With all that’s happening in the world, you’d think young people would find something to protest besides a commercial landlord and a museum about the Chinese diaspora.
A group called Youth Against Displacement is trying to make a villain out of Jonathan Chu — a third-generation member of a Chinatown real estate family that exemplifies the immigrant success story — and the Museum of Chinese in America.
YAD’s anonymous members and other activists spend 12 hours a week outside the museum, known as MOCA, yelling at visitors and their children. YAD’s slick Instagram posts, a mix of propaganda and outright falsehoods, are racking up tens of thousands of likes.
Chu and the museum are not their only targets. Their videos also slam YIMBYs, rezoning, congestion pricing and an affordable housing project for seniors. One depicted former Council member Margaret Chin as Godzilla and called her “Chinzilla,” which seems racist even if many of the activists are also Asian.
In an apparent quest to preserve Chinatown exactly as it is, Youth Against Displacement members blast landlords and politicians for any past or potential change. It is unclear what they hope to accomplish by attacking Chu, whose family has been in the neighborhood for half a century.
“Bad landlord Jonathan Chu’s destruction of Chinatown goes beyond evicting the big Jing Fong restaurant and supporting a new mega-jail,” one post begins.
Literally everything in that sentence is false.
The Jing Fong fiction
Jing Fong wasn’t evicted. The dim sum restaurant, an institution in Chinatown owned by Truman Lam and his father, shut down on March 10, 2020, when the governor banned large gatherings.
But even prior to Covid, Lam had closed Jing Fong on weekdays for lack of business. A month before coronavirus was detected in New York, Lam had counted 36 customers in his 794-person dining room. “I had more staff there than customers that day,” he told Eater.
That spring the Lams stopped paying rent and asked out of their lease for 16,000 square feet at Chu Enterprises’ 20 Elizabeth Street. Chu agreed.
If Youth Against Displacement knew the first thing about commercial real estate, it would recognize this as a gracious act by the landlord, which was entitled to full rent through the remaining years of the lease — something many owners demanded of retail tenants during the pandemic.
Instead of playing hardball, Chu, the managing director of Chu Enterprises since 2013, heeded his father’s mantra — “You come in peace, you go in peace.” He likely also recognized that the restaurant could not survive where it had once thrived.
Jing Fong moved to a smaller space at 202 Centre Street, the heart of Chinatown. It reopened in 2021 and is doing a brisk business. Its owners have no interest in returning to 20 Elizabeth Street.
Still, former Jing Fong workers, YAD members and other activist groups, all based at 345 Grand Street, began protesting — not against the Lam family, but against Chu. They demanded the landlord move Jing Fong back to its former home, and portrayed the episode as union-busting because the restaurant workers belonged to the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association.
But Chu was never their employer, the CSWA is not a union, and Chu doesn’t appear to be anti-labor: He and his sister opened a unionized hotel in 2017 at 50 Bowery, working with an actual union — the Hotel Trades Council and its leaders, Peter Ward and Rich Maroko.
After four years of vacancy and extensive renovations, Chu filled the void left by the restaurant with the third-generation Swiss family business Vitra, which a Youth Against Displacement video sneers is a “high-end luxury furniture giant.”
This, it seems, is what YAD means by the “destruction of Chinatown.” Its videos, narrated by unidentified young adults, spin a story about Chu forcing out a traditional restaurant in a dastardly plan to bring in a fancy store — part of a grand design to gentrify the neighborhood for profit.
Chu has tried to get Chin’s successor, Council member Christopher Marte, to get the activists to stop lying about his family. But Marte has been unsympathetic; his chief of staff, Caitlin Kelmar, is a regular at MOCA protests and has been a member of Youth Against Displacement since she was an NYU student in 2018.
Kelmar declined to answer questions from The Real Deal about YAD’s campaign, as did the group itself. “We’re looking forward to the article,” it emailed in response to a lengthy query.
Marte last met with Chu and his mother in March 2022, when he offered to arrange a meeting between Chu and the former restaurant workers of his former tenant. Chu didn’t see the point, and declined.
Marte has been avoiding him ever since. His spokesperson told TRD, “Chu Enterprises and the Council member have fundamentally different visions for Chinatown’s future. The most recent example is the replacement of the large Jing Fong banquet hall by Vitra’s luxury furniture showroom.”
According to Chu, no restaurateur with any hope of making the expansive, second-floor space work expressed interest in it. But Vitra has reactivated it, hosting events that bring desperately needed foot traffic to Chinatown.
Long history in Chinatown
YAD’s videos omit that Chu’s grandfather Joseph and father Alexander assembled their portfolio over half a century. Chu grew up having family dinners at Jing Fong, only to be unjustly demonized for its relocation.
But that’s not all that YAD accuses him of: One young woman in a YAD video declares that by “colluding with the city” on the Soho-Noho rezoning, which includes Chu properties at 235 Canal Street and 183 Centre Street, “his wealth has increased by hundreds of millions of dollars.”
It is a fantastical number, spun out of whole cloth and entirely divorced from reality.
Chu had nothing to do with the rezoning, which passed in 2021, and doesn’t appear to have made a dime from it.
If the rezoning were a devious plot by speculators, it sure took the Chu family a while to pull it off: The properties cited in the video had been in the Chu family for four or five decades.
Alexander Chu obtained a right of first refusal for the Centre Street property in 1989 and bought it in 1994. He bought 235 Canal Street in 1987. His father Joseph Chu bought 221 Canal Street in 1975. The three buildings’ mortgages, which total $61 million, predate the rezoning by an average of four years.
Museum scapegoated for jail project
As for the “new mega-jail,” Chu never supported the city’s plans for a 40-story, mixed-use tower on the site of the jail known as the Tombs. Few if any Lower Manhattan owners did.
The Tombs, at 125 White Street, did not prevent Chinatown from thriving. Still, any jail project scares people, even if the only effect on the neighborhood is more lawyers, correction officers and others patronizing local restaurants.
So when the de Blasio administration sought City Council approval for new jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx to replace the notorious Rikers Island, local Council member Margaret Chin and her counterparts in the other boroughs did what any smart politician would: negotiated for community benefits.
High on Chin’s list was city funding for MOCA to buy its building. Its rent was $600,000 a year and rising — an existential threat for a young museum with a $2.8 million budget.
At a December 2018 meeting to discuss the jail plan and what benefits Chinatown should seek if it came to pass, then-Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer asked MOCA’s president, “Don’t you need money to buy your building?”
“We do,” Nancy Yao Maasbach replied.
“How much do you need?” Brewer asked.
“We would like from the city $32 million,” said Maasbach.
Chin secured $35 million — part of an extensive package of goodies for the four boroughs getting new jails — and the museum got the protection from displacement it had long sought. This is how the ironically named Youth Against Displacement came to accuse Chu, who was co-chair of the museum’s board, of selling out Chinatown.
Never mind that MOCA was applying for city capital grants well before the jail plan — which it opposed — ever surfaced (those grants were folded into the $35 million). Or that community funding like the de Blasio administration provided was standard procedure in New York City politics.
Indeed, in 1982, long before Youth Against Displacement members were born, the city had also extended local benefits, including new housing for low-income seniors, as part of the Tombs’ expansion.
For whatever reason, YAD has selectively woven bits and pieces from these events into a fictional narrative that Jonathan Chu is a union-busting, restaurant-evicting speculator who conspired with City Hall to build a mega-jail as part of his sinister scheme to gentrify Chinatown.
If you think that commercial owners typically wait 40 or 50 years to execute their expansion plans, and that gentrifiers flock to neighborhoods with jails, and that landlords can force money-losing restaurants to remain in 800-seat spaces, it all makes sense. Doesn’t it?