This exhibit examines the rise of tenant organizing across New York City during a period marked by urban disinvestment and aggressive redevelopment. As landlords neglected buildings and city policy prioritized market-driven “renewal,” tenants faced unsafe living conditions, rising rents, and displacement. In response, grassroots organizations, primarily led by working class communities of color, fought to protect their communities from displacement and neglect. This exhibit traces how local community-building efforts evolved into radical tenant organizing and direct-action campaigns, situating community organizing in Chinatown within broader citywide movements for housing justice.

In Chinatown, housing activism developed alongside a broader wave of radical Asian American political organizing that challenged racism, U.S. capitalism and imperialism, and urban neglect, histories that are often absent in history classrooms. Drawing on archival materials including the 1969 Chinatown Report, I Wor Kuen’s Getting Together magazine, and tenant strike flyers and organizational records, this exhibit foregrounds the voices and strategies of those often marginalized in dominant historiographies of New York City. Ultimately, residents in Chinatown and across the city built alternative infrastructures of advocacy, documentation, and justice when the city failed to protect their livelihoods.