Good afternoon, my name is Keming Lu. I’m a professor at Medgar Evers College, CUNY as well. And I’m very honored to introduce to you today our three honored guests and experts in the field of research. As we all know, research is the key to advancement and getting grant money is key to getting anything published and key to advancement and promotion, especially in academia.
Without much ado, allow me to introduce to you the three honored guests. Dr. Tarry Hum is a published author who is an Assistant Professor at the Queens College, CUNY. She’s currently working on a Ford Foundation funded research project on multi-ethnic Asian Latino neighborhoods entitled, “Global Neighborhoods in New York City: Locating Boundaries and Common Interests.”
Sitting in the middle is Mr. Richard Rothbard, who is the Interim Executive Director of the Research Foundation of CUNY.
To your left, is Dr. Shao-Chee Sim, who is the Director of Research at the Asian American Federation of New York, and author of the report 9/11. I think this morning someone held up that report, so thank you for being here with us, and I’ll shift the podium to you.
Dr. Tarry Hum:
Thank you. Today the program is on research challenges and strategies, and I’m going to talk specifically about challenges in data collection for community studies. Even before 9/11, many community leaders were already sounding the alarm about Chinatown’s economic well being, in particular because of the multiplier effects of a declining garment industry. During the year between February 2000 and February 2001, I worked with a community organization, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, on a community survey to locate emerging and established Asian neighborhoods, and to determine if and which Asian neighborhoods constitute communities of interest. That is when residents have shared social, economic, and/or political interests.
The surveys we conducted in Chinatown underscored the fragile state of the local economy, and as the post 9/11 activities moved from relief to recovery and rebuilding, the need for comprehensive, long-term community planning and sustainable developmental solutions was even more urgent. I’m going to spend my few minutes talking about [ALDA’s] Community Service Project to illustrate the challenges in collecting data for community studies, as well as to highlight the findings for the Chinatown/Lower East Side neighborhood.
During the one year period that we conducted the Community Survey Project, we collected 458 surveys. Eighty-seven of them were from Chinatown/Lower East Side. The other neighborhoods surveyed in the study included Sunset Park, Flushing, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Richmond Hill, and Queens Village. Those of us who are involved in community surveys or community studies know that data resources, particularly about immigrant neighborhoods, their local economies and their development needs and concerns, are fairly limited at best.
One of the rationales for ALDA’s study was to build that knowledge gap about local neighborhood issues and needs. To do this we developed a comprehensive four page survey, and we had two versions of this survey – one for organizational staff, and the other for neighborhood residents. In addition to common core questions, the resident survey included questions on housing type, how long one had lived in their neighborhood, their occupation, place of employment, the commute mode, and the time that it took for them to commute. The staff survey had questions about organizational mission and activities.
In addition to collecting basic demographic and background information, such as ethnic and racial identity, nativity, language ability, education level, age and gender, we also asked respondents about their perception of the racial, ethnic and linguistic composition of their neighborhoods and what they think are neighborhood issues and concerns. We also had a mapping component in which we asked respondents to draw the boundaries of their neighborhoods. Then we asked them how the surrounding area outside of their neighborhood is different from the area that constitutes their neighborhood. Then we asked what neighborhoods the respondent thinks are similar to their own neighborhood.
As I noted, we conducted the Community Survey Project during a one year period from February 2000 to February 2001. We trained over 25 volunteers, many of whom were bilingual in various Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Urdu, and Hindi. The surveys were conducted face to face and typically took twenty minutes to an hour to complete. Given the limitations of our time, I will discuss the findings for the question (only one question) about neighborhood concerns for one neighborhood, the Chinatown/East Side neighborhood. Clearly, we’ll see that the responses already underscored the community’s economic development prior to September 11th.
Respondents were asked, “What are the most important issues that concern your neighborhood?” The question was open-ended and there was no limit as to how many issues a respondent could list. The responses were then recoded into several general categories pertaining to: Other, Public Safety, Employment, Education, Neighborhood Quality, Race and Ethnic Relations, Housing, Youth, Social Service Needs, etc. The top two concerns for Chinatown respondents were Employment and Housing related.
The key employment concerns were low wages, sweatshop conditions, worker rights, and job availability. Respondents expressed concern about underemployment and unemployment and workers’ future prospects given the decline of the garment industry. In addition to employment issues, housing and specifically issues related to the lack of affordable housing, decrepit conditions, and the inability to hold landlords accountable to substandard conditions such as the lack of hot water. Heat, during the winter, was a key neighborhood concern. In addition, several respondents also expressed concern over increasing rents and the observation that more expensive buildings were moving in.
Concerns about immigrant issues and education were also prominent for Chinatown/Lower East Side respondents. These issues are wide ranging, from concerns about undocumented immigrants, specifically regarding the debts that are incurred in their migration, as well as concerns of discrimination, to the need for more immigrant services, especially ESL, since the inability to speak English reinforces a sense of isolation. This was reflected in one respondent’s comment that she can’t leave Chinatown. The need for ESL was also a key education concern that included the need for bilingual teachers, the need to address overcrowded classrooms and a sense poor quality education. These respondent concerns underscored longstanding economic development needs of Chinatown’s immigrant working class population.
Again, as we move from relief to rebuilding, these concerns should inform further research and community planning. I’m going to conclude by briefly discussing three challenges to collecting data for community studies, and these challenges are: defining neighborhood boundaries, defining community stakeholders, and generating both human and financial capital and resources to conduct community studies.
In terms of defining the neighborhood boundaries, it’s clear that different data resources use different definitions for neighborhood boundaries, such as the census track or zip code or community board district. It’s difficult to synthesize official data resources for neighborhood and community studies because of these varying definitions. Moreover, we learned that defining neighborhood boundaries is highly subjective, and this is clear in the arbitrary Chinatown boundaries for relief assistance, which Shao-Chee Sim will talk about.
A second concern is defining community stakeholders. While neighborhood institutions including non-profit organizations have the greatest resources to articulate community and neighborhood concerns and issues, ALDA had a very broad definition of community stakeholders, because we especially wanted to survey neighborhood residents and immigrant populations who typically have the least amount of resources and power to have their views heard. Outreach strategies that are inclusive of all community stakeholders and the challenges to do this are great if the population is immigrant and non-English speaking.
Finally community studies is extremely labor intensive. I noticed that we had recruited over 25 volunteers, so there is the need to recruit lots of volunteers, to train them and to keep them interested in the project. I think there’s potential for university and community collaboration, and the integration of research that’s both useful to the community, that also provides an important learning experience for students. There is a great potential here that we may need to tap more. I taught a class on Asian Americans in New York City, and our students were able to participate in the data collection. We also trained volunteers from Columbia Law School who received credit for working with ALDA, which is a non-profit organization. So I think I’ll end with that.
Keming Liu:
You have some time.
Dr. Tarry Hum:
I thought it would be more conversational, so I would be ready to take questions about the survey, etc.
Keming Liu:
Sure, we’ll leave the questions for later on, and we’ll move on to Mr. Rothbard.
Richard Rothbard:
Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. The topic of my talk this afternoon is “How the Research Foundation Supports Sponsored Activity.” First let me thank Dr. Tam for inviting me to participate in the workshop. I’d like to congratulate him and Dr. Sung and the entire Institute for putting together this conference. It’s very important. It’s nice to share the day with this distinguished panel. Time is short I know, you must have questions, so I’ll keep my remarks brief.
First of all, let me see by a show of hands how many in the audience are associated in some way with the City University of New York? Ok, about 2/3. Thank you. Well let me start off by telling you something about the Research Foundation. The first thing I have to do is tell you what the Research Foundation is not. The Research Foundation is not an organization that conducts research at the City University of New York. Nor are we an organization that gives away money for people to conduct research at the City University of New York or anywhere else. Now if you’re confused, don’t worry about it, you’re not alone. When many people hear the name Research Foundation, they naturally assume that we are engaged in research or in grant making, but that’s not what we do.
If we don’t do research and we don’t do grant making, why are we called the Research Foundation and what exactly do we do? The Research Foundation, or the RF, is a full service host award fiscal agent of university sponsored programs. What this means is when a faculty member or other employee of the university receives a grant or contract from a governmental agency or from a private foundation, the Research Foundation is the institution that deals with the many details associated with administration of those awards, and believe me there are thousands of details associated with administration of research grants.
The RF is the employer of all personal who are paid on grants and contracts. We run our own payroll and our own benefits program. Last year we issued over 11,000 in W-2 wage statements. That makes the Research Foundation a larger employer than the eight largest colleges of the City University of New York combined. So we’re a fairly large organization and a very well kept secret sometimes.
The RF also provides purchasing and accounts payables services for non-personnel expenditures. We perform all legal work on sponsored activity agreements and we are responsible for all accounting functions. We assure that the frequently complex terms of the awards are fulfilled and that appropriate documentation is maintained and provided to award sponsors, that is the people who give you money to do the research. And we also undertake a variety of other tasks. These include assisting faculty in protecting and commercializing intellectual property – that is insuring that discoveries and inventions remain the property of those responsible for their production – along with seeking opportunities to commercialize those products. We also oversee compliance with rules and regulations governing the use of human subjects in research, the use of animals and their care, environmental and radiological safety, and conflicts of interest.
We work closely with the individual principle investigators on the campuses, as well as with the college grant officers. These are the professionals responsible for assisting faculty and others locally in exploiting grant opportunities and implementing awards. And by the way, our activities are not restricted to the City University of New York, we provide these services to a host of other organizations as well, and we’re looking forward to expanding those opportunities in the future. We exist and we were formed to do all of this so that faculty can concentrate on obtaining grants and contracts and carrying out their research activities. We charge a modest fee for our services and it is this revenue that enables us to pay for our operating expenses and the cost of a central staff of about 130 people.
As a not for profit private educational corporation, the Research Foundation offers a degree of flexibility to researchers in hiring and purchasing that would not be possible if they had to conduct their business through the university’s normal channels. The Research Foundation oversaw $222,000,000 in award activity in the fiscal year 2001, which is the last year we have complete figures for. And for the five-year period ending 2001, award activity totaled nearly $840,000,000. That is, we administered $840,000,000 for faculty and others over the last five years at the university and elsewhere.
The awards come from every level of government – federal, state and city, as well as from numerous private organizations. Award areas include research, training, program development, institutional improvement, equipment, and student support services. Subjects receiving funding are extremely diverse and include such things as treatment of middle ear infusion, the link between fat and carbohydrate in children and adults, transportation research, the interaction of language and dialect, and the internal migration in China.
As you can imagine from the nature of our business, there’s an awful lot of paperwork. Contracts, payroll forms, financial reports, etc. An ongoing effort at the Foundation seeks to eliminate this heavy dependence on paper records and paper processing. We have developed many state of the art electronic systems. Most of them are web based. These facilitate the work of the Foundation and our interaction with the research community. This has yielded and will continue to yield significant dividends in terms of speed and reliability.
Speaking of the web, we have a website. Here is the most important piece of information I’m going to give you today. The Research Foundation website is www.rfcuny.org. That’s www.rfcuny.org. It’s an important resource for the research community, not just the CUNY research community, but anyone can come to our site and visit. This is where you’ll find information on everything from new grant opportunities to direct deposit procedures. Please visit our site the next time you’re online and you’ll discover a wealth of information just a mouse click away.
What can the RF do in the area of research challenges, findings, and opportunities (which is the title of today’s workshop)? The answer, I think, is we can provide a robust, experienced, and responsive infrastructure to help identify grant and contract opportunities, facilitate collaborations across the university and beyond to secure sponsored activity, and then provide the administrative infrastructure necessary to carry out the research enterprise.
If ever there was a time that New York needed the collective talent and wisdom of the university and the community, it is now. If ever there was a time when opportunities to have and direct and positive impact abound, it is now. The Research Foundation and all of us there look forward to working with you and everybody else in the community to support this effort.
I would invite any of you who would like to learn more about the Research Foundation in general, or any specific questions that you might have, if you can’t ask me today, please feel free to contact me. If you go to our website, you’ll find the directory and you’ll find me listed in there and you just click on my name and an email screen will come up. I promise to respond in a timely fashion. So thank you very much for your attention.
Keming Liu:
Thank you. I’m sure you’ll be bombarded with email. Get your money ready. Alright, our next panelist is Dr. Sim.
Dr. Shao-Chee Sim:
Many of you heard this morning about the Chinatown Impact Study. What I’m going to focus the discussion on right now is more in terms of me as a researcher looking back at this study and reflecting on the challenges that we faced at the initial phase, what type of strategies we adopted and how it eventually evolved over the course of the three or four month period.
As many of us sitting here are very well aware, in the aftermath of 9/11, Chinatown, as a community, was suffering. We all have different types of personal or professional relationships with residents, workers or organizations in the community. There were a lot of anecdotal statements being made. At the same time major relief agencies were slowly but gradually acting to respond to crises in Chinatown, especially dealing with workers who lost their jobs, residents who had to deal with a number of the consequences. In light of that, the Asian American Federation has always been in the forefront in terms of relief activities and helping out different human service organizations in Chinatown.
In light of the lack we feel in terms of this lack of concrete discussion, and even furthermore, this lack of documentation to use as the basis of any type of rational discussion for planning purposes, it’s extremely important for us to put together a document that systematically documents the impacts, as well as disseminates the results.
Remember this was around the December time period. At that time we had no idea about how the report was going to evolve, or even how we were going to start to do research. We knew a lot of different groups and different organizations were doing different things. I, myself, in reading Chinese newspapers on a daily basis, read a lot of stories about it. One of the major challenges was the time frame that we had to deal with. We also understood at the time that a lot of discussions were happening about Lower Manhattan redevelopment. Everyone focused their discussion and focus on the sixteen acres, Ground Zero, in what shape or form they wanted it to become.
There are tons of federal monies flowing in from the federal government, with the creation of LMDC. We felt it was very important to put out a document in a very short time table. In fact, I keep raising this concept of short time frame. I think a lot of us in this room who have been doing research understand that research takes longer than just three months. A lot of times many of you have other responsibilities. I, myself, am also an Adjunct at the New School. It’s not easy to put something in such a short period of time, given the immense scope and challenges that we had to face. That’s definitely one of the major challenges that we had to face. We were hearing a rumor at the time saying that the newly appointed Chairman of LMDC was going to make a major public policy move around the mid-March timeframe so we thought, we need to shoot for March. That’s what we were thinking about.
Resources. At that time, I was the only researcher that was working full time at the Federation. The rest of the staff focused more on relief planning and other types of activities. So the question I kept asking myself was, how the hell am I going to pull this off? Yes, I have public policy background, especially in the area of public finance, but I am not a so-called traditional Chinatown scholar or one on impacted economies in any sense. That was the second challenge.
The third major challenge I faced was there’s virtually nothing going on in terms of… I mean, if you look for any scholarly work or any research about Chinatown, especially in the more recent period, it was very, very difficult for me to track down any type of report or books that talk about even the very basic characteristics of the community. How many people are there? How many businesses are there? How many workers are there? All this basic information that was so important to us, especially where we were doing an impact assessment, we needed to figure out what the pre-September 11th information was.
Those were the three major challenges, and then a forth one, that I think many of us researchers tend not to pay attention to, is that it’s also how do you use your research results to disseminate and to influence the larger public policy making. I think drawing that connection was a key thing for us. Of course at the time, our expectation was very low and we didn’t set our goal very high. We just said, let’s give it a try, given all these constraints and our political motivation. We wanted to be able to use it as an advocacy document to help the community, so that other groups can also use it. That set the context in terms of where we were coming from in December.
I don’t know if it was me being very young, ambitious and restless, but I basically said hey, if the LMDC is going to move very fast, if their train is moving very fast right now, let’s try to put something out in mid-March or toward the later part of March. It was in early January that I was talking about that. That was kind of the goal that we set for ourselves. In terms of doing it, I mentioned resources within the Federation. I reached out to many different groups and organizations. What we found out was that anyone could have done the report. Anyone could have issued a statement about impact on Chinatown, but it’s much better to do it when you have created some type of collaborative relationship with more of the mainstream research institutions and the advocacy groups out there. Again, this was with our basically very, very little experience dealing with the mainstream institutions.
We were actually very pleasantly surprised that we could reach out to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that senior economists were on board right away. The officers at the bank said, is there some thing we can help you guys with? We reached out to the fiscal policy institute, the group that actually issued an economic impact report, ten days after 9/11, documenting the job losses in the entire New York City. I was very lucky actually to get the assistance of [Paul Orf], who works at UCLA at the Regional Center for Policy Study. That’s the kind of framework that we were going on.
In our advisory committee, we were also trying to reach out to both, economists, scholars, political scientists, not only from the University, but also from the New York City Chamber of Commerce, folks that have been doing work in this area, and the Federal Reserve Bank. Within the community, we understood that the document is not going to go very far unless you have the endorsement of different groups in the community.
Some of you may know, walking through Chinatown, it’s like walking through a land mine basically. If you don’t have the background, if you don’t have the sensitivity and sophistication, you don’t know who you are offending. So we approached it with a great deal of care and a great deal of sensitivity. I give a great deal of credit to the organization who was able to pull in the business sector, the labor sector, the civic organizations, the major social service organizations in the community to participate on the study of the advisory committee. So that’s the framework that really generated a lot of momentum to us even before we collected any data.
I also used a lot of volunteers. We were able to recruit at least 15 volunteers to work on different pieces of the research on this project. The Federal Reserve Bank actually donated some staff time to us. They had staff members helping us to analyze data. They were extremely instrumental in doing the economic employment and job loss estimation together with us. You can call it timely or very fortunate or whatever, but that was the approach that we took.
The third approach that we took in this Chinatown Impact Study, like Tarry was saying, was trying to study what the unique analysis was in this study. What is it that we are trying to study? Are we trying to study Chinatown as a community? Are we trying to study all businesses in the Chinatown community? Or are we just studying the Chinese owned businesses in the Chinatown community.
The whole notion of boundary, it gets political and it’s evolving all the time. Basically with the advice of the advisory committee, we decided to base it on two major criteria, both in terms of the residential population, based on the 2000 census data, as well as on the business concentration, based on the business data that we were able to collect. That’s how we defined Chinatown, and I think we even went one step further. We clearly stated in the report that we only looked at the impact of 9/11 on Chinese owned and Chinese operated businesses and Chinese workers. Because many of you know, let’s say, in Little Italy, virtually, yes it’s still called Little Italy, a lot of the stores are not owned by Chinese, and yet Chinese residents live on the second or fifth floor of the building. So you know, that’s the kind of blurry lines that we had to deal with. We also understood that once you pull out a line or a boundary area, it’s going to get highly political. So that was the approach that we took with our analysis.
That was actually a major breakthrough for us in terms of the conceptualization of the study. What happened was this, besides our later approaches in terms of collecting the data from relief agencies, businesses, community organizations, banks, in terms of who are we focusing on? Are we focusing on the Chinese businesses, versus non-Chinese businesses? And in fact because of the narrowly, narrowly defined boundary we were able to refute what, for instance, the SBA (the Small Business Association) kept saying that Chinatown businesses have over a quarter of the loans being made. In fact they were using Chinatown as the area that covered the entire four zip codes in Chinatown. 10002; 10012; 10013; and 10038, and they explained the boundary covered South Street Seaport; it covered some part of Noho and Soho. It’s more than just Chinatown. We thought there’s definitely misinformation and miscommunication. This study was able to provide that solid basis for public policy debate and discussion. That’s the part on analysis.
Gathering data from different sources was actually quite a challenge. When I first started, I knew different people were doing different things. I had no idea what I was going to be able to collect and what I was not going to be able to collect. But to my big surprise, many of the major relief agencies were very accessible to our requests, and some of them worked with us in terms of narrowing down the scope of what we were looking at, like Safe Horizon, the major relief agency that’s been giving cash assistance to laid off and affected workers.
We have so far been able to study over 5,000 impacted workers in the area. They were able to share their individual data in terms of what industry they were in and what was their pre and post September 11th earnings. That was very critical for us. And on top of that we are now moving into trying to expand the 5,000 names to the possibility of incorporating, I would say the needs of close to 10,000 workers in Chinatown. There was a major breakthrough. Many of the businesses that were done by different organizations, we were able to incorporate some of those findings and results in our studies and really try to do a comprehensive assessment of what happened two weeks after 9/11, three months after 9/11, and five or six months after 9/11. That’s the part on data sources.
I think it’s very encouraging to meet many of you who will be interested in doing this area of research. There is data and kinds of information available regarding different organizations, whether it’s public or private. It’s a matter of positioning yourself and being aggressive, and being out there asking for the data. Emphasize the need of the research and the importance of the research. So that’s the part on data.
I just want to talk a little bit about estimation of employment and job loss. I believe that one of the major breakthroughs for us was the ability to estimate what was the baseline for Chinatown employment. I think if we did not have the baseline employment for Chinatown, it would be very hard for us to speak about the impact. For every four workers in Chinatown, one of them was laid off in the first 2 weeks after 9/11. One quarter of the workforce of Chinatown was laid off three months after 9/11. Again it was a struggle for us. I worked very intensely with economists from FRI, from the Federal Reserve Institute, trying to make some sense and trying to come up with a reasonable range in terms of these estimations. We were very happy that based on the relief agencies’ data that we were getting some mainstream labor that we were looking at, that we were able to come up with a baseline for Chinatown labor force, what happened two weeks after 9/11, and three months after 9/11.
Again, in terms of crafting your language, sending the message out to politicians and to media alike, it’s so important to craft it in a clear-cut and concise way that is convincing and credible. That’s what happened. That’s the part on estimation of employment and job loss.
The last thing I want to talk about is our strategy in terms of disseminating the research results. Yes, of course, we had no idea that the press event was actually a huge draw when we formerly released the report a little less than a month ago. Over 40 reporters came. I don’t mean the Chinese language newspaper reporters, these were mainstream reporters. It was well covered by the TV, the radio networks. In fact, the day of the press conference, we had an exclusive interview with Wall St. Journal, and National Public Radio, so that the stories did go out to the rest of the country. It was just a momentum catching thing for us. What we were worried about, the day before the press conference, was that we only had five RSVPs for the press conference. And you know what? They were all Chinese language newspapers.
We had no clue and the day of the press conference, people just kept pouring in and it really surprised us a great deal. The Associated Press, who picked up the story was actually able to send the message out across…I believe New York One was reporting the story every 10 or 20 minutes or so, so by the end of the day, Cao O was invited to a TV talk show to discuss the impact. Even now, we’re still getting phone calls from both the national and international media about this Impact Study. It was completely beyond our expectations. We wanted to make an impact. We wanted to reach out, but we never thought it was going to be this great.
I think to a certain extent, it has to do with the issue of timing. Initially we were thinking about, let’s put out something for March 11th, which would have been six months after September 11th. Let’s see when people are starting to focus on September 11th and six months after maybe that would be a good chance to get our news on Daily News or Newsday. We weren’t even thinking about the New York Times or Wall St. Journal. But because of our limited capacity, we were not able to do that. I think timing-wise it was great because had we done it in March, I don’t think we would have been able to gather the kind of attention from the media, from the politicians.
The other thing I want to talk about in terms of the disseminating of the research we found is that while it’s so important to have a strong basis for your estimations and your research methodologies, it’s equally important to work from the executive summary part. The sort of findings that we put out are very simple. Anyone could have understood it.
I think for us, it’s also a learning experience. We never had to deal with this sort of attention before. And it’s not my intention to continually stay in the spotlight. I think more importantly in terms of influencing the public policy making, we’ve been getting letters from the state control office, the governor’s office, the deputy mayor for economic development got an advance copy of the report the day before the press conference. We had a briefing with him and we continued to take advantage of this opportunity of the momentum that the report has created to advocate for the community’s behalf, to bring more attention to Chinatown issues.
I’d be happy to speak to any one of you after this panel if you would like to talk more about the report.
Keming Liu:
Thank you very much. I’m sure many of you have questions. Raise your questions and speak loud so people can hear you.
Audience Member:
My name is [Cecelia Gomaz]. I’m in charge of a media non-profit organization called Asian Women in Media. First of all, I would like to congratulate you Mr. Sim for the good media releases that you’ve come out. You’ve actually helped Asians break through to the mainstream. And it was a real break through. Now what’s coming in focus are the mental health problems as a result of 9/11. Are you planning to do further research about the economic impact and relate it to the mental health problems of the children that were right there at Ground Zero in Chinatown? I think that’s very important. It’s a very tough job, but now the children must be suffering. So I think that’s another important issue.
Dr. Shao-Chee Sim:
Yeah, there are two major research projects that we are working on right now after the release of the interim report. One is that we will continue to track and to evaluate the impact on businesses and workers in Chinatown. We do plan to issue some sort of document, I don’t know whether it’s a final report or something else on Chinatown’s impact. We have set the work in motion, we have built relationships with different organizations.
To answer your question about mental health, we were very fortunate, again because of the momentum that we generated and outside interests in terms of what’s going on in the community. We did receive a grant from the [Robin Wood Johnson Foundation] and we will doing a mental health needs assessment, actually working with researchers from CUNY, Columbia University and Seton Hall University.
Keming Liu:
Thank you.
Audience Member:
This question is for Dr. Hum and Dr. Sim. What segment of the short term and long term job loss consisted of the commuter populations, and therefore what were the economic reverberations that were experienced? Also as a result of job losses.
Dr. Tarry Hum:
I thought your study that some of the workers, I think 1/3 of the workers that lost their jobs lived in the satellite Chinatowns in Brooklyn and Queens.
Dr. Shao-Chee Sim:
Yeah, actually the data provided by UNITE, the garment worker’s union, among the unionized garment workers, more than half of the unionized garment workers do not live in Chinatown, but they work in Chinatown. In fact, one of the highlights of the report was that we were able to show the close linkages between the Chinatown community and Brooklyn Chinese community and the Flushing Chinese community.
I do believe that the impact has reverberated in other ethnic communities. However, we also have to deal with the issue of substitution. To what extent when the Chinatown businesses are declining, the businesses in the Brooklyn and Queens have picked up. That’s a more complicated research question. I think this report is doing a great job in documenting that sort of impact.
Dr. Tarry Hum:
And I guess with respect to the garment industry, most of the garment industry in Chinatown is unionized, where that’s not the case in the other boroughs. So if in fact there is spillover to the other satellite Chinatowns it may also be under worse conditions and with less monitoring of those conditions than what would exist in Chinatown with the presence of the unions. So those are things that need to be addressed as concerns.
Audience Member:
I’m interested in housing issues and I would like to hear Dr. Hum talk a little bit more about specifics and the impressions of Chinatown residents about their housing and about the protections they get from the local government – what they think is good and bad.
And I’d also like to hear Dr. Sim talk in that domain also, about the recovery efforts and the impressions of Chinatown residents about the adequacy of the attention they got from the community agencies, and what they felt were good and bad.
Dr. Tarry Hum:
I actually think that the substandard…I mean, you were talking about the lack of baseline information about Chinatown – state of the economy, jobs and housing. I actually think that housing conditions and substandard housing conditions are in Chinatown is fairly well documented. I think Councilman Liu has a study on Chinatown, Janet Lin did a study on Chinatown, and also our survey in terms of our respondents finding that there was a lack of affordable housing, that there’s overcrowded housing and the conditions of their housing are substandard is nothing that shocked anybody that knows Chinatown.
I think added to these substandard conditions, what we saw among the respondents was that there were also pressures that were happening in that community. So there were concerns about displacement as well.
To answer your question about how responsive Chinatown residents feels the government agencies are at addressing their needs, we didn’t ask that specifically. That would be an interesting question. We didn’t ask that specifically in the survey, but what is clear are the housing needs in Chinatown. But again I think that there are other studies that also substantiate that.
Dr. Shao-Chee Sim:
In terms of questions on relief efforts, I guess I have two points. On one level, as pointed out in my presentation this morning, immediately after September 11th, FEMA and some leading relief agencies drew a line on Canal St, using that as a boundary for their relief agencies. What it means to the Chinatown community was devastating.
You’re talking about 80% of the garment factories located on the north side of Canal Street, which basically made them ineligible to apply for any type of government assistance. Immediately after FEMA’s policy and guidelines, groups like the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and Safe Horizon followed suit and followed the basic boundary. There are many, many impacted workers and residents who are not qualified to get assistance. The story is still carrying a lot of leg right now. There was a New York Times article that came out a couple of weeks ago. So that’s one in terms the relief efforts.
I guess on another level what we need to recognize – let me just get rid of my head as a researcher, just be as a concerned Asian American. You’re dealing with an unprecedented level of job loss in Chinatown. When you’re dealing in terms of the thousands of people loosing their jobs, I think what we really need to think more…it’s not only about, let’s try to figure out how much rent subsidy they need, or whether we can help them pay their rent bill or utility bill for the next two months. I think the conversation that is not happening right now is how can we help these laid off workers to rebuild their human capital?
We know for a fact that many of these are immigrant workers in their 40s and 50s who speak very little English, have very little transferable skills in the mainstream job market. How do other institutions, such as the CUNY classrooms, how CUNY or any other government agencies can seize on this opportunity.
Let’s try to improve on the human capital. If they need ESL training, give them ESL training. If they need computer classes, let’s make them more marketable in a non-Chinatown setting type of environment. When you’re dealing with one quarter of the labor force being out of a job, that’s what New York City had to deal with in the 1930s. It’s very unfortunate to draw that comparison, but at the same time, this is the Chinatown community and this may just be a local community issue but it does have huge national implications and I think now is the time for us to seize on this opportunity to continue to talk about it, raise awareness and advocate on the community’s behalf.
Keming Liu:
Thank you. Let’s see, unfortunately I think we’ll end here because there’s another workshop starting right now 3:45. I’d love to entertain everyone’s questions. I think you should get in touch with each panelist and exchange your email and phone number and continue your discussions afterwards. Thank you so much.
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