamour of luxury condos and mixed-use malls, Taiwanese residents forged livable spaces in the late 20th century. Those facing economic precarity subdivided spaces. When they faced exclusion, they established their own banks, their own political and professional organizations, and their own coalitions. They engaged in solidarity with non-Chinese and other Chinese communities through grassroots advocacy and civic engagement. They took care of their own by building social and mutual aid networks. Flushing’s Little Taipei shows that communities can build powerful economic centers with rich infrastructure while remaining bound to the pressures of global capital and internal class inequality—a tension that shapes the experiences of many New York City neighborhoods today.
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Carolyn E Lau is a community-based researcher and organizer born and raised in Queens. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University, where her work examines the relationships between race, space, and politics in U.S. cities. Carolyn’s current research traces the evolution of New York’s gambling ecosystem and explores how the state’s growing reliance on the gambling industry unevenly burdens communities along the lines of race, class, and legal status.
Her family moved to Flushing in the late 1970s from Manhattan’s Chinatown, where her grandmother continued to work in the garment industry. She would like to extend her thanks to Shelley Lee, for her support and research pedagogy, and her dad for sharing all the neighborhood gossip.