By Shirley Lin
Special to AsianWeek
Winnie Chen is a merchant whose unmarked hat and handbag stall faces the pedestrian traffic of Canal Street. Rent is $6,300 a month; but Chen says since Sept. 11, she has been unable to break even. “I’m lucky if I even get two customers an hour,” she says. But government assistance is elusive for Chen, who arrived from Hong Kong two years ago, keeps no receipts and speaks only Chinese.
Despite some indications of recovery, numbers assessing the impact of the World Trade Center attacks on the city’s Asian Pacific American communities over a year later remain sobering. Community groups fear that barriers to emergency and long-term relief have left New York City’s most vulnerable residents struggling in isolation.
That residential, business and health care relief programs might be available to Chinatown residents like Chen was news to her. “How am I supposed to apply?” she asked. “I don’t speak English. I only live by counting my sales from day to day.”
According to a report released this month by the Asian American Federation of New York (AAFNY), an advocacy and social services group, Chinatown’s businesses and residents are still coping with the attacks’ widespread effects. In the year following Sept. 11, the community’s garment industry lost at least $500 million; restaurant and jewelry store owners earned an average of 40 percent lower revenue this summer than last summer. Many of the nearly 8,000 workers who lost their jobs within three months of the tragedy — over a quarter of the community’s workforce — are still seeking work.
In the past year, AAFNY has also helped some of the city’s yellow cab drivers, the majority of whom are South Asian, recover from financial losses with cash assistance. These drivers traditionally relied on Lower Manhattan for their fares and have lost many riders in the downtown and Wall Street area.
The Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), in response to criticism that relief program parameters were too stringent, adjusted some of its guidelines earlier this year. FEMA’s Mortgage and Rental Assistance (MRA) program offers up to 18 months of mortgage or rent for anyone who lost income as “a direct result of” the attacks, but did not offer translated materials until June. The agency extended eligibility boundaries north of Canal Street only six months ago, disqualifying and discouraging many low-income residents in the process. Many such families are also hard-pressed to furnish the required paperwork for leases or business income, when those affairs are managed informally.
FEMA public affairs officer James McIntyre says the agency is satisfied with the extent of its outreach, noting that ethnic press is included in outreach and that interpreters are on call at the relief applicant hotline.
A grassroots coalition of advocacy groups, the Beyond Ground Zero Network, believes that federal agencies are discriminating against low-income residents. Based on zip code-centered data which FEMA released to the group in August, the coalition found that only 1.69 percent of households in Chinatown and the Lower East Side had applied for mortgage and rental assistance. Of those households, less than half were approved. In upscale TriBeCa, adjacent to Chinatown, roughly half of all households have applied for residential aid and 32 percent were approved.
FEMA’s McIntyre disputes the statistics, saying the percentages are based on the total population in the area. “We don’t know why [some] people didn’t apply,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t have to, maybe they didn’t have losses. When it comes to MRA, there are volunteer groups helping with the outreach and hopefully by January 31 [the program deadline], we’ll have reached all of them out there.”
Nevertheless, AAFNY saw fit to expand its ongoing Sept. 11 Relief, Recovery, and Rebuilding Initiative, designed to substantially improve outreach for APA communities in partnership with five organizations: the Chinatown YMCA; the Chinese American Planning Council; Filipino American Human Services, Inc.; Japanese American Social Services, Inc.; and the New York Asian Women’s Center. With the help of a $1.15 million grant from the Sept. 11th Fund, the groups hired 22 additional bilingual service coordinators to help community members apply for government and charitable programs, including temporary FEMA mortgage and rental assistance, the Federal Victim’s Compensation Fund, job training, legal assistance and healthcare services. The initiative, ambitious in scope, recognizes that community members drastically affected by Sept. 11 reside in surrounding boroughs and may be experiencing a double impact where discrimination and detentions have occurred.
“We feel that there’s a vast array of community organizations that are trying to do this work, but there was a need for dedicated staff,” said Parag Khandhar, AAFNY assistant director. “The relief and recovery program is a labyrinth even for English speakers, and … our fear is that there are families out there that are falling through the gaps.”
Although the AAFNY grant is for one year, Khandhar hopes current efforts to bolster social service resources for APAs in New York City will have a lasting impact. “The undue burden falls on community groups, and we have not received the level of support that we need,” he said. “Some of the programs are not perfect, and we need to advocate on behalf of our communities to make sure they can recover with the rest of New York City. If we can provide clear answers and stabilize them through this period, that’s what we are trying to do.”
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