Dr. Betty Lee Sung:
Thank you Professor Okhiro. And now I will turn the podium over to Professor Ngee Pong Chang, and you’ll have another set of speakers, so please stay with us.
Dr. Ngee Pong Chang:
We will proceed right on to the next speaker. We have heard about the Chinatown study. An important part of the impact on Asian Americans is on the health aspect. Today we have a very distinguished speaker, Dr. Benjamin Chu, who is the president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. He is a true doctor, a primary care internist by training with extensive experience as a clinician, administrator and policy advocate for the public hospital sector. Dr. Chu has served as Senior Associate Dean at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Associate Dean and Vice President for Clinical Affairs at the NYU Medical Center. We are privileged that he has taken time from his busy post as president to come here and address us today.
Dr. Benjamin Chu:
Thank you Dr. Chang. What I want to do is spend some time talking about the health effects of 9/11. It’s very difficult when you think about 9/11 to get your brain around the total effect of it and I think it’s really very important for us to begin to look at these things comprehensively in conferences like this. I was listening to Dr. Sim’s presentation of the economic impact and it’s really amazing to me when you actually think about 3 out of 4 workers in this area being affected to that extent in terms of their economic well being, and 25% of the work force being laid off as a result of 9/11, that we haven’t seen even more health effects from the Asian community.
That’s really the message that I wanted to emphasize today – that when you look at many of the surveys around some of the health effects – and what I want to do is concentrate a little bit more on the mental health effects of 9/11. I think the story’s still out as to what the overall effects are on the physical well being in terms of respiratory illnesses and the long term effects, and I don’t think I know enough to really talk about that. The one thing that we can talk about is the mental health effect and the differential responses in the various communities to the 9/11 tragedy and the Asian communities in general.
I don’t think it’s any surprise to all of you that Asians actually have a difficult time accessing mental health services. It’s probably culturally embedded, but it’s also differences in the way we view our lives and we view mental health issues and health-seeking behavior for mental health issues that I think are in play. For example, if you look at some of the survey data…these are all survey data. The New England Journal of Medicine published survey data on the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder symptomology after the 9/11 disaster and compared the ethnic communities. Asian Americans are way, way down, whereas the Latino community, the survey talked about 14% of Latinos surveyed actually suffered from those symptoms as well as depression and other mental health issues. Only about 10 or 11% of African Americans reported symptomology. Only about 3% of Asians did.
I can tell you that the public hospital system took the lion’s share of the manning of the counseling in the crisis sites here as well as at our hospitals. Governor Diagnostic and Treatment Center is probably closest to the Chinatown community, but Bellevue also provided a great deal of counseling services. In fact, in the three months following the 9/11 disaster, about 7,000 people came to the facilities to access mental health and counseling services for a variety of symptoms related to the stress of the disorder. In addition to that, the public hospitals were asked to man the disaster centers. The centers on Pier 94, over by Chambers St. and really the one closest to Chinatown community is the one on Worth St. by the old motor vehicle bureau (which by the way can give you a stress disorder just walking into the motor vehicle bureau. I know they’re much better now). But the truth of the matter is that we also manned those sites and provided about 5,000 counseling sessions as of the beginning of January, so in a four month period afterward there were tremendous amounts of counseling going on.
But one of the things that are interesting to note is that Asian Americans didn’t really access that many counseling services except in the counseling sites. On 141 Worth St., we had Asian language speakers there and I think one of the reasons we were able to do… by the way, about 1/3 of the counseling sessions that were provided on Worth St. were to Asian Americans. You’d think that was a lot, but actually when you think about it, it was the primary site for counseling for this community and only 1/3 of the persons who accessed those services were Asian. So that tells you something. Even with that, there were significant number of Asians that accessed the services, but they accessed them for, I think, a variety of reasons, because the disaster relief sites were not just for mental health services.
The economic relief process was there, along with a whole host of other services, and the counseling was just built in. Counseling was just one of a series of services that were available at the site. In that non-labeled setting, counseling became much more available in terms of our clients’ ability to think about talking to somebody about some of the problems. I think that’s an important piece, because when you really look at…and I used to be on the board of the Chinatown Heath Clinic, I guess it’s now the Charles B. Wang Health Center…but one of the things that we did at the Chinatown Health Clinic was to build the Mental Health Bridge Program, through a number of grant programs. Basically that program was built around what I was talking about – that Asians don’t access mental health services readily for a whole variety of reasons.
One of the basic tenets of the Mental Health Bridge Program was to reach out to the Asian community on the very important areas that we could actually intervene with – depression and other kinds of things where the treatment has evolved to the point where we could actually make a big, big difference in people’s lives. You can’t do that by offering psychiatric services or traditional mental health services. It had to be bridged from the primary care services that are being offered. If you look at some of the data from our counseling sessions, people weren’t complaining about symptoms of depression. You really had to elicit it out of them. Much more so, and I think this is generally true with Asians, the mental health issues come out in somaticization – in complaints about physical ailments or much more oblique ways. I’m not a psychiatrist, so I really don’t feel confident to talk about this in exquisite detail, but I actually know enough from general medicine that that’s true, that if you look at the general population, you’ll find (depending on the studies that you read) somewhere between 20, 30, maybe 40% of the general internal medical population, that there is some mental health component that could be addressed by the mental health provider that often isn’t addressed.
That was one of the impetuses for the Bridge program – to really educate our primary care internists to some of the markers of mental health issues in the Asian population. And in fact, that’s what we saw in our counseling sessions – that a lot of the complaints were physical complaints, somaticization. Really when you read a little more deeply into it, you get to the mental health anguish that people experienced. When you think about it, there is this tremendous disaster with tremendous economic implications. We’re talking about relatively fragile populations in terms of overall social well being in this country – largely immigrant, sometimes undocumented, with that added burden of psychological stress. Why wouldn’t this population be out there displaying all of the symptomology that normal people do? Asians don’t because of again a whole variety of cultural attributes and that’s just the way it is. I think that’s probably the most important lesson, the most important impact. The impact is completely understandable.
I don’t really think that those self-surveys of post traumatic stress disorder symptomology are accurate – that Asian children are less affected by the disaster, that Asian adults are less affected by the disaster. It’s just that we’re not looking at the right measures of it and the ability to talk about it is much, much lower. From the health provider standpoint what the challenge is to us, is to really find the language in order to elicit those kinds of symptoms and then to really effectively deal with them. Deep down inside, if you don’t deal with these things, down the road there are much deeper impacts. We’re beginning to see that. The incidence of domestic violence and all sorts of things that nobody wants to talk about in any community are really actually there. We’re always better off addressing them head on rather than waiting for it to happen and worse yet, not catching it in time to do anything about it.
What I would say to all of us as Asian leaders interested in the impact of 9/11 is that we really have to look at different ways to listen to the pain of 9/11, and I use this mental health example because it’s a good example. It’s very clear in my mind that the language has to be a little different. The ability of our providers to listen has to be different. First of all there have to be enough Chinese and other Asian language providers there to listen in the native language. That’s an important piece of it. But also, even with that, there are subtleties with which Asian cultures and communities communicate this kind of pain. It is really to all of our benefit to begin to think about what those subtle differences are and to begin to target our approaches a little bit differently so that we can be most helpful to the community.
Hopefully I caught up on some of the time that you lost. Thank you.
Dr. Ngee Pong Chang:
Thank you Dr. Chu. He is a very timely person. He timed it very well. Now we’ll go on to the other aspect of the impact, which is the garment industry. We’re very pleased we have a representative, Ms. May Ying Chen, who is the Associate Manager of Local 23-25 and Vice President of UNITE (the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees.) She also serves as Director of UNITE’s Immigration Project. What she’ll be talking about is the need to develop jobs in the garment industry and look at the past, present and future.
May Ying Chen:
I want to thank Dr. Chang and good friends Tom Tan, Betty Lee Sung and others for inviting me to be here. It’s really an important conference that we’re here for today. I realized since I’ve been away from academia for decades at this point and then with the occurrence of 9/11 and working together with Shao-Chee Sim and others in the Federation, how important the partnership is between those of us, what academics call practitioners, people working in the community, and young people who are students and also people like professors who are coming up and working together to be able to respond to a terrible crisis.
The garment industry has really a long history in Lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, especially the lower East Side, was a place where garment factories existed, giving opportunities for entry jobs for all the waves of immigrant workers that have come into New York, past and present. My union, which is called UNITE today, was formerly the International Lady Garment Workers’ Union and Amalgamated Garment and Textile Workers’ Union. We have a strong history and a long history that goes back to 1900, of organizing workers to defend their rights and creating a public conscience – you know the Union Worker song, and whatnot, and working with employers in the industry and government to develop package benefits that has given immigrant garment workers the ability to raise their families in the United States and fulfill their dreams of raising their kids to become teachers, doctors and whatever else.
This is a tradition that has existed with the union and the garment industry for a long time. The Chinese workers first started to enter this industry in the 1950s, because if you remember our history of Chinese in America, a lot of the early immigrants were men. Women only started coming in large numbers in the 1950s, following World War II as the wives of Chinese men who were able to bring over their wives after the war.
Starting in the 1950s you start to see Chinese women in the garment industry, and this number grew very rapidly after the 1965 change in the immigration laws. By the 1980s, the number of Chinese workers and factories (because you have workers and then you have Chinese businessmen who began to open these factories) really began expand in to the numbers like 30,000 or even more than that. But since the 1980s, in the last 20 years, there have been two very big pressures that have started to chip away and reduce these numbers. One is the globalization of the garment industry through various trade agreements and so on. A lot of American companies, instead of producing garments in New York, are producing them in other countries.
The other issue in Chinatown which still confronts us today, is the question of land use and real estate pressures. Should we be devoting this much space to factories and industry, or should we be converting these industrial spaces into other uses? This happened in a big way in the 1980s and then fell off during an economic dip in the 90s, during the dot com period, and it’s going down again. But this remains a research question and obviously, for us in the garment industry, a very real question since a lot of these spaces are being taken away and garment shops are evicted.
But, yet and still, when you saw Shao-Chee’s numbers, there are 34,000 workers in Chinatown and of this number, ten to fifteen thousand of them are garment workers. That’s a very large number of workers. That’s why the garment industry, I argue, has to be taken as a really big part and parcel of the Chinatown rebuilding effort. The terrible attacks of September 11th created – and I really can’t express this enough because I live downtown also – a very deep pain, disruption and hardship, especially for the garment workers, as well as the factory owners.
But thanks to the work of the different community groups that came together – the researchers – we have begun to quantify the impact. I want to thank again, Shao-Chee, because this book has been so, so important for us. We work in the shops. I’ve been running around Chinatown like crazy since September 11th and I’m very grateful that researchers put that story into numbers and into facts and figures that we now can use. It’s preliminary – obviously there are things that need to be tightened up, but it’s been really important.
The conference today is also really important because you’re bringing together a lot of people to talk about the problems. I also want to segue from Dr. Chu’s presentation, because the mental impact has been really severe and I wanted to just describe, because I live in Chinatown, the impact of 9/11 through the actual encounters that I have with a lot of my different union members and people in the neighborhood, about what happened.
The day of September 11th was actually Election Day – I’m glad Irene talked about that too, because we had a lot of people out in the street mobilizing the voters and it was a very exciting day. I was standing right at Confucius Plaza and suddenly you see this big explosion and everybody just went into a shock. I just can’t explain to you how shocking that was because we could actually see all the flames and paper and all that stuff flying out of the building. It was just a horrible situation.
After the second plane hit, we realized that this was a very, very serious emergency and as we were walking through the streets of Chinatown, especially south of Canal St, the police started to close down those streets right away. It was chaotic. There were people at the pay telephones. The cell phones all went dead. You started to see people running up from downtown. They were all totally in shock. It was just a horrible situation. We had workers who were helping us on Election Day would talk about, with tears streaming down their face, trying to go to a payphone to call their relatives, because everybody knows people who work downtown. Where were they? Were they safe? Was everything okay?
Then in the garment factories, many of them with windows that could face downtown seeing the collapse of those buildings, and the employers hearing the radio and telling everybody by noontime, sit tight but we’re going to close down and everybody has to go home. It was just really a horrible situation. The trains went down. I sat with probably about 20 or 30 of my union members for quite a few hours waiting for news of when the subways were going to get up again and how we were going to get home.
Then I went to IS 131 where my daughter works, and all the children were told to call family members to pick them up. A lot of the students were waiting in the auditorium for them to come and the teachers were just doing their best. I have to say that there were a lot of heroes in the 9/11, not just the police and fireman, but the teachers and pretty much everybody else in the neighborhood who really stepped forward and really pulled together.
In the next few days…I stayed home the day after 9/11 because I was just shell-shocked. We saw a lot of people just wandering over to the east side because they were evicted from their houses in Battery Park. There was an old couple with a shopping cart and their pets and they were trying to figure out a way to get out of the frozen zone since all the subways were closed down.
Two days after 9/11, when I went outside, I had to walk out, so I walked up to Houston St. to get a subway, and I ran into garment workers at the checkpoints on Houston St. who were trying to get down to the factory to see if they could collect their paychecks. They were being stopped by the police and National Guard, because you had to show an ID to get below Houston St. and into the area. They didn’t speak English. They didn’t have their Green Cards, except a crumpled up copy, and the police were not accepting this. I remember going there and just trying to vouch for this person, even though I didn’t know who she was. I said, she’s a garment worker and she needs to get down to the shop, and they finally let her by. Then they asked me, are you with her? I said, yeah, yeah, I’m with her. Actually I was going out, but they let me go back in with her. I brought her in and then I had to sneak around the corner and go across another checkpoint to get out.
I ran into a woman in my neighborhood who had just donated $20 to the relief effort. There was a massive outpouring of donations from the community to the relief funds, especially in the days right after. She had gone to the radio station and donated this money; she said all these victims, it’s so sad, it’s terrible. When I asked her how she was doing, she was unemployed, and her husband was unemployed. She was supporting two children. She herself was facing such a hardship but there was this outpouring of generosity and concern.
I met a couple whose son died in the World Trade Center. He worked in one of the towers, and it turns out the woman actually lives in my building. She was a garment worker. She and her husband were just totally distraught. This is an adult son, but the adult son helped to support them. They’re still working in the garment industry. Their factory was south of Canal Street and closed down. We had many days of meeting with them. This is really to Dr. Chu’s comment about mental health.
Our union’s health center fortunately has a Chinese speaking psychiatrist, but the Chinese will not go directly to the psychiatrist. They’ll go to see a doctor for their medical conditions, and then after that you can hold their hand and try to move them into some kind of counseling. There were many of our garment workers whose adult children died in the World Trade Center. Then as I met people in the Hotel Union and other unions, I realized that a lot of those hotel workers included a lot of Chinese Americans and Asian Americans.
There were a lot of families who lost people. We knew other young people who worked in the financial sector – Cantor Fitzgerald and these other companies where there is a fair number of victims and their families were really distraught. The mental health thing, I think the research just hit the tip of the iceberg, because there’s really a lot of very deep pain and a need to deal with that.
In responding to September 11th, I just wanted to talk about two areas. One is for the apparel industry. We started fairly quickly after September 11th, a project called “Made In New York” to try to bring the work back to our shops, because when we went to the factories immediately after September 11th and saw how a lot of the work orders were canceled and that the workers were just sitting around and really didn’t know what to do, the two issues that the workers wanted, were that they wanted to keep their jobs in the factories. The jobs. Work. Not going to work is very disorienting for these workers. And they were very, very concerned about their health care and their health benefits.
The union provides a safety net for their health care for up to six months of coverage while they’re unemployed, but the fact that the state also stepped in with Disaster Medicaid and some of these new programs, has provided a safety net since September 11th. Some of these programs are expiring and as we’re rebuilding the industry, we’re also very concerned about restoring employer-provided healthcare and various private programs, because more than 50% of America’s population relies on an employer-provided benefit. We do not have what you call socialized medicine or government-provided medical care, for the most part, so health benefits are very important.
The jobs are very important. We put together a shopping guide and had a campaign last year to promote companies that did their work in New York City, provided work to our factories, and we’re continuing to promote this campaign. The other thing, one of the last things I want to talk about, is that the access to relief programs has been very, very difficult for the garment workers, because of first of all, language barriers and then secondly, the lack of coordination among the various relief agencies providing help. There were unemployment benefits, which we’re somewhat familiar with. We helped hundreds, probably thousands of our garment workers file for unemployment when their shops closed. There were health-providing agencies. There were groups like Safe Horizon, Red Cross, Salvation Army, but each of them had different rules and regulations, so it was a real difficulty, especially for Chinese and non-English speaking garment workers to really understand what they were eligible for or not.
The division at Canal St. was a major problem because as Chao-Shee pointed out, 80% of our garment factories (and in fact, the larger factories) are north of Canal, and most of the north of Canal factories got nothing. Most of the garment workers right now have lived through seven or eight months of really severe economic stress, as well as the emotional stresses of having lived through this period of time. It’s a time now to regroup and to heal. Some of the workers have taken advantage now, after coming through the first few months, of a downtime to start enrolling in English programs, to do job training and to try to figure out what to do next.
There are many recommendations, some of them are in this report, but I’ll leave that for the next speakers. I know that they have done a lot of very comprehensive work in the relief. We need to regroup. We are rebuilding, we need to heal and I hope that we will come out stronger as a result of this. Thank you very much.
Dr. Ngee Pong Chang:
Well thank you. We need jobs, but also we need some bankers to be involved in the effort, and we’re very pleased that we have Mr. Alex Chu, who is Founder, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Eastbank. He has a wide background with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture and a Master’s Degree in Urban Design. Also, he’s a lawyer, with a Juris Doctor Degree from Fordham University Law School. He’s going to talk to us about “Economic Challenges and Impact to Chinatown in its Future Development.”
Alex Chu:
Thank you Dr. Chang. I want to salute all of you. For those of you who have been here since 9:00, I want to say that even when I was in graduate school in my best form, I could not have sat through so many hours just listening. All of you are awake and I notice some of you are even taking notes, so really I salute all of you.
I want to discuss in some broad terms today, the critical issues that will affect not only us now, as all the reports have demonstrated to you, but also what are the solutions that can put us in a more advantageous position going forward. I’d like to begin by simply saying that it’s not the September 11th event. I think the September 11th event was a trickling point, but a lot of those defects, problems that face us today, are infrastructural defects that have been latent, that have been there all along. It took the severity of September 11th to bring it up to its full impact and stare us in the face.
We have heard that Chinatown is a good place to many, many people – homes, employment, tourist attraction, culture center, and all of the rest. Because of all these possibilities, it continues to be a point of interest and a focal attraction for all disciplines and all of the governmental officials, and all of the people interested to have its best face, its well being, taken care of.
What have we found since September 11th? We have known that it is a tourist attraction, that it has problems, but the most single note that we’ve found today is that this beautiful community is not at all plugged in. It took a lot of studies to show the public its pain. It does not have the infrastructure, an ability to speak for itself. The councilman this morning talked about it, and a lot of the community activists have talked about it and that certainly is a key way to go about it.
The other way, from a commercial point of view, is that we have to examine the financial underpinnings. What are the things that give us a better footing and allow us to look back on our troubled past, and look forward to a better future? We have to look at those financial underpinnings.
What are they? Housing and unemployment, just to name two most important components. Obviously there are social services and investment – how do you draw in fresh capital, how do you generate internal sources of funds to do all these things that the community will demand. In the context of the employment, housing, social services and investment, those are the major sectors that I think a lot of the people this afternoon in their special workshops will be able to address.
What I’d like to do today, is to very briefly discuss the financial framework, the big picture, whereby all of these little components that are necessary for the wellbeing of the community can take root to be able to deal with it without a huge amount of governmental interference or dictates. We have to learn to be self-reliant like we have never been before. We have to look at what are the assets in our community, what are the things we can massage out, and enforce it, so that at the end those become our prerogative and our dictate. That’s how we control our future.
If we believe that land is the source of all wealth… Land is the source of all wealth, I submit to you then that the use of land is even more important. We cannot manufacture more land. This community that you see in the maps is bounded by major thoroughfare, is bounded by city hall, bounded by governmental housings. We are locked in. We are isolated. But within this isolation, there is a tremendous amount of asset – land, as I said, the use of land.
I will try to give you a little…I have to be a little technical here, but please bare with me because it’s very basic stuff that you need to understand so that going forward you will know the components that are necessary, that we must wrestle with. Zoning is the thing that really governs the use of land. And zoning simply puts down residential, commercial, mixed use, open space and variations. What Chinatown has now is mostly light manufacturing and low-density residential. Now what does low density mean?
Low density means that you can only build a certain amount floor area ratio (FAR), Floor to Area Ratio – that means the number of floors you can build. Most of Chinatown is locked into 3.4 times to 6 times the land area, the FAR (Floor to Area Ratio). If you look at New York City in general, midtown, they’re 12 times, they’re 20 times. Why is it that Chinatown, with proximity to City Hall and civic buildings, is locked historically into 3 ½ times of residential?
I suggest and I submit to all of you that housing is an issue and it’s also a governmental concern. Without governmental interference, financial commitment, we can through modification in land use, to change that FAR from 3 times, 6 times to 12 times. That merely is air. We have the ability to build up, to generate much needed housing. In fact, we can achieve the dual result of solving the housing problem and anchoring the amount of residents, which will become electoral capital, the ability to have a critical mass so that they can vote. This long-range planning is necessary as far as housing is concerned.
We need to get to city planning and have them evaluate this. Those thinkings that were put into place half a century ago might have been very valid – dividing up Canal St. to the north and south, and so forth. Now 50 years later, with all the changes that happened to all of us – the immigration laws, more young people coming back in the community and so forth, we need to examine the basics, whereby the government had planned our future more than 50 years ago. This is all within our prerogative to do so and there is a great need for us to do so.
Now a word on employment. We have heard that the garment industry has in the past, no doubt, been the strongest provider of employment opportunities. But because of the globalization and the fact that manufacturers can pay 1/5 the price to manufacturing oversees, and then add that to transportation and insurance and having it shipped back to America, and it’s still substantially less than of course to have it done locally. That is a whim that we cannot resist. It’s happening all over, not only to that particular section. It’s happening to all the other ones, where everybody’s seeking for the most economic way to compete. Now so is the garment industry and they have done so to look for alternatives. Look for other opportunities to be trained, to be employed and so forth.
The fact is that when one sector gets hurt, the end result is that (if you believe the studies) within the last 24 months, more than 100 garment factories closed their doors. Now, each factory on average, occupied about 3,000 square feet of loft space. That, to me, translates to be 300,000 square feet of vacant loft space. Unless we do something about it, most of these loft spaces are situated in light manufacturing zones. Going back to land use, these light manufacturing zones preclude residential housing. You cannot convert that to housing or build housing. That means you’ve lost a substantial amount of community asset into something that’s not probably its highest use.
Again, this 300,000 square feet of vacant loft space, unless something is done, I submit to you that the owners will go forward and sell these as expensive loft condos at $2 million per floor, in an area that has all of these troubles and problems. Meanwhile they’re selling it at $3,000 a foot. This is a phenomenal injustice to the community. I submit that this 300,000 square feet of vacant loft space can be converted to residential at 600 square feet. That’s 500 units. I submit to you that these are already standing buildings. All you need to do is renovate. You don’t have to go through the superstructure, steel structure, etc.
Housing and employment do come together. They are related. When you have more housing, more residential, you bring in another tax base. You bring in people that will spend more and frequent your commercial space. They will continue to enforce all of the positive assets that the community now enjoys. Instead of subtracting from it, instead of not understanding it, there’s a way to put it all together so in fact this thing is much larger, much stronger, not only for us today, but for our children. Because we are building that political framework on top of an economic consideration that takes into consideration the biggest and most important communal asset.
I have a lot more to say, but I know a lot of people are doing a lot of things with grants and assistance and so forth for the community. Those are very important, very vital. But I submit again, whatever we do, or whatever they do, they should have not only a short term goal, but also long term goals. If you want to give money so that they can just be tied over, that’s fine. That’s very much needed. But in order for them to take the next step, to be competitive, to be viable, there’s got to be a little better setup, so that the future can be brought back to the present, and make a real connection. Without that we are just leaves dripping in the wind like we have been doing in the past.
I hope all of you can be able to see, through my limited scope and viewpoint, the goals and tasks that are ahead of us. Perhaps with a collective effort from all of us, a commitment and resolution to move forward, then perhaps the better future will be here today. Thank you.
Dr. Ngee Pong Chang:
Thank you Alex. I’m sorry that we don’t have time to follow up on his suggestions and how to, in fact, try to implement the global vision for effort in redeveloping Chinatown.
We must now press on to the last of this session, by Christopher Kui, who is the executive Director of AAFE (Asian Americans for Equality). That’s a very important organization, because too easily Asian Americans are overlooked in the political and governmental system. And we are pleased that we have a very strong organization, AAFE, that with Christopher Kui, as the executive director. He is also the Chairman of the Renaissance Economic Development Corporation. He holds a degree in Economics from NYU and a recent fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Kui has helped raise over $50 million to build 500 units of housing for low-income individuals and families. And what he’ll be talking to us about is “Chinatown’s Response to 9/11’s Impact on Local Economy and Social/Political Structure”.
Christopher Kui:
Thank you. Thank you to Betty and Tom and other colleagues that actually invited me to come to speak to you about our experience and about our thinking in terms of helping to rebuild Chinatown.
I know that Dr. Ben Chu talked a little bit about the mental health issue, and I think that is a critical issue. Our organization actually just recently received a grant from the [Democrat Foundation] to look at that issue based on the Asian American community and I’m actually very lucky to say that the former deputy executive director of [Hamilton-Astor House] has agreed to come on to lead this mental health wellness project on behalf of our organization. Also, since 9/11 our organization has been very active in terms of advocating for the needs of the Asian American community, particularly in Chinatown, and also has been very instrumental in terms of helping to facilitate and support the small businesses of Chinatown.
Through the Renaissance Economic Development Corporation, we were able to actually help about 200 businesses to receive direct low-interest loans, and much of these loans are really from private sources. We’re very proud of that because we’ve been able to help garment factory owners and restaurant owners. But at the same time, we saw that you couldn’t just help the owners. The program that we developed was one where we were able to provide loans for these businesses, but at the same time, give grants to them so that they can retain the workers. Many of these workers are people who earn less than $12/hour. But if you look at overall, in terms of response from the community, I think it’s been very, very tremendous. All the organizations really have come out and played the part.
I think if you look at it five or ten years from now, we probably will see that this is a turning point in the community, particularly in the Chinese community, that people are really beginning to see beyond their own organization, and their own organizational programs. I think that is because of 9/11. It’s a really tremendous event that impacted the whole community, so in a sense the response in terms of solutions for the community and the workers and all the constituents really require more than one organization to be able to provide. I think that’s an important point.
I also think if you look at the response from the mainstream right now, in terms of private charities, restricting the aid from Canal Street. But if you look, even more importantly, at the government response, because the bottom line is that private charities and private assistance is really a supplement. It should be supplementing the gap that exists from the government sector. In a sense, if you look at the past six months or nine months, they’ve been in many ways leading because the response from the federal government, the SBA, FEMA, has been a non-response in many ways. If you look right now at the existing action plan from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is chartered to really direct all the aid, the $2.7 billion dollars, that is actually causing the achievement from the federal government – the community block grants and actually normally CDBG money is really targeted to the low income community, to assist low income individuals.
In this case, the federal government waived that restriction. The purpose of it is really to be able to allow the money to flow much more freely and much more quickly to the affected community. But look at the aid so far, and also more importantly the vision, the plan. If you look at the action plan today, so far there’s nothing that is mentioned in Chinatown. All the items, the ten points, twelve points, really it’s all centered around the immediate area, the wealthy area and wealthy community. If you look at the housing assistance plan today that put forth for the assistance residents of the affected area, the bulk of Chinatown is getting $1,000, a one-shot deal, whereas the immediate area is getting $12,000 over two years. Granted that my argument, we’re not saying that the people in those areas don’t need it, but if you look at that inequality and that imbalance, it’s a big problem.
Then if you look at that $270 million (I think it’s around $270 million), of the housing assistance, you’re talking about 30, 40 or 50 million going to low income people. Then also if you look at the criteria of that aid, that aid is really saying that every apartment will only get one assistance basically. Then if you look at Chinatown and much of the Lower East Side, many of our families are only getting tripling. So then you have the situation that I think the government agencies are not aware of or don’t know how to deal with it. In that sense, I agree with the previous speaker that we have to really put forth our own agenda.
I think the community has to be in power and then really put forth its own common agenda. What does it need to really rebuild Chinatown? I think that process is taking place. I think it’s a challenge. I think that it’s an opening. I don’t think that we’re there yet, but coming from the experience of the past nine months, I think that there’s the possibility that we could maybe mobilize the community. I know that other affected communities are doing it.
There have been a tremendous number of other organizations that have sprung up to speak on the behalf of the other affected communities, but really if you look at Chinatown, it’s not there. There’s no common action plan/agenda coming from Chinatown. Within the community we always say it’s very difficult to work together, everybody has his own agenda. I think that’s true. I think that’s true for all communities. In that sense, I think 9/11 does give us an opportunity to really perhaps go beyond our usual way of doing business. We’re looking at and encouraging the community to really initiate a planning process.
I think that planning process has to be really transparent, so as not to hide the fact of different people just meeting. There will be meetings of people strategizing and all that, but I think on the whole it has to be a transparent process and that that has to be inclusive. I think the timing is short. If you look at September 11th, it’s only three or four months until September, so you’re talking about three more months that I think our community needs to come together.
Again, I think Alex talked well about some of the issues that we’re facing in our community and some of the proposed solutions. I think that’s perhaps a banker’s perspective. I think also we have residents and local businesses and others, and I think we need to integrate that and present that agenda. My experience so far is that there is an opportunity. I think various levels of government are very open to hear from us.
I had the opportunity to sit on the transition team of the new mayor with people like Ben Chu and Betty Wu and other people. We have people, we have friends, and maybe they will get some of our ideas through. On the state level, with the election coming up the governor and others are much more open to our ideas, so I think that the strength and the need of the community of Chinatown is to come up with a Chinatown plan. Not a CPC plan, not a CCBA plan, but I think it has to be a Chinatown plan. And I think once we come up with that quickly, then I think we can move another step towards the recovery of Chinatown. Thank you.
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