The “New Chinatown” appellation never sat right with me — yes, the area around Argyle Street in Uptown is a distinctly Asian corridor, but many of its storefronts advertise goods and services in Vietnamese, not Chinese.
However, new Census data suggests that New Chinatown became more Chinese in the 2000s. In 2000, Uptown‘s Vietnamese residents outnumbered its Chinese residents by a 2-to-1 margin. Over the course of the decade, the Chinese population grew by more than 25%, while the Vietnamese population shrank by more than 33%, and now the two groups are almost equal in size.
The data also shows a significant out-migration of the community area’s Korean, Japanese, and Indian populations. Overall, whites became Uptown’s majority in the 2000s, as its Hispanic population fell by 25% and its Black population by 15%.