Though she’s lived in the Museum Square building for over 20 years, Lin Yong Ru says it’s obvious she’s being forced out of her home.
“The landlord of our building is not friendly to the residents, they frequently ask us to move out,” she said at a recent town hall with other Chinatown residents.
Ru is just one of 70 remaining residents at Museum Square, a 302 unit apartment building located at 401 K St. NW in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood. For years, the building has been at the center of a battle between tenants, fighting against their own displacement, and their Virginia-based landlord Bush Companies. Museum Square is an emblem of a much larger debate — one about which communities should be included in the city’s plan for the economic revitalization of D.C.’s Chinatown.
In the last year, the remaining residents of Museum Square say they have faced increasingly difficult conditions, yet they are determined to stay. The building where many have lived for decades provides a vital and caring community that helps residents, many of whom are immigrants, navigate life in the United States.
“The reason we choose to be in Chinatown is because we have the language barrier. It is difficult for us to communicate with mainstream society,” Jenny Zhou, another resident, said at the same town hall.
In the 1970s, nearly 3,000 Chinese residents called D.C. Chinatown home. As of the latest census only 361 Chinese residents live in the neighborhood. The majority live at two locations: Wah Luck house, an affordable housing complex on 6th Street, and Museum Square.
Before 2014, Museum Square was part of the federal Section 8 program, where low-income residents pay 30% of their income in rent and the federal government makes up the difference. This program ensured Museum Square was affordable for its residents — the majority of whom are Chinese, according to residents and organizers.
In 2014, Bush Companies announced it would not renew its Section 8 contract and instead would try to demolish the complex in order to construct 13 stories of market-rate condos, four levels of parking, and 17,000 feet of retail space.
Tenants rallied to save their building by using the Tenant’s Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), a law that theoretically guarantees tenants the first chance to purchase their homes when a building goes up for sale. But Bush Companies offered to sell Museum Square for a whopping $250 million — more than $800,000 a unit — a price the residents couldn’t pay. At the time, the building was appraised of a value of just $36 million, according to Washington City Paper.
In response to the inflated offer, the tenants took Bush Companies to court in 2016, arguing the price offered by Bush was not considered what TOPA defines as a “bona fide” offer, and won. Since then, the number of tenants at Museum Square has steadily declined as Bush Companies refuses to sell to a development partner the residents have picked to help them buy the building, and instead seems to be waiting the mainly elderly residents out, according to Cassie He, an organizer with the Save Chinatown Solidarity network.
“The landlord wants to push residents out of the building, and the way they have been doing that is by not being super responsive to tenant needs,” He said in an interview with Street Sense.
Multiple elevators in the nine-story-tall building are broken, posing health and safety concerns for the building’s mainly elderly residents, according to He. At the beginning of the summer, Bush Companies refused to turn the air conditioning on until the mandatory switch-on date of May 15, leading to temperatures as high as 86 degrees at night. This prevented sick and elderly residents from being able to sleep, according to court records.
Finding recourse has been difficult, according to Nashrah Ahmed, the attorney who represents the Museum Square tenants. She feels as though the tenants have run through most of the resources that exist, and pointed to past and ongoing cases in housing conditions court, which have yet to compel Bush Companies to repair the elevators or address other issues. Bush Companies did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
In Ahmed’s eyes, the limbo the tenants find themselves in currently is indicative of structural issues with TOPA — namely that the law doesn’t account for cases like this one where the landlord refuses to sell at a reasonable price and instead seems to be hoping enough tenants move out.
“The Museum Square tenants, they won their TOPA litigation, but they’re not better than they were before. There is no way to force Bush to sell, and Bush is able to let it fall into disrepair and just wait the tenants out. And so while the tenants may have won their TOPA litigation, where has that brought us in 10 years?” Ahmed said.
Nor has Mayor Muriel Bowser’s announcement of a Gallery Place and Chinatown Task Force earlier this year heralded much positive change for Museum Square.
The taskforce is part of her larger $400 million dollar plan to revitalize downtown D.C. over the next five years, and includes goals like adding 15,000 residents to downtown, creating more affordable housing, and prioritizing minority owned businesses. The taskforce’s vision for Chinatown aims to honor community and serve the neighborhood by preserving local businesses and adding new boutiques.
However, Museum Square falls just outside the blocks the task force is supposed to focus on, and there’s no representation of Museum Square residents on the task force. This exclusion is frustrating for those like He, who are advocating for Museum Square.
“The boundaries for Chinatown don’t even include Museum Square, in fact there is a broader over representation of Gallery Place,” He said. “Museum Square is consistently left out and the folks who live there are working class, immigrants, and people of color.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) wrote in an email to Street Sense the taskforce was initially conceived in the wake of the announcement that the Capitals and Wizards might be leaving the Capitol One Arena site, and its main focus was to “reimagine how the Capital One Arena site and the surrounding blocks could be improved and transformed to ensure a vibrant and active downtown for years to come.”
The spokesperson added that while “Museum Square is not within the Task Force’s immediate boundaries, it remains an important focus of community engagement” for DMPED and the Office on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs.
Still, the frustration for residents and organizers remains, and they have channeled it into action. The Save Chinatown Solidarity network has been working to amplify the needs, demands, and ideas of Museum Square residents they say would revitalize the neighborhood in ways that center community.
This includes arguing against a proposed nine-story development project that would displace two small Chinese businesses in the neighborhood and for the creation of a locally owned Chinese grocery store. Currently, Chinatown only has a corner store which sorely lacks produce and other important items, meaning residents of both Museum Square and the Wah Luck house must travel as far as Virginia to find grocery stores that are culturally appropriate.
He said organizers and residents are looking to bring in an independently and locally owned business, not a chain Asian grocery store, to preserve language access and to center and grow the community.
“There is so much demand for a grocery store like this, everyone we’ve talked to would be so excited,” He said. In addition to the grocery store, the Save Chinatown Solidarity network hopes that the city will take steps to hold Bush Companies accountable and ensure everyone has access to affordable housing in the reimagined downtown. For organizers, like He, a revitalized Chinatown means first and foremost addressing the displacement of the neighborhood’s longtime residents.
“What does it actually mean to have a Chinatown without Chinese residents or small businesses?” He asked. “What does it mean to revitalize the area without taking into consideration the people who have been living there for decades and decades?
Andrea Ho contributed reporting.
