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How housing justice in New York’s Chinatown connects to broader abolitionist struggles for community safety, collective wellness, and the possibility of living otherwise
From youth organizing out of the oldest porcelain store in Chinatown, to working-class tenants taking their predatory landlords to housing court, to artist collectives reclaiming public space through outdoor projection art, You Can’t Evict a Movement explores the visionary possibilities of housing justice activism in New York City.
Drawing on ethnography, participatory mapping, and oral history interviews with tenants, organizers, artists, sex workers, mutual aid practitioners, and young people, Diane Wong reveals how Chinatown has become one of Manhattan’s last working-class neighborhoods and a battleground for gentrification—a fight that determines who has the right to shape the future of the city.
Through what she calls interstitial politics, Wong shows how transformative change takes root in the crevices of daily life—in streets and storefronts, hallways and staircases, massage parlors and kitchen tables. Housing becomes a catalyzing issue that connects to broader abolitionist struggles for community safety, collective wellness, and the possibility of living otherwise.
Ultimately, You Can’t Evict a Movement is about emplacement as much as displacement—a testimony to how the most transformative changes in cities are forged from the ground up through insurgency, creativity, and the fundamental belief that an alternative future is not only possible but that ordinary people are already building that vision.
"Amidst the accelerating violence of global racial capitalism comes this brilliant and beautiful book from Diane Wong, one that is written with a commitment to abolition as place-making and housing justice as community infrastructures of care. It serves as both an archive of struggle and a guide for world-making rebellion."
"Diane Wong has woven together a magnificent homage to the intergenerational movement for housing justice oriented around Manhattan’s Chinatown. Beautifully written and profoundly instructive, Wong teaches us how racial capitalism, settler colonialism, predatory finance, and artwashing are each vital to understanding what Wong calls the ‘interstitial politics’ that combat gentrification."
"Diane Wong has given us a vital history of gentrification in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the work of grassroots activists, organizers, artists, and shopkeepers in creating the neighborhood they want to live and work in. A must read if you want to understand the dynamics of housing, community organizing, and Asian American activism for abolitionist futures."
"Amid federal-level repression, an affordability crisis, and an increasingly frayed social fabric, how do communities remake their cities for everyone? Wong tackles this question through a deep dive into Manhattan’s Chinatown and the political economic forces that made the neighborhood what it is today. Wong shows how those who make our cities great have been building new ways of doing politics all along."