ABSTRACT
The dilemmas and challenges associated with remaking Alhambra’s older residential neighborhoods have implications for the larger ethnoburb region where Chinese immigrants are settling and for older suburban cities in general. Alhambra’s city council adopted the Residential Design Guidelines, the Design Review Board was often confronted with challenges in communicating design ideas to lay homeowners and relatively unsophisticated construction professionals. Concerned about the rapid transformation of older historic neighborhoods, residents formed a preservation organization in 2003, the Alhambra Preservation Group, to promote an understanding of the city’s history and its architecture, and to advocate for municipal protections. Alhambra has long been home to whites and Latinos, but the incursion of Chinese, initially from Monterey Park on the southern boundary of the city in the 1970s, has intensified as Asian immigration broadened. Alhambra’s preservation advocates include younger newly arrived homeowners, and older long-term residents, who are middle or upper-middle class, and mostly white.
