It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey, I'm WBEZ reporter Monica Eng, and on a warm fall afternoon, I meet up in Chinatown with questioner Mallory Van Meter.

We walked down side streets looking at lots of apartments with these amazing front yard gardens

covered in squash and melon vines.

Mallory's been fascinated by this Chinese neighborhood and its people for a while.

And that fascination grew when she was searching for apartments online.

She noticed there were hardly any rentals advertised in Chinatown.

She wanted to know why.

So she asked Curious City,

Chinatown is a hole in the online rental market.

How do people find apartments there?

Seems like a pretty simple question, but the answer can be a little complicated and even controversial.

That's because Chinatown apartment rentals are advertised in pretty much one language, Chinese,

because Chinatown landlords just prefer a certain type of tenant, Chinese.

But this preference, it's been key to keeping Chinatown landlords just prefer a certain type of tenant. Chinese. But this preference, it's been key to keeping Chinatown Chinese for almost 100 years,

especially since Chinese immigrants weren't always welcome in other neighborhoods.

So let's start with the basic question.

How exactly do people find their apartments?

To find out, I meet up with Debbie Liu and C.W. Chan of the Coalition for a Better Chinese-American

community. We meet at the busy new Chinatown library, and Lou tells me that local landlords

don't usually advertise on popular English language sites like Craigslist or Apartments.com, but instead, through

internal channels, social media, we chat, we will also Chinese ethnic newspapers. So here we have

...