








































Residential Patterns of Chinese Americans 


Residential Patterns of Chinese and Korean Americans  
in Greater Los Angeles 

 
 

Kevin Ok 
Department of Mathematics 

California State University, Los Angeles 
 
 

This article elaborates on why the residential patterns of Korean 
Americans and Chinese Americans vary.  The affluent class of the 
Chinese Americans has developed a privileged version of an ethnic 
enclave within the San Gabriel Valley while the Korean Americans 
are dispersed within the Greater Los Angeles Area.  The affluent 
Chinese have moved from the mainland to the San Gabriel Valley 
because of a high concentration of already present Chinese 
American inhabitants. On the other hand, Korean Americans have 
always been dispersed within the Greater Los Angeles area and 
therefore do not have a specified area that is highly concentrated.  
Historical sequences from these two ethnic groups also perpetuate 
these trends. 

 
 

1The greater Los Angeles area is home 
to two very large ethnic groups; Chinese 
Americans and Korean Americans.  It 
has been observed that Korean-Amer-
icans are very widely dispersed 
throughout the greater Los Angeles area 
with many small areas of concentration 
(Li 2006:101), while Chinese-Amer-
icans have a clearly defined area of 
significantly high concentration in and 
around the San Gabriel Valley (Allen 
1997:122).  The purpose of this paper is 

                                                 
Kevin Ok is a sophomore student at the 
Department of Mathematics, California 
State University. His paper was 
submitted as a requirement for Dr. 
Ronald Tsukashima’s Soc 263 The 
Asian-American Experience during 
Winter 2008. 

to determine why this residential pattern 
persists among Korean-Americans and 
Chinese Americans.  It is the position of 
this paper that the Korean-American 
community is more dispersed because of 
the absence of a single heavily con-
centrated suburban area of institutional 
completeness that would be attractive to 
affluent Korean-Americans outside of 
traditional Koreatown, whereas the 
Chinese do have such an area outside of 
traditional Chinatown in the San Gabriel 
Valley. 
 In order to elaborate further, the 
historical sequence for these residential 
patterns must first be understood. 
 The traditional Chinatown of Los 
Angeles was well established to the 
north of downtown Los Angeles in the 
1860s (Allen 1997:120).  The Chinese 

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RESIDENTIAL PATTERS by Kevin Ok                         19

residents of this area were, and still are 
“poorer, less educated, less acculturated, 
and more recently arrived than the 
Chinese who live elsewhere in Southern 
California” (Allen 1997:121). 

As an alternative, the San Gabriel 
Valley has become the most popular 
destination for “immigrants who could 
afford better housing than Chinatown” 
(Allen 1997:122).  In the 1970s, an 
effort was made to develop a suburban 
Chinese community in Monterey Park 
by advertising to the wealthy Chinese 
living in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Allen 
1997:122). International events in the 
1970s and 1980s caused many residents 
of Hong Kong and Taiwan to fear 
political uncertainty and come to the 
United States (Li 2006:82).   

As a result, there was a 
significant influx of wealthy Chinese 
people migrating to Monterey Park, as 
well as into other areas within the San 
Gabriel Valley (Allen 1997:122).  In 
addition to buying homes, many of these 
immigrants opened businesses “catering 
to the needs of the growing Chinese 
population” (Allen 1997:122).  This 
phenomenon can be described as “rapid 
economic growth propelled by the influx 
of foreign capital and immigration” 
(Zhou 2005:280).   

The ethnic Chinese banking 
sector played a significant and crucial 
role in this development.  It “financed 
the transformation of the entire San 
Gabriel Valley into an [area] where the 
Chinese population and businesses are 
prominent” by tapping into “financial 
resources brought by the Chinese 
immigrants and possessed by ethnic 
Chinese across the Pacific Rim” (Li 
2006:86-87).  Many of the Chinese in 
the area soon became, or already were, 

wealthier than the native whites and 
showed “little interest in acculturating to 
white America” (Allen 1997:122).   

This was made further possible 
since the community had clearly 
developed into a region that corresponds 
with Raymond Breton’s description of 
“institutional completeness” (Li 2006: 
100).  A region is said to be institu-
tionally complete when a significant 
proportion of the members of an ethnic 
group have most of their personal 
relationships within that group as a result 
of the abundance of ethnic institutions, 
or “formal collective organizations,” 
such as “social aid agencies, business 
groups and media, and public institutions 
like schools” (Bourgeois 2005:2). 

According to one source, by 
2000, 41.23 percent of Monterey Park’s 
residents were Chinese (Kwong 2005: 
358).  The same source stated that the 
Chinese population of nearby San 
Marino was 41 percent, Arcadia’s was 
34 percent, and Rosemead’s was 29 
percent.  From all of this it is clear that 
the San Gabriel Valley is the largest 
center of affluent Chinese in Southern 
California as well as the area’s most 
“intensively Chinese settlement” (Allen 
1997:122). 

The development of the Korean 
community in the greater Los Angeles 
area had a much different start.  Most 
Koreans who came to the United States 
were highly educated, often as 
professionals, but were unable to use 
such education effectively because of 
language and cultural barriers, dis-
crimination, and “lack of transferability 
of work experience, education, and skills 
acquired in Korea” (Allen 1997:149; 
Song 2004:13-14).  As a result, many 

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RESIDENTIAL PATTERS by Kevin Ok                         20

had to open their own small businesses 
in Koreatown (Allen 1997:149). 

Koreans are well known for 
being very entrepreneurial in comparison 
to other groups (Waldinger 1996:329).  
However, unlike the Chinese in the San 
Gabriel Valley who had a strong ethnic 
banking sector as well as an intense 
“flow of transnational capital,” Koreans 
had to rely on rotating-credit asso-
ciations and banks for financing (Kwong 
2005:358; Allen 1997:149).  Despite 
their difficulties, they were able to 
establish an area of “institutional 
completeness” in Koreatown (Li 2006: 
100). 

Although it is the most important 
Korean enclave in the greater Los 
Angeles area, Koreans make up a very 
small proportion of the residents of 
Koreatown (Li 2006:103).  Not to 
mention, in 1990, 56.6 percent of 
Korean households in Koreatown had an 
income below $25,000 and they had a 
poverty rate of 25.3 percent (Li 
2006:109).  Koreatown is clearly not an 
area that is attractive to affluent Koreans. 

Many Koreans were able to make 
significant economic success and move 
out of Koreatown and into the suburbs, 
while some were already wealthy 
enough to go to the suburbs directly 
from Korea (Li 2006:105-112).  These 
settled into enclaves in places like the 
San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel 
Valley, Orange County and the South 
Bay (Li 2006:101; Allen 1997:150-151).  
These suburban enclaves developed their 
own Korean businesses and had 
sufficient Korean institutions to be 
considered institutionally complete 
(Allen 1997:150; Li 2006:105). 

  However, unlike Monterey Park 
and the San Gabriel Valley for the 

Chinese, there was no one specific place 
or region that was heavily advertised for 
Koreans and to which an intense amount 
of transnational capital flowed.  There-
fore, there was no one suburb into which 
affluent Koreans concentrated and de-
veloped intensively.  The Korean dis-
persion into the suburbs followed a 
pattern of “decentralized concentration” 
(Li 2006:103).  In support of this notion, 
population data shows that Koreans do 
not make up more than 10 percent of the 
population of any one of 10 regions in 
Southern California (Li 2006:102). 
 It is the position of this paper that 
this trend is being perpetuated by the 
already established residential patterns 
of the two ethnic groups.  Because 
Korean Americans outside of Koreatown 
have already been dispersed to the point 
of having no one major area of 
significant suburban clustering, new 
immigrants from Korea looking to move 
to the suburbs will continue to have 
several areas of institutional com-
pleteness to choose from and will not 
begin to intensively occupy any one 
region (Li 2006:116).   
 The Chinese, on the other hand, 
already have a significantly large area of 
concentration in the San Gabriel Valley 
that was well established by intense 
investment from overseas as well as 
local economic activity.  Given this, new 
affluent immigrants from China will be 
more likely to choose the San Gabriel 
Valley area over another.  It appears that 
this “cycle” will continue perpetually, 
and for this reason it can be said that the 
Korean American community’s lack of a 
single heavily concentrated suburban 
area of institutional completeness is the 
reason for its apparently greater dis-

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RESIDENTIAL PATTERS by Kevin Ok                         

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21

persion than the Chinese American 
community. 
 
REFERENCES 

 
Allen, James P. and Turner, Eugene. 1997.    

The Ethnic Quilt:Population Diversity in 
Southern California. Northridge CA: 
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Bourgeois, Daniel. 2005. “Sub-State Insti-
tutions and Minority Self Determi-
nation.”Montréal, Québec: Université du 
Québec a Montréal. Retrieved May, 4, 
2008 (http://www.umoncton.ca/icrml 
/Document/QCGN-final.pdf). 

Kwong, Peter and Dusanka Miscevic. 2005. 
Chinese America: The Untold Story of 
America’s Oldest New Community. New 
York:The New Press. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Li, Wei. 2006. From Urban Enclave to 
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Song, Kui-Hee. 2004. Beyond Mult-
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http://www.umoncton.ca/icrml/
http://www.umoncton.ca/icrml/
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/zhou/pubs/Zhou_Lin_
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/zhou/pubs/Zhou_Lin_

