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Connecting for Low-Cost Housing

Suzie Wong from the Chinatown Community Development Center Communicates with panelists at the Policy Roundtable in St. Paul, Minnesota. Photo by Ji Hyun Lim.

By Ji Hyun Lim

The camera roamed and zoomed in on panelists and moderators from two states. Housing advocates in Minnesota and California discussed issues and solutions for an hour and a half on July 6, via video.

Organized by the Minnesota Policy Roundtable, a pan-Asian, St. Paul-based alliance, the conference focused on innovative and affordable housing solutions. Research by the Roundtable found that 88 percent of Minneapolis’ APIs lived in “very poor” areas. In contrast, 42 percent of Oakland’s API residents live in comparable districts.

Furthermore, in the San Francisco/Oakland metro area, 35 percent of households had more than one person per room, compared to the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area’s 49 percent of households.

Suzie Wong of Chinatown Community Development Center (CDC), Carlos Castellanos of East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC), and representatives from the Indo-Chinese Housing Development Center (IHD) were panelists in the discussion. CDC has created over 2,000 low-income housing units for the API community since 1977. EBALDC Property Management manages 550 units of affordable housing and 87,500 square feet of commercial and service space.

San Francisco panelists agreed that one key to placing API clients into low-cost housing is to introduce them to other programs aimed at the general population, rather than just focusing efforts on Asian American-specific programs.

“We encourage people to take advantage of any housing development,” Castellanos said. “The important thing is that they get on any waiting list quickly.”

Hoping to follow in their footsteps, Asian American community leaders in St. Paul listened attentively at the Vietnam Center, while Bay Area panelists sat in front of a television screen at the Asian Perinatal Advocates in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Shia Levitt of Internews Interactive coordinated the talk. Participants felt slightly uneasy with the camera but slowly relaxed. Levitt contended that video-conferencing is going to be the most innovative and accessible means of communication for all people.

Mei-mei Ho, executive director of the Asian Perinatal Advocates agrees that video communication will strengthen dialogue across state and country, and enable communities to learn from each other.

“Videoconferencing is exciting,” Ho said. “Unless we travel to Minnesota as a group, we don’t have this kind of opportunity to have a dialogue with one another. In the future, we can tackle many other difficult issues and problems of improving the well being of the API community. To me, it’s an exciting event.”