The rats – bold, tenacious and totally fearless – are what bothered him the most. Prem, who requested his last name not be used, says the rodents have the run of the old apartment he shares in Baltimore City, Maryland, with five other Nepali men, most of them undocumented.

“It is impossible to have beds for six people in two rooms,” he said. “So we have small roll-out beds or mattresses on the floor. There are many rats running around the apartment and it’s difficult to catch them. We can’t complain. The landlord doesn’t care. He knows we have to live here and have no choice.”

Prem, who is from the town of Pokhara, Nepal, had a small business and a modest life there. “It was quite comfortable, though not many facilities. There was safe water, enough rooms to sleep, enough to eat, enough everything.” He had heard many stories about America’s riches and greatness, but has been thrown instead into the depths of its ugly underbelly.

So how do six strangers manage to live together in two rooms?

“It’s all about compromise,” says Prem, who works at a gas station. “We have only one toilet and there are problems with the water and a leaking roof. There is not enough heat or hot water. Six people working at different times is hard. They all use the bathroom, eat and come in at different times, some at night. So you can’t sleep very well.”

One hears of the great successes of the South Asian community, of their huge McMansions that have more bathrooms than bedrooms, and more bedrooms than people. But Prem’s life is a reality too and there are countless others like him, living in homes that hardly deserve the name.

“Since the late 80s and 90s the nature of the influx of immigrants has changed drastically. It’s not just the engineers and the doctors any more; it’s really low income, underclass immigrants, and that includes South Asian immigrants, who are undergoing a very difficult time here to make ends meet,” said Partha Banerjee, executive director of New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, a statewide advocacy and policy organization for immigrant rights and justice based in Newark, NJ. The immigration status of many of these newcomers is in limbo and impeded by language access as they struggle with health and housing issues.

The problem is more acute in urban areas where new immigrants tend to congregate, where the rents are very expensive, well outside the means of the below-minimum wage that some of the undocumented people make.

“The rents are so high, they are being driven out of the cities. Some landlords take advantage of the immigration status of these people and because they are caught between a rock and a hard place, if you will, they have no means to go to law enforcement or a lawyer, if they are denied fair housing,” Banerjee added.

Poverty is the great leveler and it is making its way into the affluent suburbs too.

Pockets of the poor can be found in Jersey City, Camden, Atlantic City and even some areas in Bergen County and Palisades Park.

“Even in the so-called rich Indian pockets of Edison or Metro Park or Metuchen some pockets are really bad. It could be workers in the back of a kitchen washing dishes – people don’t even know they exist – they are doing that and nothing but that, because they don’t have the power of language or education or they do not have a proper immigration status. So these people are living in the same area, but in complete darkness, if you will,” Banerjee said.

The problem is perhaps most acute in the urban sprawl of New York City, which attracts so many wanderers and dreamers and undocumented workers.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau and New York City Department of Planning, immigrant renters are three times as likely to live in overcrowded conditions as native-born New Yorkers, and immigrant renters are 62 percent more likely to live in dangerous housing conditions

Research done by Chhaya Community Development Corporation, a Jackson Heights-based housing advocacy group, shows that South Asian Americans live in the most overcrowded housing and pay much higher rents than other New Yorkers.

One-fourth of South Asian American rental households are overcrowded by federal and municipal standards of no more than one person per room. Only 8.2 percent of New York City’s general population falls into that category. In addition to overcrowding, living in illegally converted units is commonplace for South Asian American families. The extended family structure and low income make even window-less illegal basement apartments a viable home.

One out of every four New York state households paid over half their incomes for housing, a rent-to-income burden that is impossible to bear for low-income households. A worker earning the minimum wage ($6 per hour) would have to work 121 hours a week to afford the fair market rental of $945 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in New York. Many New York households cannot afford to pay the fair market rent and housing advocates estimate there are 100,000 illegal apartments in New York City.

“Many of New York’s desi immigrants are caught in a shadowy triangle of low wages, substandard living conditions, and pervasive fear of the growing assault on immigrants in today’s changing political climate,” said Suman Raghunathan, interim director of Chhaya CDC. “Some of these issues are very specific to New York, given the type of urban density that we do have here. It’s certainly hard because New York has a legendary housing gap. It’s an issue that needs to be addressed.”

Tenants are totally at their landlord’s mercy and have to accept whatever he provides to them. Sometimes the housing violates sanitation or fair housing standards, sometimes landlords don’t provide heat or hot water, and sometimes there are no windows in these basement apartments.

According to Chhaya CDC, housing patterns for South Asian Americans vary considerably: The number of homeowners in Queens, for example, is much higher than in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. Yet, the proportion of renters in Queens who live in unregulated units is much higher than the other boroughs.

The largest population of South Asian Americans in the city can be found in Queens, where at least 40 percent of each South Asian ethnic group resides. Brooklyn has the next largest community. Their concentration is in mostly low- to moderate-income communities. Homeownership for South Asian Americans of moderate income is often a tough battle, because of predatory lending practices, often by members of their own community. Only one-fourth of South Asian Americans are homeowners in the city.

According to Chhaya, in the process of purchasing homes, low-income South Asians commonly experience limited options in financing, incur higher loan fees and pay more for their homes than New York City homeowners in general.

Poor housing often contributes to poor health: Among New York City’s South Asian communities, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi have been identified as two of the five communities most affected by childhood lead poisoning and account for at least a quarter of the total lead poisoned children in New York City, according to a 2002 report by city’s Department of Health and Human Services. Although lead paint has been banned in residential housing in New York, the lead dust from deteriorating lead paint in older housing continues to be the primary source of childhood lead poisoning.

Affected children can develop learning and behavioral problems, delayed growth and the ill-affects can persist even after the blood lead level has declined. Nearly 4 percent of the 587 cases requiring intervention in 2003 were from Bangladesh or Pakistan, far disproportion to their overall numbers in the population of New York.

“We found a great percentage of South Asians were affected by lead poisoning simply because they lived in over-crowded conditions in illegal basements, and in houses that were of substandard quality,” says Tenzing Chadotsang of Chhaya. “They didn’t know their rights and landlords didn’t inform them about the problems of lead poisoning.”

Chhaya’s research showed that certain neighborhoods in Queens that had a high percentage of buildings built before 1960 also had a high percentage of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis living there.

“The two were co-related. It wasn’t just old housing there; it was also the highest percentage of the community living there. These homes were all over Queens, but mostly in the Astoria and Jackson Heights area,” said Chadotsang.