Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2019: Many in Chinatown have never tried its most popular restaurant, so I brought the food to them
Howlin’ Ray’s and other businesses reach a specific, moneyed clientele through smartphones and social media. Their popularity becomes an asset to property developers, who build more projects serving that clientele. City leaders take campaign contributions from those developers, then enact zone changes, waive requirements for environmental impact reports and allocate public funds for transit, parks and bike shares. That attracts richer residents, which makes real estate more valuable and rents more expensive.
That process doesn’t just change a neighborhood — it creates a newer, more affluent neighborhood that sits on top of the old one, making it harder for it to exist.
And it all happens because we want to eat good food and get likes on our social media posts; because food writers need readers; because chefs rent the only places they can afford; because property owners and developers want to maximize their investments; because politicians want to spur economic development and get reelected.
It’s a situation where focusing on the innocence or guilt of individual decisions obscures the inequality that the overall system creates. And the end result is often not something that anyone wants.
