Josh Ishimatsu
Josh Ishimatsu is deputy director of capacity building and research for National CAPACD.
“Welcome to Little Tokyo, Please Take Off Your Shoes:” Remembering Dean Matsubayashi
Sustained resistance to gentrification and displacement requires more than antagonism. It requires a community organized around an open, positive alternative vision that has both big ambitions and achievable, intermediary steps.
Interview with Gordon Chin, Founding Executive Director of the Chinatown Community Development Center
Gordon Chin started San Francisco Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), a longstanding CDC well-known in the field, in the mid-1970s. In June 2015, he released Building Community, Chinatown Style, a book about his professional life, the founding and evolution of CCDC, and the future of community development. Josh Ishimatsu, director of Research and Capacity Building at the National Coalition for Asian-Pacific American Community Development, and a regular Shelterforce contributor, spoke with Chin about where community development is going, and where it should go.
Gentrification and the “Slums of Beverly Hills”
In 1998, when Slums of Beverly Hills was released, I lived in West Los Angeles, relatively near (in LA...
Gentrification Is More Widespread Than We Think
In Miriam Axel-Lute’s recent post here, “Place Matters But Place Changes,” she references “a study done by Governing magazine that found a 20 percent...
Community Development and Hot Markets
At the People and Places Conference earlier this month, we organized a mini-track around “Community Control and Hot Markets.”...
Punctuated Equilibrium and Racial Justice
“Ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. The drama of such events, combined with the disorder that results, […]
Asian Americans Key in Virginia Senate Race?
When I drafted this post, incumbent Virginia Senator Mark Warner held a narrow margin of victory over challenger Ed Gillespie (Warner has since declared victory, and Gillespie officially conceded). The race was bitterly contested, and the results are notable in that Asian Americans–with growing populations in Northern Virginia–were very likely determinative in Warner’s victory. UC […]
Election Polling, Big Data, and Movement Building
There is a data geek Internet flame war going on between Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com over 2014 election projections. Evidence of the confrontation can be found here, here, and here. My research interests (such as they are) tend more toward demographic analysis, and I am far from […]
The Real Problem with the Model Minority Myth
There is a Time article—“The Real Problem When It Comes to Diversity and Asian-Americans“—that has been making the rounds on the Internet. As a card-carrying member of the Model Minority Myth Busters club, I am sympathetic with author Jack Linshi’s piece in that it seeks to discredit model minority mythology. However, there are a couple […]
Ferguson and Reparations
Shortly after the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the bill enacting redress and reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans, there was an editorial cartoon in my local newspaper. There were two Native Americans. One was reading a newspaper. The newspaper had a headline that read “Japanese Americans to get $20,000 each.” […]
Asian-American Poverty Higher than You Think, And Growing
The US Census recently released American Community Survey (ACS) numbers for 2013. My narrow, first and foremost task with these new numbers is to look at poverty numbers. The growth in numbers of people in poverty is slowing—possibly a sign that the economic recovery is finally trickling (albeit a tiny trickle) down to poor people. […]
Ferguson, Sanford and the Persistence of Violent Racism
“Wonder when I’ll find paradise // Somewhere there’s a home sweet and nice” –WAR, The World is a...
The False Choice Between Mobility and Community Development
What is it about community development that it constantly seems to be posited in a binary set of choices that...
Toward a Politics of Love: Thoughts for Pride Month
During the closing plenary of our recent National Convention, Alex Tom from the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), when talking about...
Activists Have Long Known That Donald Sterling Is Racist
I am a huge sports fan and I grew up in and currently live in the San Francisco Bay...
This Is How We Should Measure Our Work (And Achieve Economic Justice)
This is Part 6 in a series about the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Click here for...
Embracing Affirmative Action, Imperfections And All
In a piece on my personal blog, I referenced a bigger politics of social and economic justice vs. a...
How Exactly Does One Measure Economic Justice?
This is Part 5 in a series about the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Click here for...
The Myths About Poverty are Keeping People Poor
This is Part 4 of a series about the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Click here for...
When We Debate Poverty, What Are We Really Arguing About?
This is Part 3 in a series about the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Click here for ...