Immigrant Place Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, 1970-99

The literature about residential settlement patterns gives little or no attention to the supply side of the picture ofhousing access and neighborhood formation.However, outside this literature, the Logan and Molotch theory of the "urban growth machine" offers the best explanation of how urbanization proceeds in the U.S.There is evidence that immigrants join urban growth machines as realtors, as opposed to developers. The example of Los Angeles and the role of the Koreatown Development Association is reviewed, and theories supporting the collapse of the growth machine in 1980 (Fulton and Purcell) are refuted. Growth machines have become multi-ethnic in Los Angeles through steady growth of ethnic business, especially Asian American ventures. Between 1970 and 1999, Chinese and Korean immigrant entrepreneurs changed the morphology of Los Angeles, building new communities for fellow immigrant customers, creating and preparing new residential neighborhoods for the new immigrants, and supporting LA's property values. While American-Korean settlements still lack a central cluster, compared with their Chinese counterpart, L.A. was the only American city to develop a Koreatown (in 1980), ten years after the emergence of Chinatown. Asian immigrant place entrepreneurs have attracted co-ethnic immigrants from Asian homelands, thus influencing LA's urban development in innovative ways, increasing the status level of LA's metropolitan area. Thus, immigrant 'place entrepreneurs' create choice contexts by conscious entrepreneurial initiative.(CBS)