We’re Still Undercounting The Number Of Asians Living in Poverty — and We Still Don’t Know By How Much.

How does one accurately measure poverty and economic hardship in New York City? It’s rarely been a clear-cut answer.

“We know poverty is really complex. It's dynamic. It changes over time,” said Sarah Oltmans, the chief of grant strategy at Robin Hood, a nonprofit that partnered with Columbia University to create annual “Poverty Tracker” reports for the city.

It’s especially complicated for the Asian American community. “Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the model minority, and the disadvantaged subgroups and their experiences are often hidden behind the veil of this stereotype,” explained Xiofang Liu, a survey coordinator at the Columbia Population Research Center. Even though Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in New York City, they also “remain among the most understudied,” and that’s especially true for those “who are economically disadvantaged,” Liu said.

The way the government typically measures poverty is through the Census Bureau, which conducts two separate surveys: the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Decennial Census. The ACS, which asks about income, education, and employment, is conducted every year and is sent to a small sample of households. The census, meanwhile, is every ten years, and is meant to count every single person living in the United States. In theory, the combination of these two things gives politicians an accurate look at how to allocate around $675 billion of federal spending each year.

But in practice, these surveys have often undercounted large swathes of the Asian population. This only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We do not have Asian American poverty rates for 2020,” admitted Christine D’Onofrio, the director of poverty research at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. “We rely on the American Community Survey for our estimates, and the 2020 data quality did not support poverty rates by subgroups due to COVID related problems with the survey.”

These surveys are really “inadequate in a lot of ways,” said Oltmans.

We can glean some information from the surveys. According to the ACS, in 2021 over 1.2 million Asian Americans were living in New York City. Of those people, about 17% of them were living below the poverty line, compared to 10% of white people. This is higher than it was in 2019, but actually lower than the rates in 2015.



Sophie Collyer, a doctoral student from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, said that federal relief programs stopped poverty rates from sharply increasing during the pandemic. But she added that “the poverty rate in New York City is still well above the national average,” and with many of those COVID-era programs expiring, these rates could climb up again.

We also know that food insecurity deepened during the pandemic for Asian Americans.

There was “definitely a huge leap” in the number of Asian Americans using the pantry services, said Bonnie Lumagui, an assistant executive director at Hamilton-Madison House, a non-profit organization in the Chinatown/Two Bridges area.

If you chart out the data, the use of SNAP increased in every borough except for Manhattan, where the number of Asian Americans on food stamps seemed to plummet. But that’s likely because there was an exodus of people moving out — or being evicted — from that borough during the pandemic, said Oltmans. “We found that people were going from areas that maybe had lower poverty rates, and then moving into areas with higher poverty rates. So really concentrating poverty throughout the city, and widening that opportunity gap,” she said.

According to the ACS, over 70,000 Asian American households in New York City relied on food stamps in 2021.



That’s just a quarter of the Asians living in poverty, meaning that a good number of households didn’t take advantage of social services. This hesitancy to use — or unfamiliarity with — government services is a well-documented issue, said Liu.

But the reasons for this gap are multilayered, said Lumagui. For one thing, there might be a language barrier. Even if that person goes to a place like Hamilton-Madison House for help, it’s a costly endeavor to have social workers on staff who can speak not only the major languages like Mandarin and Cantonese, but dialects like Fujian, too. And that’s before factoring in all the Asian ethnicities — and their many dialects — who call New York home.

“Good luck finding all of these different languages that we need, for salaries that are sub-par. I can tell you that it takes us months,” said Lumagui.



Most of the people who can speak the language and are trained as social workers are usually foreigners, but the agencies often can’t afford their work visas. “We've been told that we can't bill back the government for sponsorship,” said Lumagui. “You're talking upwards of $7,000 for each worker. We try our best, but it makes it very challenging to find appropriate staff.”

There’s also the cultural stigma of needing help. “Some people do not want to talk about Medicaid, for example. It's shame. They don't think they need it,” said Lumagui. Even if they’re struggling to make ends meet, “It's not something they want to talk about,” she said.

Compounding all of this is the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. A 2022 report by the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health found that many Asian Americans, especially low income seniors, feared being attacked. As a result, they avoided going to the grocery stores — and they certainly didn’t come out for a census survey, either.

Even as the data shows that poverty is on the decline, Lumagui said the reality is that it feels like challenges have been “mounting” since the pandemic, and that it’s not getting better. “Funding is inadequate. Staffing is limited. It's like you're putting a hose on a three alarm fire, in some respects,” said Lumagui.

Photo: Chinatown, 2023 (Gretchen Smail)

In situations like these, government help is critical, said Liu. But because the surveys consistently undercount the Asian American community, funding is scarce. For example, the Asian American Federation found that between 2000 and 2014, Asian Americans in New York City received just 1.4% of the city’s social services, despite accounting for 33% of the population growth.

Worse, because the government is undercounting the Asian American community, it’s very “likely [that they’re] underestimating the poverty level,” said Liu. In Columbia’s 2020 Poverty Tracker report, they estimated that rather than 17%, the real rate of Asian American poverty is probably closer to 23% — the highest of all ethnic groups alongside Latinos.

The result is that the Asian American community is likely being even more underfunded than we originally thought. “It's very critical for us to have accurate data on poverty and the disadvantages among the Asian American population,” said Liu. Funding could go towards more “linguistically and culturally supportive programs” — like more translators, technology classes, and diverse food pantries — if the city actually knew of the full scope of the issue.

Lumagui agreed. “There are so many who suffer in silence because they can't communicate,” said Lumagui. “And if you don't have the resources and the services to enable communication, it becomes really challenging. It's really easy for them to be left out.”