Despite the increasing provision of social and financial services by community-based organizations (CBOs), few studies focus on the roles that Asian American—serving CBOs play in helping their economically and culturally diverse communities accumulate wealth. The authors explore this overlooked sector by interviewing key informants in 30 mostly Asian American asset-building organizations nationwide. Participating CBOs respond to the financial needs of their diverse communities primarily in three ways: (a) adapting programs for the underserved, (b) facilitating access to the mainstream, and (c) preserving existing assets. Unlike mainstream banks, they use a comprehensive asset-building framework premised on extensive technical assistance and culturally congruent programming. The interviewed organizations face a variety of challenges in implementing programs-namely, maintaining financial solvency and working with limited capacity—issues that they struggle to overcome through forming collaborations and partnerships, earned income strategies, obtaining certification, and cross-training.

Academic and community research partnerships have gained traction as a potential bridge between the university and local area to address pressing social issues. A key question for developing justice-oriented research is how to integrate best practices for creating genuine, authentic research partnerships. In this paper, we discuss the process of building a critical community-engaged project that examines how urban redevelopment changes neighborhoods within immigrant and/or communities of color. Focusing on Long Beach, California, in this article, we detail the development of a mixed-methods study that involves undergraduate students and community members as co-collaborators. We discuss the use and outcomes of co-walking as method, emphasizing observational findings, as well as the process of building team collaboration. We find that neighborhoods in Long Beach are changing rapidly in terms of the use of greening, increased technology integration within neighborhoods, and modern aesthetics, revealing that new residents will likely be younger and single residents with disposable income and no children. From this process, we identified a more critical question for the research project: “Development for whom?”. We argue that co-walking as method is an observational and relational process that assists with the foundational steps of building a critical community-engaged research project.

While much research exists on African Americans and Latinos after the housing crisis in 2007, much less is known about the Asian American experience particularly as it relates to foreclosure and housing burden. This study takes a quantitative case study approach examining Asian Americans in one region of Los Angeles County. Utilizing data from the Census, Home Mortgage Foreclosure Data, and Data-Quick, we provide a more comprehensive picture of the Asian American housing experience before, during and after the housing boom in 2005. Findings show that Asian Americans' decline in homeownership could not be explained by foreclosure. In fact, Asian Americans may have avoided foreclosure in this region using higher down payments, avoiding subprime loans, and loans with variable interest. A potential cost of these actions is higher housing burden, which is closely related to default and foreclosure. Thus, policymakers and community leaders should continue to monitor Asian American homeownership as the impact of the housing collapse may be delayed for Asian Americans compared to other racial groups.

Khmer Girl’s in Action is a nonprofit that successfully utilizes community-based participatory research (CBPR) with university partners to create social change for youth in Long Beach, CA. Based on semi-structured interviews and content analysis of news articles, I explore the impact and sustainability of this research work and the research partnerships. Findings highlight impacts such as youth empowerment, heightened awareness around community needs, policy change, and CBPR curriculum improvements in the field as impacts. Sustainability requires integrating research into program funding, utilizing a tailored training curriculum, building on community members prior relationships, and selecting partners that share common goals, levels of commitment, and flexibility. As funders demand more data to justify community needs, understanding more examples of such work in the Asian American community will be useful for informing future partnerships.

We draw on forty-six in-depth interviews with residents of Cerritos, California, a middle-class majority Asian suburb in Los Angeles County to explore the meaning of resurgent ethnicity and the ways in which a racialized identity informs residential preferences and choice among second-generation Asian Americans. Findings suggest that second-generation Asian Americans are choosing to reside in a place that offers cultural and class-based amenities that reflects a multiethnic sensibility. They also make residential choices based on family ties to strengthen and maintain intergenerational relations and share mutual social and economic resources. For second-generation Asian Americans, this racially dominant but ethnically diverse spatial settlement also provides a sense of belonging, signifying the continuing significance of race among middle-class, acculturated racial minority groups. As U.S. ethnic populations continue to grow and continue the trend of suburbanization and segregation, understanding such places and their implications will become increasingly important.