Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED)

This holiday season, we’re encouraging everyone to shop small and support the legacy, community-serving small businesses of Chinatown! We’re back with a holiday bingo for folks to stock up on their favorite gifts, foods, and more! From December 10-30, we’re going to continue to show Chinatown love while playing a fun game of bingo for the holidays come join us! 1 Spend a day (or two or three!) in the neighborhood for all of your favs: delicious food, desserts and d...rinks, clothes and accessories, gifts, and plants use our list of legacy and community-serving small biz: bit.ly/supportct 2 Fill out our virtual Bingo! board (completing any 3 across the board -- horizontal, diagonal, vertical -- is a winner!) Note: Free Space = Freestyle option/fulfill a category of your choice 3 Share with us pictures and videos of how you’ve supported the community by tagging @ccedla and #SupportLAChinatown or DMing us Get bingo! We’ll send you a super short form to fill out and mail you a postcard and surprise *sticker* to show our appreciation. Remember to wear a mask, bring cash, and tip generously! #SupportLAChinatown Tips: Remember to download our bingo board story template in our bio or reshare our bingo post and tag us @ccedla so we can see your posts! Continue using our IG story templates to share and recommend your favorite small biz! Check out our Small Biz List and interactive Virtual Map with status updates (who’s currently open, who delivers) and Google Maps navigation! Links in our bio. Small Biz List: bit.ly/supportct / Virtual Map: bit.ly/ccedmap - use the sidebar to filter by category and status Graphics: M. Chi

TODAY, LA City Council will discuss whether to use $45M CARES fund to purchase Hillside Villa. The city needs to act quickly and urgently to support the 124 families in Hillside Villa who are deeply impacted by the pandemic. Let’s make HSV permanently affordable and set a precedent for keeping housing in community hands. Please leave a comment RIGHT NOW at lacouncilcomment.com to support HSV Item #60... Council File:20-0148-S1 Call in at 10AM: 1-669-254-5252 Meeting ID: 160-535-8466 (City had changed the meeting ID) Toolkit: http://bit.ly/hsvcares

Hillside Villa tenant leaders speak about their recent struggle with Covid 19 and the Eminent Domain. Particularly folks addressed how the pandemic has made their survival even more difficult and how the city should not be pitting them against their houseless neighbors and see our fight as being interconnected. $45million is a lot cheaper and faster than building new "affordable housing." Preventing homelessness IS COVID protection. CARES ACT NOW!

To throw away MILLIONS of dollars in CARES Act funds or to help 124 low-income families stay housed during a deadly pandemic? One of the easiest, most obvious decisions the city can make, and they’re still fumbling. The city will lose the $45M left in CARES Act funding if they don’t use it by the end of this year 12/31. Currently there are NO other plans to spend this money.... $45M is less than... LAPD’s weekly budget a proposed gondola for Dodger stadium that would fly across Chinatown and the many many tax breaks given to super luxury developers (that our mayor and city council members seem to love) At only $360k/unit, purchasing Hillside Villa @hillsidevilla_ in Chinatown makes good fiscal sense! This Tuesday 12/8, LA City Council will discuss whether to use $45M CARES fund to purchase HSV. Let’s make HSV permanently affordable and set a precedent for keeping housing in community hands. Make your public comment! Call 10AM: 1-669-254-5252 Meeting ID: 160-535-8466 (City had changed the meeting ID) Toolkit: http://bit.ly/hsvcares Swipe through for more info and some quality meme content @latenants #housingisahumanright #foodnotrent #cancelrent #eminentdomainnow #hillsidevillacares

What type of world do you want to live in? For us, this world is a just and equitable one one where there is justice, liberation, and joy for communities historically harmed by systems rooted in violence and white supremacy. Our Black and Indigenous communities, people of color, immigrants, queer and trans folks, working class and poor folks. It’s a world where housing is decommodified. Communities not predatory landlords or corporate developers steward the land and d...rive how neighborhoods shape. It’s a world where quality healthcare is universal, education and spaces are public and truly accessible, and resources are tailored to communities, their needs, their languages, and their cultures. It’s a world where we center people’s livelihoods and the well-being of the earth rather than profits. We hope you join us and so many other grassroots organizations and collectives in reimagining what’s possible and fighting to make those things a reality. Graphic by Cynthia Yuan Cheng for the UCLA Urban Planning Community Collaborative 2020: Disrupting Speculation, Defending Communities

We are excited to announce our first-ever E-Shop, where you can support CCED by purchasing some of our merch and art online, made possible by our community artists and volunteers! At our annual in-person fundraiser, we usually have a table where you can stop by to take home a poster and buttons. This year, we are setting up an E-Shop for that! We currently have stock of our 2020 Anniversary Poster, our Bingo Sticker Pack (Lucky Fish, Boba, Dim Sum), our acrylic Chinatown Ramb...utan Keychain, and more! We will be dropping more items and stocking more as we grow our small storefront. Feel free to comment what you would like to see, and keep an eye out for updates! Check out our store at: bit.ly/ccedstore Support us and help us reach our $50,000 fundraising goal! Your donation will support us in continuing to organize our tenants, providing meals and groceries to tenants in need, supporting an eviction defense fund, and funding our lawsuits against Atlas Capital alongside other legal fees. Head over to the link in our bio!! Graphic: M.Chi

Check out this piece on Hillside Villa Tenants Association on and their fight for the city to use eminent domain to keep families in their homes! Hillside Villa leaders continued to push through and demand accountability from Councilmember Gilbert Cedillo in preserving affordability in our community. The motion to use CARES ACT is an important step forward since so many tenants are deeply impacted by the pandemic. But the fight is far from over. City Hall has a history of q...uickly give away big $$ to developers, hotels, and corporations, but much more reserved in preserving affordable units. Let’s hold them accountable every step of the way! LA can EASILY purchase Hillside Villa and it’s a way better use of funds than a ~GoNdOLa~ that will cost $10/trip. DEFUND THE POLICE. KEEP FAMILIES HOUSED. HOUSING IS A RACIAL JUSTICE ISSUE!

CCED proudly supports YES on Measure J! Measure J is a ballot measure that would amend the L.A. County Charter to require at least 10% of locally controlled revenue (about a billion dollars) to be invested into (1) local communities and (2) alternatives to incarceration. Building to defund police and BID, providing mutual aid and support to low-income community members, fighting against gentrification, and demanding racial justice are interconnected and crucial to CCED’s figh...t. Demanding accountability from those in power, to invest back into the community, and end mass incarceration, is the future we want. Measure J’s impact on our community will look like Direct community investment is broken down into: community-based youth development programs job-training and job creation specifically for low-income LA residents access to capital for ‘minority-owned businesses’ with an emphasis on Black-owned businesses rent assistance/housing vouchers for housing-insecure residents capital funding for transitional housing, affordable housing, supportive housing, restorative care villages Alternatives to incarceration are outlined as: community-based restorative justice programs pre-trial non-custody services and treatment community-based health services + mental health and substance use disorder services non-custodial diversion and reentry programs, including housing and services Shoutout to our friends at API Equality-LA for their toolkit and graphics!

Thank you to Off Their Plate for providing 1,020 meals these past 3 weeks from Northern Cafe and Kobunga. They were able to feed our community AND give our hard...working meal prep volunteers a well deserved break. Special thanks to the volunteers who came through to deliver on the holiday week to make sure we didn’t miss a single week of providing meals. See more

Chinatown needs stronger rent control. Yes on 21 would allow the city to pass stronger protection for communities like Hillside Villa, 970 Everett and Metro tenants. https://youtu.be/WySSuZ7bFgI

After an absolute sham of a process, the Chinatown Business Improvement District (BID) was renewed on September 29th, 2020. In order to continue the fight for abolition of the BID, CCED has sent a protest letter to the LA City Council, City Attorney, and City Clerk detailing a myriad of concerns about the renewal process, which was utterly undemocratic and rigged to continue George Yu’s vision of a gentrified and over-policed Chinatown. Check out the full letter here! ... https://www.dropbox.com//RE%20-%20Council%20File%2012-0489 See more

C.A.C.A. Los Angeles will be hosting the Flex Vote Center at the Lodge in L.A. Chinatown TOMORROW, Saturday, October 31. For updates and more info: https://fb.me/e/dPdunfWlb Vote! This is the most important election in our life time! Check out our voting guide at https://www.facebook.com/125652174242389/posts/1809474579193465/?d=n

Check out this vid highlighting CCED’s work this past year! As many of you know, CCED is an all volunteer-run organization that’s building grassroots power to fight for a Chinatown that EVERYONE can thrive in. CCED is made up of young people, elders, tenants, volunteers, and we’ve been organizing tenant associations and lifting up the voices of low income Chinatown residents for 8 years now. Amid multiple crises, CCED continues to show up for the community, in the spirit of ...Continue reading