Community development and Historic Preservation: Exploring intersections in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District

Urban neighbourhoods are home to complex social interactions, cultural traditions and historic built environments that have accrued over time. Many community development corporations (CDCs) in the United States work in older, inner-city neighbourhoods, setting the stage for a possible alliance with historic preservation. This paper explores the intersection of community development and historic preservation, asking: In high-growth contexts, how do community developers working in neighbourhoods with strong cultural and ethnic identity use historic preservation? What are their motivations? And, how do they define, use, and/or adapt preservation to address the needs of their target communities? The article chronicles the Seattle Chinatown-International District Preservation Development Authority’s (SCIDpda) efforts to reverse neighbourhood decline while preserving the International District’s significant history, fostering its continued future as a Pan-Asian community, overcoming persistent barriers to development, and mitigating high growth pressures. The findings show that for community developers, preservation can serve as an oppositional strategy to demolition and incompatible new development, helping to attract outside financial resources, and providing a means to assert local symbolic ownership over neighbourhood space.