One snowy winter day, after standing at his restaurant job washing dishes, Jinlong Chen came home to the apartment that he and his wife shared with several other families on Beach Street in Bostons Chinatown. He opened the door to their room to find water and debris everywhere. Part of the ceiling had collapsed.

Chen notified his landlord. The landlord told him to move out. Back then, I didnt know my rights as a tenant, Chen, 66, says in Mandarin through an interpreter. I avoided that part of the ceiling. I moved the bed to the other side of the room. A few months later, with the ceiling still gaping, Chen and his wife moved.

Landlords neglecting their buildings and harassing tenants in order to get them to leave have become a common story in Chinatowns across the country as these traditionally working-class immigrant neighborhoods become gentrified.

A study of the three largest Chinatowns on the East Coast Boston, New York, and Philadelphia by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund found that Chinatowns are losing their Asian residents as the white population grows. Asians now account for less than half of the population in all three Chinatowns.

As those with more means move in, immigrant residents of Chinatowns increasingly squeeze into shared quarters, like Jinlong Chen and his housemates did.

In Boston, theres a lot of real estate speculation, says Lydia Lowe, a Chinatown community leader for more than 30 years.

Bostons Chinatown, located adjacent to the Financial District, has long been affected by development, Lowe says. During urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s, an estimated 1,200 units of housing were demolished when two major highways, I-93 and the Massachusetts Turnpike, were routed through Chinatown, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund study says.

Then, Tufts University and the New England Medical Center, now the Tufts Medical Center, took over one-third of Chinatowns land area.

But the pace of development has exploded in recent years. Weve just seen luxury tower after luxury tower being built in the area and this has led to rapid gentrification, Lowe says.

Lowe now serves as executive director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, founded in 2015. In a community land trust model, the trust owns land and can deed-restrict the buildings on it to be permanently affordable.

The Chinatown Community Land Trust intended to do just that, but its attempts to buy properties have failed. Thats not looking so good right now, Lowe says. Because of the market were not able to even get our hands on buying a smaller property.

A dilapidated three-story row house that would have gone for about $800,000 two or three years ago is now selling for $2 million to $3 million, Lowe says.