The number of Asian residents in Manhattan’s Chinatown dropped by over 20% in the past decade despite an increase in the neighborhood’s overall population, according to a recent report published by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Experts on the history of Chinatown and community advocates said the demographic shift is a predictable result of gentrification, as boba shops and hot pot restaurants catering to a broader clientele replaced more affordable eateries that sustained working-class Asian American immigrants in the neighborhood.

The report also argues that luxury developments in the area have helped drive a comparatively sharp increase in rents, making Chinatown less accessible for a new generation of lower- and middle-income Asian Americans and new immigrants.

The decrease in Asian residents represents a symptom of the affordability crisis, said John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian at Rutgers University who was not involved in the report but has studied the history of the Asian immigrants in the city.

“It’s very easy to represent Asians and Chinese as somehow this middle-class success story,” Tchen said. “The hidden dimension is the poverty.”

According to a Gothamist analysis of city data, the community district containing Chinatown and the Lower East Side has about 5% fewer residents receiving federal food benefits now than it did in 2018, indicating a departure of lower-income residents.

That makes Chinatown’s community district a rarity in the city. Overall, 80% of community districts have seen increases in the number of SNAP recipients since 2018.

And while rents in Chinatown have not increased as much as they have in other parts of the city — 5% compared to 25% citywide — they have far outpaced any recent gains in income for neighborhood residents. Incomes in Chinatown only rose 2% over the past decade, making it harder for tenants to pay for higher housing costs. Whereas incomes increased by 19% citywide.

The changing financial picture has come with a shift in demographics.

According to the report, Chinatown was home to 52,000 Asian or Pacific Island residents in 2010. By 2022, the U.S. Census estimated that the number had dropped to 41,000. Over that same period, the number of white residents in Chinatown increased from 23,000 to 31,000.

But Manhattan’s Chinese enclave has fared better compared to the other Chinatowns studied in the report. The median rent increased by 55% in Boston’s Chinatown and by 47% Philadelphia’s Chinatown within the same years.

Annie Lo, one of the report’s co-authors and a staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, credited New York City’s rent regulation laws for the stark difference. But she said newer luxury developments around the neighborhood in Manhattan are exponentially higher than the area’s median rent, even for supposedly affordable units.

“We’ve continued to see an influx of new development that’s raising the cost of living,” Lo said. “Chinatown is no longer affordable.”

According to Lo and her coauthors, the affordability crisis in Manhattan’s Chinatown is being exacerbated by new luxury developments in the Two Bridges neighborhood, which extends from the edge of Chinatown to the waterfront.

While controversial developments like the high-rise residential tower known as One Manhattan Square are incentivized through property tax abatements to include affordable units, those apartments are still too expensive for residents in the surrounding neighborhoods, Lo and her coauthors wrote.

“You're not only displacing the community that was here, but you're making it so no other working-class person can move into the community,” said City Councilmember Christopher Marte, who represents Chinatown.

He said more comprehensive rezoning is necessary to require developers to determine rent for affordable housing based on the neighborhood’s median income.

The rezoning plan endorsed by Marte and a coalition known as the Chinatown Working Group seeks to limit the height of new buildings. He criticized the outgoing Adams administration for, in his view, shifting its attention away from the neighborhood’s specific needs in favor of a broader citywide rezoning effort.

In an emailed statement, City Hall spokesperson Daniel Marans said the Adams administration worked to increase affordability by building more housing. He said that “any neighborhood rezoning must prioritize removing barriers to the construction of new homes, including permanently affordable housing.”

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment about rising rents and the demographic shift in Chinatown. But Tchen said he is optimistic about the new administration’s focus on affordability.

“Affordability is right on target,” said Tchen. “Poor folks around the city need to have some hedge against precarity.”