APA Child Poverty on the Rise in NYC
June 27, 2003
Poverty among Asian Pacific American children in New York City has worsened over the past decade, according to newly released Census data. Coupled with the current economic slump and an estimated $3.8 billion citywide budget shortfall, APA families will be among the hardest hit when the city enacts cuts to education, child care, afterschool programs and other direct services.
Nearly one in four APAs in New York City in 2000 lived in severe poverty, compared to one in five in 1990, but in sheer numbers the rise is even more startling. Approximately 47,000 “Asian American” children (those under age 17) live in families which fall below the federal poverty threshold ($17,603 for a family of four) — more than double the 21,000 recorded for the “Asian Pacific Islander” category in 1990.
“As New York’s Asian Pacific American families continue to recover from the Sept. 11 aftermath, proposed city budget cuts endanger social services, health and education programs that have begun to help poor children break out of poverty cycles,” said Cao K. O, director of the Asian American Federation of New York (AAFNY), which released a detailed analysis of the data earlier this month.
Within some of New York City’s most heavily-settled boroughs and neighborhoods, the rate is even higher — 34 percent in Brooklyn, 30 percent in Manhattan (with Chinatown at 40 percent) and 39 percent in the Bronx. An analysis by ethnicity shows pronounced need among children of Vietnamese, Bangladeshi and Pakistani descent (40 percent, 39 percent and 34 percent, respectively). The sublevel statistics are in stark contrast to the national average for APA children (14 percent) and all children nationally (17 percent).
äocial service providers who serve APAs say the new statistics give shape to what they have long known, but could only paint anecdotally.
Some, like Child Welfare Policy and Program Coordinator Anita Gundanna at the Coalition for Asian American Families and Children (CAAFC), believe there are more inclusive indicators of poverty. One is the percentage of live births born to APA mothers enrolled in Medicaid, which shot up from 22 percent to 53 percent during the same time period. “The federal poverty level isn’t necessarily a good indicator,” Gundanna notes.
Eligibility for Medicaid, the federal and state program for low-income families, is defined at 185 percent of poverty in New York.
Direct service providers for APA youth and families, nearly all of which rely on city contracts for organizational funding, are today weighing rollbacks to a host of already-scarce daycare, afterschool, recreational, educational, youth employment and family counseling programs. The cuts to youth services — which under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s contingency plan may total in the hundreds of millions of dollars — are of special concern when city agencies persistently miss low-income APA families due to insufficient cultural and linguistic outreach. The city is scheduled to resolve its fiscal 2004 budget this week.
“We’re optimistic and hopeful that services won’t be cut,” says John Albert, spokesperson for the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development. “We’re fighting hard to make sure there aren’t reductions, but if there are, that they are in such a way that it won’t disproportionately impact any one community.”
“The majority of the youth we serve come from families that fall into the income category of receiving [entitlement] services,” says Karen Liu, assistant director of the Chinese American Planning Council’s (CAPC) childcare division. “When a child walks in, it’s not just the child — it’s the child and the family. That’s the benefit in having different services, because we can then direct them to the different agencies.”
She and her colleagues believe APA families will feel the cuts even more keenly. “If the budget cuts are approved … we would have to fundraise [on our own]. We could not maintain comprehensive family support services, but we wouldn’t know where the youth could go otherwise,” she added.
The cuts will arrive, of course, when and where they are most sorely needed. “After 9-11 it’s been very difficult for the parents, since most of children have parents employed by the garment industry,” says Liu. CAPC currently runs 12 afterschool programs, mostly in the lower Manhattan area, and currently serves over 1,000 children.
Aparna Lall, a director at South Asian Youth Action (SAYA) in heavily-APA northwest Queens, concurs. Children who have looked to SAYA as a recreational and educational resource have been affected on all levels, through their parents who work mainly in restaurants, taxis and small businesses hurt by Sept. 11. Says Lall, “This added stress on the families has come out in various ways, including increased tensions in the home and youth needing employment to supplement the family income.”
While APAs make up over one tenth of the city’s population, APA-serving community organizations have received less than 0.3 percent of the total city funding for social service contracts over the past 10 years, according to a 2002 AAFNY study. What’s more, APA community organizations have never received more than 1.5 percent of contracts since 1990, despite the fact that the APA population in New York City surged by 74 percent during that time, a rate surpassing all other groups.
Immigration among South Asian groups, especially Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, expanded dramatically during the 1990s, but city infrastructure has yet to accommodate the shift. Says Lall of SAYA, “I haven’t seen the social service agencies grow at the rate that [the South Asian community has], especially where the public school system is concerned … The need is always stronger than what we can provide, even in good times.”
Sensing dire need, some groups, including CAPC and CAAFC, have encouraged parent groups such as Concerned Mothers of the Chinese Community to advocate for additional city investment in child care and special education.
“Afterschool programs, youth development programs and the public school system, that’s where most of the resources need to go,” says Lall. “Investing in young people is an investment in the future of the city.”
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