Abstract
This article analyzes how local political contexts at the municipal and intra-ethnic community levels shape the participation of immigrant place entrepreneurs in local growth politics and their pathways of entry into it. Based on in-depth interviews in Koreatown and Monterey Park in Los Angeles, the paper illustrates how immigrant involvement in local development evolves in response to differences in governance arrangements, electoral influence, and spatial scale. The findings show that the composition and organization of immigrant leadership, along with its position within the regional configuration of ethnoburbs, not only shape the strength of immigrant influence in land use outcomes but also how that influence is recognized, brokered, and constrained by public officials and neighboring growth regimes. Furthermore, political empowerment for immigrant and racial minority communities is often connected to place-based interests, as ethnic identity can shape how neighborhoods and commercial districts are valued, defended, and governed. The comparison highlights contrasting models of immigrant-led development politics: Koreatown operates as an auxiliary to Los Angeles’s dominant growth regime, concentrating leverage among a narrow set of well-positioned actors in a vertical and institutionally centralized political system, while Monterey Park exhibits a more autonomous, horizontally oriented model shaped by majority-representation governance and regional competition and cooperation. Across both cases, immigrant growth politics reflects coalitions in which place-based identity and capital-driven strategies interact in shaping development outcomes.
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Keywords: Immigration; Urban Politics; Redevelopment; Ethnic Enclaves; Korean Americans; Chinese Americans
Introduction
In fall of 2022, leaked recordings of a private meeting among elected members of the LA City Council and LA County Federation of Labor sparked public outrage throughout the city of Los Angeles. In the meeting, former LA City Council President Nury Martinez, two Latino Council members Kevin De Leon and Gil Cedillo, and LA County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera expressed their displeasure with the new maps proposed by the 21-member redistricting commission. The members made racist and derogatory remarks against black, Indigenous, Armenian, Jewish, and gay people, derided their fellow council colleagues, and spoke openly about how the city should be carved up in order to harness political power, including one of the hotly-contested regions in Koreatown. The ensuing public uproar forced the resignation of Martinez and Herrera and ignited a call for governmental reforms that would reduce council dominance and increase community input on redistricting processes. In the wake of the scandal, the city and state considered a structural changes to counterbalance the stronghold of the city council and bring in more local community input, including the installment of an independent city commission for redistricting, a substantial increase in the number of council representatives, and stronger authority and supervision from the city’s ethics commission.
Meanwhile, east of Los Angeles, another controversy unfolded in the San Gabriel Valley when the independent local and state-level redistricting commissions released draft maps, proposing to split two congressional districts represented by Judy Chu and Young Kim. In the west San Gabriel Valley, Chu’s district would separate Asian American-concentrated districts Alhambra, Monterey Park, and Rosemead from Arcadia, San Gabriel, San Marino, and Temple City to their north and grouped with predominantly-Latino cities to their east (
Huang, 2021).
Across this region, the proposal ignited significant backlash among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocates, residents, and elected officials, who warned that this realignment would reduce the region’s Asian voting population from 38 to 31 percent and undermine the cohesive political representation for diverse Asian communities of interest. Following a wave of public opposition including hundreds of emails, calls, and coordinated advocacy from Asian American leaders and organizations, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission released a revised map that kept the communities in the same congressional district. This move was widely seen as a victory for local input and a recognition of the importance of advocating for and maintaining established communities of interest.
These two events marked a momentous turning point that illustrated two aspects of growth politics in Los Angeles: 1) first, how redistricting decisions and council representation are critical battlegrounds for consolidating political influence among different racial and immigrant groups; 2) and second, how these struggles have been undergirded by racial and immigrant fault lines that play out differently in gateway cities
1 like Los Angeles where Latines comprise a strong voting bloc and Asian Americans provide key financial backing. In the case of Koreatown, the proposed reforms represented a larger push to decentralize the locus of power and put land use decisions back into the hands of local community stakeholders. In the latter case, Chinese American stakeholders mobilized regional solidarity to enhance ethnic political representation across local borders. The case of Koreatown and Monterey Park both demonstrate how the changing social and demographic realities of larger, globalizing ethnic enclaves and ethnoburbs require a more sophisticated approach to community-academic partnerships–one that pays even greater attention to the relationships and divisions that undergird ethnic politics.
In particular, the political influence of public leaders in multicultural cities like Los Angeles is heavily dependent on their capacity to mobilize and sustain a broad coalition of supporters extending beyond a single ethnic electoral base (
Joyce, 2003;
Li, 2008;
Saito, 2022;
Sonenshein, 2006). These dynamics vary widely and are especially challenging for Asian American politicians, who typically lack the demographic concentration necessary to win elections through co-ethnic support alone. However, the focus on broader racial groupings conceal complex political hierarchies that individual ethnic groups must navigate in different localities because of the variable size and characteristics of their ethnic population and the distinctive political histories of the neighborhood in which they operate (
Schrover & Vermeulen, 2005;
Stone, 1989;
Vermeulen, 2005).
This article examines how structural factors operating at both the municipal level and within ethnic communities shape immigrant entry into local growth politics along diverse pathways. In particular, the article expands on the rise of
immigrant growth machines–or private-public partnerships among public officials, domestic and overseas financiers, immigrant entrepreneurs, and other economic development groups that mobilize overseas and domestic capital to shape land use policies, redevelop neighborhoods, and steer patterns of urban development. Given the article’s focus on the internal power relations between public officials and pro-growth ethnic entrepreneurs, we focus on the perspective of political elites from the larger sample–or
place entrepreneurs–who have served as the primary architects and political brokers behind the politics of growth and development.
2The comparison of Koreatown’s institutional centralization in the powerful City of Los Angeles and Monterey Park’s role as the hub of autonomous Chinese suburbs scattered throughout the region reveals how place entrepreneurs have adapted to different city governance, electoral dynamics, and district scale. On the one hand, Koreatown’s fragmented council districts have long served as pawns in the broader agenda of powerful City Council members, but proposed reforms have aimed to decentralize power and return land-use decisions to local stakeholders. Conversely, while Chinese American leaders in individual San Gabriel Valley ethnoburbs operate independently, their ethnic networks that span across neighboring municipalities allows them to bypass local rivalries and mobilize a powerful regional coalition when a crisis threatens their collective interest. Moreover, the political structure of each field site together influence the access points available to specific subsets of politically savvy immigrant place entrepreneurs in these two regions. For immigrant and racial minority groups, political empowerment often becomes intertwined with place-based interests and determines control over particular neighborhoods and commercial districts.
This study is part of a larger research project that draws on approximately 185 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2007 and 2016 with local and transnational elites and grassroots community stakeholders involved in the politics of development, finance, and governance in two Pacific Rim ethnic enclaves. Interviewees were identified through theoretical and purposive sampling, with snowball sampling and professional networks used to recruit additional participants, including less visible grassroots advocates. Our research team also conducted participant and non-participant observation of redevelopment projects, political meetings, and public hearings, most intensively during fall 2015, with intermittent site visits from 2007 to 2018. The team analyzed all transcripts and field notes using grounded theory techniques and NVivo qualitative software, with multiple researchers independently coding and cross-checking findings to minimize bias. The research study also draws on secondary data sources, including U.S. Census Bureau demographic data, business registrations, building permits, real estate transactions, nonprofit records, and content analysis of ethnic and mainstream newspapers, supplemented by planning documents, public hearing transcripts, and real estate social media platforms.
Navigating the Politics of a City Within a City
The political trajectories of Korean Americans in Koreatown and Chinese Americans in the San Gabriel Valley reveal contrasting patterns of representation and empowerment that introduces both opportunities and constraints for immigrant growth machines. In Koreatown, Korean Americans have struggled to achieve substantial political representation in the City of Los Angeles, despite the neighborhood's role as the institutional hub of the region’s Korean population. The 1992 Los Angeles riots
3, or
sa-i-gu, devastated Koreatown and left a lasting impact on its community, politics, and urban landscape. Since then, efforts to consolidate political power have been hampered by challenges such as fragmented voting districts and limited access to city-level decision-making. Even as individual Korean immigrant entrepreneurs have made substantial financial contributions to individual campaigns, they have struggled to translate these investments into political representation compared to other constituencies in the City of Los Angeles. Legal battles over redistricting by various interest groups and stakeholders underscore these obstacles. It was not until 2015 that David Ryu became the first Korean American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, representing District 4 but then lost his seat in November 2020 to urban planner Nithya Raman. Ryu's victory marked a breakthrough for Korean Americans in local politics but his later downfall also highlighted how rare and limited such successes have been in this densely populated yet politically marginalized community.
In particular, Koreatown’s economic value stems from its unique location in one of the highly populated corridors experiencing continued transit-oriented growth from Santa Monica to downtown LA. Land use decisions in Los Angeles are tightly controlled by the fifteen-member City Council, which represents the city’s diverse districts, along with various advisory bodies and commissions that influence the city’s land use decisions. Moreover, the public appeal of this vibrant ethnic enclave economy is boosted by its proximity to the Hollywood entertainment industry, as well as the Seoul government’s interests in place branding the booming global K-wave and entertainment industry in recent years (
Kim, 2023). Rather than succumb to the pressures of ethnic succession and gentrification, a mixed and dispersed network of Korean American entrepreneurs and investors have used a combination of personal, family, and transnational resources to sustain the economic and institutional vitality of Koreatown and translate some of it into political leveraging.
In particular, the foundations of immigrant growth machines must navigate the political opportunities and constraints within each ethnic community–including the area’s electoral composition, the community’s institutional core, and the strength of cross-regional ethnic networks. Using data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS),
Table 1 highlights several proxy measures of political incorporation, including naturalization and length of residence, to assess the relative political capacity of ethnic groups in Koreatown and Monterey Park. For one, Koreans residing in Koreatown are more likely to be non-citizens with fewer years of residency on average than the Chinese in Monterey Park. As one of the significant predictors of voter participation, the income level of each group also suggests that the Chinese population in Monterey Park have greater economic capacity for political influence than the Korean population in Koreatown. Even with financial campaign contributions from Korean businesses, their weak representation in local politics and governance pose some crucial institutional hurdles.
Oh and Chung (2014) report that out of more than 500 public official positions (elected and appointed) in the city government of Los Angeles in 2012, roughly 24 (about 5 percent) individuals had distinctive Korean last names who served the local government during the period of study.
4 Many of these appointed officials were members of planning or housing commissions, which means they are involved in local (re)development processes. We could not identify any Korean elected officials in the city government, at least by their names.
Until 2019 redistricting, the electoral power of Korean community stakeholders were significantly diminished by the partitioning of Koreatown into four different council districts with the largest portion falling under CD-10–the most powerful district in Los Angeles and home to a sizable black electorate from South Central (
Joyce, 2003). There are also seven neighborhood councils and a dozen or so neighborhood associations within Koreatown, reflecting the fragmentation of local grassroots voices. Under the old plan, Koreatown was merely a small segment in the 10th council district, dominated by black voters in South Central. Korean community stakeholders like Grace Yoo, who ran for the 10th district council office in 2015, expressed frustration with the lack of return for the substantial contributions of Korean taxpayers and entrepreneurs who filled the coffers of local political candidates. It sparked a long-standing grassroots campaign among Korean American stakeholders, local nonprofits, and multiracial allies that ultimately led to the 2024 adoption of a more unified electoral map.
Koreatown resembles an auxiliary institution to the City of Los Angeles yet also the institutional hub for the scattered Korean residential population. Although their constituents reside in multiracial places like Cerritos, La Palma, La Buena, Torrance and Buena Park, the economic interests and campaign funding of the broader Korean base are in some ways inextricable from the entrepreneurial and political center of Koreatown (
Zip Atlas, 2026). With major businesses and the population’s largest institutions clustered in this hot region west of the garment district, Korean businesses have contributed substantial funding to numerous political campaigns and city events. Koreatown also stands out as the site for major political organizations in Koreatown like KYCC, Korean American Coalition (KAC), Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), and National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) (
Chung, 2007). Nevertheless, Korean political representation in the suburb is increasingly expanding outside the enclave into metropolitan and national venues with local and congressional representatives like Jay Kim, Young Kim, and Michelle Park Steel
5 in Orange County. Only 23 percent of Korean American elected officials are based in California, a figure significantly lower than those of Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipina/o, or Asian Indian elected officials.
Interestingly, corporate developers and affluent residents in adjacent neighborhoods such as Country Club Park were more likely to possess the political capital needed to benefit from government funding such as Community Redevelopment Agency monies intended for reinvestment in Koreatown, because of the way city ordinance rendered the agency dependent on the LA City Council for overseeing and ratifying all major decisions on local development projects. Larger institutional developers run by non-Korean corporate entities like CIM and JH Snyder are better able to overcome bureaucratic and political hurdles in the approval process, because of a combination of political savvy, campaign donations, and skillful lobbying. Many Korean investors preferred to fund projects privately rather than work through city agencies, viewing the bureaucratic process as slow and cumbersome. This preference for speed and autonomy, she noted, helps explain why Koreatown saw a surge of high-rise condominiums and market-rate apartments built without government assistance, and fewer incentives to engage in public development initiatives that might have benefited the broader community.
While elite transnational networks and chaebol-linked capital may indirectly fuel Koreatown’s growth, large corporations like Samsung and Hyundai remain less engaged in ethnic enclave economies, opting instead to globalize their brands through more prestigious or affordable property acquisitions outside the enclave. Contrary to the public’s preoccupation with the invasion of foreign capitalists, Koreatown’s economic boom is instead partly the result of key U.S.-based Korean American entrepreneurs, lawyers, and doctors pooling together their money and pouring tons of money into acquiring buildings–only a handful of the larger projects with the support of major overseas investors. According to our interviewees, the bulk of property acquisition and investment comes from individual Korean professionals both within and outside of Koreatown, who acquire, manage, and broaden their investment holdings within a close circle of family, extended kin, and close friends. In terms of generation, immigrant place entrepreneurs are mostly first and 1.5 generation actors who are building growing empires using their accumulated wealth and valuable ties to foreign capital and corporations. Even attempts by well-connected place entrepreneurs to recruit transnational Korean homeowners and investors have been relatively unsuccessful because of aversion to the immense legal restrictions and taxes involved in the process (Deverteuil et al., 2019).
The characteristics of the Korean population has evolved with new waves of immigrants and coming-of-age leaders emerging from the ashes of Sa-i-gu. Even as long-established immigrant entrepreneurs who did not flee the city resurrected their businesses and real estate holdings, they are competing with new waves of Korean immigrants with the financial capital but sparse political skills to promote urban revitalization. As shown in
Table 1, both Koreatown and Monterey Park show a similar proportion of 1.5 generation residents (18 percent, 20 percent respectively) and bilingual residents (23 percent, 26 percent respectively). The 1.5 generation
6, or leaders, who were raised and educated in both cultures, offer another potential base for political leadership because of their capacity to act as mediators between first generation immigrants and host society communities. The 1.5 generation has indeed been known to help first generation immigrants overcome language and cultural limitations in the mainstream local political realm, particularly after large-scale riots erupted in 1992 amidst tensions between Koreans and blacks in Los Angeles (
Chung, 2007).
The stream of capital also represents broader shifts in the composition of Koreatown’s progrowth immigrant elite and not just generational. In particular, they represent two major waves of immigrant capitalists: the earlier generation of non-English-speaking small business owners. For example, Hui-Duk Lee, the founder of the first Korean market (Olympic Market), the first Korean restaurant (Youngbinkwan), and the first Korean-style shopping center (VIP Plaza) in the 1970s, mobilized mostly personal/ family resources to establish successful businesses that eventually branched into chain stores or other larger-scale enterprises. According to one informant, these entrepreneurs may have been successful in building small businesses but encountered numerous obstacles when they expanded into large-scale operations which required better English proficiency, political savvy, and professional management skills. Some of them eventually ended up in bankruptcy or dissolved altogether. The newer wave of Korean immigrant and 1.5 generation elite (for example, David Lee, CEO of Jamison Properties, and Do Won Chang, 1.5 generation owner of the fashion business Forever 21), however, are more adept at mobilizing both local and transnational capital using their investment skills, English proficiency, and political networks to expand their investment and real estate holdings beyond the boundaries of Koreatown.
However, a common theme that resonated throughout many of the narratives is not only the issue of language and cultural barriers, but also, a general lack of political capital, appropriate negotiation skills, and most importantly, knowledge of American land use regulations, especially in a city as powerful and bureaucratically complex as Los Angeles. As one of the minority female players in redevelopment politics, Susan Kim explains, “So for a Korean development company in Koreatown to want to invest 500 million dollars in a project here, right, and let’s say they want to do it with a small mid-sized Korean company here…The company here needs to know what the process is, needs to be able to identify a chunk of land, needs to be able to know what the planning and land use regulations are, right, in order to be a dependable source of intelligence gathering.” Compared to Monterey Park, Koreans in Koreatown do not have access to trustworthy intermediaries or institutions within the Korean community and generally lack the level of political sophistication and insider knowledge of land use politics that you would observe among other ethnic groups such as Persian Jewish Americans, who hold significant commercial properties in parts of the Garment District passed down through generational succession.
Note that the stark contrast in political capacity is not intended to imply that there is some cultural deficiency in Korean leadership but rather, to highlight how structural factors–such as shorter immigration histories, the entangled trade and military relations between the U.S. and South Korea, the massive scale of urban governance, and the smaller size of the coethnic population–all factor into the structural maturity of their immigrant progrowth institutions. One of the top Korean American insiders I interviewed even felt it was a case of discrimination, that Korean firms thought Korean Americans would be less knowledgeable about American politics than white American firms, even though these firms he said are probably “screwing them over.” However, there is not much activity among Korean EB-5 and when it is available, they are usually diverted to other areas (non-Korean) and other states. Other possible explanations include heavier restrictions in South Korea about money leaving the country than there might be in China. Although initially Korean investors did put some capital into the early development projects, their capital investment seems to be receding and firms are now turning more toward other Asian capital, such as overseas capital from China and Southeast Asia.
Unlike the smaller and more autonomous municipality of Monterey Park, Koreatown’s development is deeply entangled with the broader Los Angeles city bureaucracy, requiring developers to navigate complex legal, logistical, and political processes. Although they may receive symbolic recognition as a result of fundraising dinners and events they host for public officials, the vast majority of Korean property owners, developers, and business owners seem to lack a sustained and substantive relationship with the city council and local public officials during this time period. This interdependence puts Korean developers at a disadvantage, as they must compete not only with city regulations but also with more established and experienced American development firms that recognize Koreatown’s high-profit potential. Further compounding these challenges is the relative absence of politically experienced and well-networked brokers–intermediaries who could otherwise help Korean developers learn, access, and effectively navigate big-city politics.
As a result of these internal and external structural barriers, Koreatown’s growth-based political opportunity structure is dominated by a small insider network of elite institutional actors who are able to mobilize informal ties, gatekeeping power, and behind-the-scenes negotiations with key decision-makers to influence the community’s growth and development. At the core of this network are a handful of the most influential immigrant and 1.5 generation Korean
American figures in the local growth coalition: Dr. David Lee (a 1.5 generation former physician and owner of Jamison Properties), Dr. Ha Kee Whan (long-time immigrant owner of the Hannam supermarket chain and president of Hankook Property Management Company Inc.), Jae Min Chang (Chairman and Publisher of The Korea Times), and Christopher Pak (a 1.5 generation architect and developer). Although they do not act in coordination, they are widely regarded as the select few Korean American leaders with direct access to Councilman Herb Wesson–the most powerful member among the four council districts and on the Los Angeles City Council–who reportedly turns to these entrepreneurs on matters concerning the Korean American community.
Christopher Pak, a prominent Korean American architect and developer from Archeon has been responsible for some of Koreatown’s tallest luxury buildings, including the Solair and the Aroma Sports Complex. He is one of the strongest proponents of a vertical, densely-built Los Angeles and described to us how time spent in Asian cities such as Ho Chi Minh City and Hong Kong shaped his understanding of urban form and helped him to reconceptualize Los Angeles. He viewed these types of compact, high-density environments as a more promising alternative to LA’s fractured, sprawling metropolitan form. The passage reveals how actors inside the growth machine articulate their legitimacy through technical expertise, global comparisons, and reframing contentious terms like gentrification.
Jae Min Chang, chairman and CEO of the largest Korean-language newspaper in the U.S. The Korea Times Los Angeles, expressed deep concern about the suburbanization and population decline of Korean immigrants in Los Angeles–a demographic trend he viewed as critical to the survival of Koreatown’s cultural and economic fabric. Rather than relying solely on the new generation of Korean Americans, Chang emphasized that the community’s vitality depends heavily on continuing to bring in new Korean immigrants and reviving second generation interest in Korean American issues. During our conversation, he proposed that expanding affordable, alternative undergraduate and graduate programs for international students, paired with internships in Koreatown, may be a practical and effective strategy to attract more Korean nationals to the area. He also stressed that the key to sustaining both the Korean immigrant population and the media institutions that serve it lies in maintaining a stronghold on the institutional infrastructure of the Koreatown ethnic enclave economy. He noted that Koreatown occupies very valuable land that Koreans should preserve and pass down, citing Jewish immigrants who continue to own a significant portion of L.A.’s garment district as a model.
Suburban Autonomy and the Expansion of Ethnoburban Regionalism
Capitalizing on the political sophistication and broader representation of Chinese public officials, the Chinese elite in Monterey Park have developed a more stable institutional infrastructure for growth and thus operated with relative local political autonomy since the turn of the 21st century. From the perspective of LA’s elite power brokers, Chinatown still stands as one of the cornerstones of Downtown LA redevelopment; however, the main pillars of Chinese-driven political activity lie along the regional corridors of East Los Angeles from Alhambra to Diamond Bar where Chinese Americans have expanded their capital base from small entrepreneurship and trade to major real estate, finance, and high-tech industries. Because of sheer population size, the geopolitical strength of China, and a longer history in the United States, the Chinese have gradually established a political stronghold over the governing regime of several SGV suburbs, especially Monterey Park–transforming the region into a hub of Asian American political influence.
Because they house similar neighborhoods with “replicable” suburban environments and trendy commercial districts, the political center of Chinese growth regime is not limited to one specific location but instead, encompasses a wide constellation of local growth machines that compete, cooperate and emulate one another. Beginning in the 1970s, an influx of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China transformed cities across the San Gabriel Valley into thriving ethnoburbs. In cities like Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Alhambra, and Arcadia, Chinese American council members have frequently held majorities or near-majorities on city councils, shaping local policy on development, education, and community relations (
Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 2018). Chinese American candidates throughout the San Gabriel Valley have also been elected across the board from local city-level positions such as school board members and city comptrollers to state representatives including the California Tax Board and State Assembly.
By leveraging their growing population and economic power, Chinese Americans in this region have solidified both their economic and political position across the San Gabriel Valley and cultivated a robust political infrastructure that continues to advocate for their interests on both local and national stages. In all, the proportion of Chinese residents in the percent cities exceeds the proportion of Koreans in Koreatown, contributing to more electoral clout for Chinese public officials and autonomous political power to the Chinese growth machine(s) than the auxiliary position of Korean growth machines in the City of Los Angeles. At the same time, Chinese leaders must still work in coalition with other Asian groups, whites and Latinos in the process of urban governance to varying degrees.
Regardless of the city’s specific demographics, most of the cities in the region had witnessed waves of ethnic succession by the 1990s and 2000s that strengthened the electoral influence of its majority or near-majority Chinese population and the election of at least one ethnic Chinese representative on city council.
Oh and Chung (2014) find that in 2012, 57 out of approximately 174 positions of elected and appointed public officials in Monterey Park were Chinese, as identified by their last names. Approximately 33 percent of the total positions are filled by individuals with Chinese names, who serve a wide range of government units and commissions–from the school district board of education to the business improvement district advisory committee. The greater horizontal and vertical integration of Chinese officials throughout the local governance may put coethnic pro-growth advocates in a more secure position when promoting various development projects.
Monterey Park’s transformation during the 1990s and 2000s highlights how high naturalization rates, economic resources, and effective coalition-building enabled Chinese immigrants to overcome initial resistance and become central actors in shaping Monterey Park’s civic and political landscape. As shown in
Table 1, Monterey Park’s Chinese population in the 1990s and 2000s exhibited higher rates of naturalization and U.S. citizenship (53 percent), as compared with Koreans in Koreatown. Chinese in Monterey Park reported slightly longer years of residency (approximately 15 years on average) than Koreans in Koreatown (13 years). As one of the consistently significant predictors of voter participation, the income level of each group also suggests that the higher-income levels of Chinese population in Monterey Park combined with higher homeownership rates and longer average residency would contribute to more robust voter participation and a steady pipeline of public representatives than the more transient Korean population in Koreatown. The economic vitality of Monterey Park’s Chinese community in the 1990s and 2000s has also provided the resources and institutional infrastructures for political campaigns and civic initiatives for aspiring Chinese candidates.
During the 2000s, Monterey Park’s city council and mayoral politics reflected both the city’s maturing Chinese American community and the ongoing negotiation of power among its diverse residents. The political landscape in the region had shifted from the contentious battles of the 1980s and 1990s to a period characterized by greater Chinese American representation alongside active coalition-building among the town’s multicultural constituents. Monterey Park became a critical stopping point for government delegations from China and Taiwan on their visits to Los Angeles. In 2003, Monterey Park became the first city in the continental United States to elect three Chinese Americans to city council members, and by 2013, four out of five council members were Chinese American (
Danico, 2014). This demographic shift laid the groundwork for political mobilization, culminating in milestones such as the election of Lily Lee Chen, who was seated as the nation's first Chinese American female mayor in Monterey Park in 1984. Over time, Chinese American leaders extended their domain of influence beyond local offices to state and federal levels, including Mike Eng and Ed Chau serving on the State Assembly. Judy Chu first joined the city council in the late 1980s, served three terms as mayor in the early 2000s, and later became the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress by effectively mobilizing cross-racial alliances in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley.
Until 2020, Monterey Park’s at-large system tended to favor candidates who could appeal to the city’s overall demographic majority, which since the 1990s, had been predominantly Asian American, especially Chinese American; however, Latino and white candidates–including members of the slow-growth old-guard–have also been successful in securing office often by building coalitions among their diverse constituents. Notably, the Los Angeles Times headlines on the 2015 local elections declared that “Monterey Park nears a demographic milestone, yet race rarely discussed.” The article noted that while the city council members were clearly cognizant of the importance of reaching out to diverse constituents through the dissemination of English, Spanish, and Chinese-language campaign materials, the six candidates either avoided or declined to speak on the subject of race or the council’s ethnic composition–instead foregrounding their professional credentials and pragmatic view on municipal issues and governmental transparency over the divisive identity politics of the past.
Despite its limited scope and resources, the CRA was also instrumental in linking the city’s objectives with regional priorities in the larger San Gabriel Valley, as well as wider transnational circuits of capital. Its two primary project areas covered over 1,100 acres of the major commercial corridors, including Garvey Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue and implemented infrastructural upgrades, commercial upscaling, and pedestrian-oriented designs aimed at downtown revitalization and economic growth. One of its signature projects, Atlantic Times Square, integrated high-density housing with large-scale retail and entertainment as a means to attract consumers and investment from across the San Gabriel Valley, rather than serving only local residents. In addition, the projects were part of a larger West and East San Gabriel Valley Area Plan, which prioritized environmental cleanup, economic stability, and improved connections across neighboring cities. Projects like the Market Place redevelopment, built on a former Superfund cleanup site, also featured 109 condominiums and nearly 71,000 square feet of retail space as part of a regional strategy to improve walkability and connectivity along major corridors.
Regional nonprofit organizations like the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership (SGVEP) also play a role in marketing and expanding the Valley’s economic connections through regional branding on Chinese commercial spaces, conducting research, and engaging in policy advocacy across thirty-one cities, including those along the Valley Boulevard corridor. SGVEP was established in the early 1990s when city managers from Alhambra, Monrovia, and West Covina created a regional consortium to market and expand the Valley’s economic base. Monterey Park’s own business resource materials list the Partnership as a regional ally “advancing the economic vitality and quality of life,” suggesting that the city is part of a broader, valley wide development agenda rather than targeted as a distinct Chinese immigrant enclave (
City of Monterey Park, 2024).
A decade after Horton’s seminal study, the EB-5 investor program and liberalized real estate investment laws prompted an influx of global capitalist investment from Asia that once again transformed the dynamics of urban redevelopment. Immigrant entrepreneurs and public officials in Monterey Park recognized the potential for attracting Chinese tourists looking for hotel accommodations and cultural amenities near downtown Los Angeles and tapped into their bicultural networks and resources to build new luxury buildings and enterprises for international visitors. For example, in Arcadia where about 60 percent of the residents were Asian, over 90 houses sold for more than $2.5 million in 2013 alone and contributed to skyrocketing real estate prices (
Hawthorne, 2014). Competing with new luxury hotels in neighboring regions, the City of San Gabriel approved the construction of an Art Deco-style Sheraton hotel with the support of EB-5 investors in 2015. The 2009 global recession and slow growth regulations in Monterey Park for a while deflected investment elsewhere, but new growth is still evident with the construction of the upscale Atlantic Times Square mixed-use condominium and shopping mall and plans for three new 4-star hotels.
What was once a small bedroom community closely protected by slow-growth white old-timers suspicious of the rapid demographic and environmental change gave way to a new guard whose authority was firmly grounded in both local immigrant clientele and global wealth. Through the establishment of transnational organizations, Chinese communities in Los Angeles have tapped into new flows of capital, labor, and consumer markets that enable them to enhance the density and diversity of coethnic activities and strengthen the entrepreneurial base and infrastructures among ethnic enclaves beyond geographic boundaries.
However, this transformation masks significant sub-ethnic differences driven by variations in politics, migration histories, and cultural orientations. In contrast to late 19th and early 20th century Chinese who mostly immigrated from the southern regions of Guangdong and Fujian province (lao qiao), the main sources of Chinese immigration during this period have originated from multiple regions throughout mainland China, as well as Taiwan and Hong Kong (xin qiao) (
Li, 2008:119). In Chinatown, the Cantonese-speaking Chinese immigrants have been succeeded by new waves of ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia and the Americas. These new immigrants have changed the demographic profile, immigrant economy, and built environment of Chinatown from a socially enclosed homogeneous enclave to a multilingual, culturally diverse district that has recently been restructured by gentrification.
Chinese American entrepreneurs, public officials, and chambers of commerce from earlier waves of immigration were key cultural brokers for subsequent immigrants and also transnational investors who needed intermediaries with local knowledge and social networks to negotiate real estate and land-use development. Max Chang, senior official of Singpoli and Invest LA Regional Center, explains:
Yeah, we have a lot of these individual consultants. Generally, they're the first wave of immigrants from China, I would say, the late 80s or early 90s. So they spend maybe five to ten years here at least. So they have a general understanding of how America works, how business works here. They will use the skill and the knowledge to tap into the second generation immigrants from China, which is the late 90s, the early 2000–the new rich from China. So they're using the family connection back in China and turn into this new rich, the new middle-class Chinese.
According to one developer, Chinese American developers lead the many new prominent development projects underway in San Gabriel. One exception may be the Olson Company, a non-Chinese-owned American firm headed by Stephen Olson, which has actively marketed its projects to Chinese and Asian American homebuyers throughout the San Gabriel Valley, including Monterey Park as a strategic response to the region’s demographic trends and market demand.
The growing marketization and densification of Monterey Park has given rise to two distinct types of brokering enterprises, each operating at different scales and exhibiting unique organizational characteristics. Monterey Park was initially developed by traditional Chinese families such as the Mar family, who accumulated collective capital over time through a combination of strategic real estate acquisitions, ethnic-owned financial services, and the mobilization of robust co-ethnic networks, paralleling some of the dynamics observed among Cuban entrepreneurs in Miami (
Portes & Stepick, 1993). These elite family firms typically rely on private, in-house funding rather than external investor programs like EB-5. They operate with a low public profile, avoid too much public visibility, and keep their operations within close-knit, secretive family circles. More recent developers like Sunny Chen of the San Gabriel Hilton and Ronnie Lam of Monterey Park’s Atlantic Times Square mixed-use project similarly keep low public profiles.
In contrast, the rising number of companies like Singpoli, a Hong Kong based construction company involved in mainland China cities in the 1980s that moved into the U.S. in the early 1990s reflect the increasing sophistication and institutional advancement of Chinese-led growth enterprises in the San Gabriel Valley. This evolution has been driven by several factors, including the use of EB-5 investment capital, a high degree of transnational institutional completeness, and the growing political experience of brokers. These brokering real estate firms follow a corporate model, characterized by a formal organizational structure, greater public outreach both regionally and overseas, and active use of digital marketing and social media platforms like Facebook as branding tools. They are heavily involved with EB-5 projects involving overseas capitalists and position themselves as professional, externally-facing operations.
EB-5 investment fund companies sometimes operate in the San Gabriel Valley such as Invest LA (an investment arm of Singpoli company) in Pasadena and California Investment Regional Center in El Monte. But EB-5 investment managers are often targeting funds to projects elsewhere in the metropolitan region, including Orange County, beach cities and also downtown Los Angeles such as at the JW Marriott hotel project at L.A. Live. Transnational Chinese investors include many directors of state-owned companies or private entrepreneurs who are newly rich from the Chinese economic boom, and they are as likely to treat residential investments in the U.S. as secondary to their primary residential location in China rather than following more traditional immigration routes to American citizenship.
Beyond these larger firms, there are also a motley of smaller firms and individual entrepreneurs who have ventured into the thriving real estate business across the various SGV ethnoburbs–from local family-run brokerages to independent investors and developers involved in small multifamily or commercial holdings. According to Martin Tan, many of the small scale Chinese developers and real estate companies like his work regionally with an emphasis on “in-field projects in mature areas” of the San Gabriel Valley where middle- and upper-class Chinese Americans have more space and stronger established roots. He states, “They find you know, maybe they consolidate, they build a lot together and build tract houses on it.” Others compete more quietly, making use of grassroots advertising, local civic engagement, and personal networks to attract clients and tenants. This vibrant market has been further animated by a new generation of tech-savvy entrepreneurs, such as the co-founders of the Hommtown real estate app, who are creating and innovating digital platforms to streamline the real estate process (
Wat & Cheng, 2024).
Auxiliary and Autonomous Immigrant Growth Machines
From a political standpoint, Koreatown’s legacy as the institutional hub of the dispersed Korean American community and Monterey Park’s emerging position as the suburban commercial center of the regional Chinese population have generated different sets of political constraints and opportunities for immigrant place entrepreneurs–one organized vertically with the City of Los Angeles and the latter oriented horizontally with respect to their neighboring Chinese-dominant suburban regimes.
Table 2 summarizes some of the key defining characteristics of the auxiliary and autonomous growth machines in Koreatown and Monterey Park. Koreatown has evolved into an auxiliary of the powerful growth machines of Los Angeles, enabling a small circle of ethnic elites to leverage resources for individual projects when these align with the city’s broader vision. As a subsidiary of the powerful Los Angeles metropolis, the enclave benefits from the wellspring of political clout and resources available to them, whereas Monterey Park may be compelled to lean into overseas investments to compensate for budget shortages. At the same time, they are limited in their ability to outcompete large-scale developers or overcome political resistance from affluent neighboring communities as a result of their political fragmentation.
Less constrained by such political obstacles, majority Chinese city councils have been able to negotiate and advance hotel developments and large-scale commercial projects, including Atlantic Square and Monterey Park Marketplace, particularly during periods of economic expansion. However, as the suburban hub of an expanding ethnic community, Monterey Park has evolved in regional competition with neighboring municipalities–some with highly mobilized residents and stricter land-use regulations, such as Alhambra, and others with fewer regulatory constraints, such as Arcadia.
Across both cases, the case studies demonstrate how immigrant growth machines are driven by a multi-level field of place entrepreneurs whose interests blend ethno-territorial attachment with pragmatic strategies for capital accumulation. These actors operate at multiple spatial and organizational scales, ranging from locally rooted small business owners with deep ties to neighborhood institutions and everyday community life to large, capital-intensive firms whose expanding portfolios orient their investments toward regional and transnational markets. While smaller entrepreneurs often mobilize ethnic identity and community embeddedness to secure local legitimacy and political access, larger firms leverage financial resources, professionalized networks, and political connections to shape development agendas across municipal boundaries. Together, these actors produce growth coalitions that are neither purely ethnic nor purely economic, but instead reflect hybrid formations in which cultural values, ethno-territorial claims, and class position are intertwined. The result is a regionally scaled immigrant growth machine in which local place-making and large-scale capital accumulation coexist, compete, and mutually reinforce one another.
The scope of this article is limited to the ways in which established ethnic place entrepreneurs of all scales mobilize capital and political relations within city governance. However, future research may also reflect on the political impact (or absence) of other community stakeholders–such as tenants, laborers, and slow-growth advocates–especially given that even immigrant populations are organized hierarchically and can diverge significantly on issues of growth (
Chung, 2007). With demographic and generational turnover, political opportunities can both open up and close for different waves of leadership. New studies are interrogating if and under what conditions, these growth projects have been met with resistance or demands for inclusion by labor groups, tenant coalitions, and other racial minorities (
Chung & Lin, forthcoming;
Saito, 2022). Ultimately, the variable impact of gentrification and its accompanying social problems reminds us that urban growth is not a neutral process, but one that redistributes both opportunity and displacement unevenly across communities.
Notes
Table 1.Proxy Indicators of Political Incorporation (2010)
Table 1.
|
Variable |
Koreans in Koreatown |
Chinese in Monterey Park |
|
Not a citizen (%) |
49.1 |
22.5 |
|
Naturalized (%) |
34.5 |
53.0 |
|
Self-employed (%) |
17.7 |
9.8 |
|
Bilingual (%) |
22.8 |
26.2 |
|
Mean years in the US |
12.8 |
14.5 |
|
Median HH income ($) |
43,457 |
58,742 |
|
First generation (%) |
80.3 |
78.6 |
|
1.5 generation (%) |
17.8 |
20.4 |
|
2nd generation+ (%) |
1.9 |
1.0 |
Table 2.Key Characteristics of the Auxiliary and Autonomous Growth Machines in Koreatown and Monterey Park
Table 2.
|
Characteristics |
Koreatown (Auxiliary) |
Monterey Park (Autonomous) |
|
Demographic traits |
Transient, mixed-status population from Korean |
Stable, predominantly middle-class residents |
|
Spatial scale of ethnic enclave |
Composed of four council districts out of fifteen subsumed under the centralized metropolitan governance (City of LA) |
Small independent Chinese-led suburban government with its own city council and mayor |
|
Governance structure |
Limited electoral representation of Koreans in office |
Strong electoral leverage among Chinese Americans with city council and mayor |
|
Brokerage structures |
Underdeveloped cultural and political brokerage networks |
Highly institutionalized brokers (business associations, investment networks) |
|
Institutional density |
Strong ethnic institutions and neighborhood associations |
Limited ethnic civic organizations and weaker neighborhood-level advocacy |
|
Regulatory environment |
Moderate growth regulations with weak enforcement |
Strict growth regulations shaped by ethnic succession in leadership |
|
Regional relationships |
Relatively low inter-suburban or inter-urban competition |
Strong competition and occasional cooperation with nearby Chinese-majority suburbs |
|
Pro-growth coalitions |
Small group of pro-growth elites with City of LA connections |
Decentralized, flexible coalition of autonomous growth machines throughout San Gabriel Valley |
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