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626: The Rise of an Asian American Suburb and the Future of Housing and Place in America

This project explores the physical and social changes caused by demographic transition in western San Gabriel Valley — a suburban region east of Downtown Los Angeles — since the late 1970’s. During that time, what was once a string of overwhelmingly white suburbs transformed into one of the largest Asian American enclaves in the continental US. This dramatic transformation has had profound effects on the area’s built environment, including significant increases in density, reconstruction of the existing housing stock, and the proliferation of Asian American businesses and growth of commercial development. Much of the existing literature on the area has focused on the racial aspect of the San Gabriel Valley’s transformation, and used racial conflict as the lens of understanding the tensions between existing and new residents during this period. Using a combination of census and property tax data, archival research of local newspapers, and examination of the built environment, I seek to augment that narrative with a focus on issues of development and growth. Much of the changes that occurred in the region — and consequent backlash — often mirror patterns of increased density and tear-downs of older single-family homes found in other metropolitan areas in America that have experienced influxes of new residents in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To this end, I posit that conflicts around the built environment is a primary cause of tensions in the area, which has significant implications for similar ongoing trends of development elsewhere in the United States.