The corner where Greenwich Street meets Ninth Avenue could be a perfect movie set for a posh New York living. From the angle where the traffic light dangles against the century-old brick building in the background, and the row of cozy restaurants that are barely set back on the sidewalk, it is a quintessential picture of neighborhood without a feeling of depravity.
But that’s not everything.
Down the block, at the basement of an Indian-owned liquor store, the setting is entirely different from the picture outside. Susan Fernandez, a 32-year-old domestic helper, lives there. With a ceiling that is almost touching her head, and a small, windowless space where sunlight has no way to filter through, she shares the box-type basement with not just one roommate, but four: Lisa, Sarah, Jennifer and Marie.
The five Filipino immigrants cramped themselves into a single room, which they rent for $875 a month. The rent, plus the cost of utilities, is divided equally.
Lisa, 29, who is a part-time student and squeezes odd jobs in between, stays on a futon couch. On the floor, almost against the legs of the dining table, is where her friend, Sarah, pitches an inflatable bed at night. After her brief stay in San Francisco, Ca., 28-year-old Sarah flew to New York City in her pursuit to find a better job. She now works as an office-cleaner in the Upper East Side financial district.
Jennifer, 26, and Marie, 28, occupy almost the whole living room, and share dresser and built-in closet for their personal stuff. They both work during the weekdays as live-in caregivers in a nursing home for elderly in upstate New York. “We are called the ‘weekenders’. We only show up in the apartment on a late Friday evening to do our laundry and get a new set of clean clothes. But usually, on a Sunday afternoon, we go back to work again,” Marie said as she folded her newly ironed clothes on her bed, a single mattress lay on the floor.
“There’s no space of the basement that isn’t over-utilized. When we are all present, even the bathroom is crowded; one is in the shower, the other in the toilet, and another is using the mirror,” Susan said. “It’s hard to move around. We’re like sardines in a can.”
Over the recent years, “the influx of immigrants to New York City has increased the demand for housing, and that immigrants disproportionately experience crowding and occupy the lowest-quality housing in the city,” according to a Fannie Mae Foundation study (The Housing Conditions of Immigrants in New York City, 1999). In an interview with one of its authors, Michael H. Schill, director of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, he defined crowding as “to live in housing with more than one person per room.”
But crowding among immigrants, the study reveals, may be attributable to several factors, such as economy, culture, and neighborhood characteristics, notwithstanding the fact that the city has one of the exorbitantly expensive housing markets in the United States.
“I’m just trying to put up living in a cramped apartment, despite its inconvenience and lack of privacy, because I can’t possibly afford an $800-room per month in any part of the city,” said 29-year-old Peter Santiago, who lives with three roommates in an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue, a block west of the Columbia University subway station. “Otherwise, I might eat only once a day.
In Brooklyn the monthly rental fees of a studio unit, as shown on the listings on Craigslist.com, range from $900 to $1,400. The average rent in a trendy neighborhood of Manhattan has quadrupled between 1996 and 2000. In the East Village, for example, the ongoing rental rate is around $1,600 a month for a studio and $2,300 for a one-bedroom.
Santiago, a waiter in Lower Manhattan, said he pays $400 per month for a five-by-eight-foot space, which is actually a quarter of the living room enclosed by a curtain. “Because I don’t have a stable job yet, I have to live within my means. It’s better to save now, and buy my own house later,” he said.
But like Santiago, the reason that most immigrants live in a crowded dwelling in the New York area cannot be solely related to their ability to pay the rent. It is also a choice for many immigrants to adopt a certain economic strategy to save on daily expenses and expedite the enhancement of their socio-economic status.
“Crowding in housing among immigrants in the city is [not] necessarily an indicator of hardship,” Schill said. “While it may be true that most immigrants, particularly the new arrivals, have relatively low-income jobs, they also try to economize by cutting their rental expenses so that they can remit money and help their families back home.”
Also, he added that many immigrants live with their family members, or close friends of the same ethnic background, because it’s a cultural norm and that’s where they feel a stronger sense of oneness.
Schill’s finding is very much prevalent in the Filipino community. It is not uncommon to find Filipino immigrants - four to eight of them - crowding in a house. They may not necessarily be blood-related but they support each other, and many of the adult household members are wage-earners working outside the homes. And on paydays, they, too, cramp the Filipino bank remittance centers. To date, the Filipino immigrants in United States alone remitted more than $3 million last year (Central Bank of the Philippines Report, 2002), boosting tremendously the Philippine economy.
As the New York state prepares the budget for the new fiscal year, immigrant groups, however, are uncertain whether the State would give sufficient allocation for housing projects for low-income New Yorkers.
“The issue that the State would reduce the budget for education and healthcare is devastating. But it adds more insult to the injury if the State would only allocate a thin slice of the pie for housing,” said Juanito Roman, a Hispanic graduate student of International Relations at New School University. “The scenario would be like this: lesser after-school programs for immigrant students, reduction of health care benefits, and a dearth of decent housing in the city.”
Roman, 37, said that “decent housing” for him means improved and adequate housing in safe neighborhood areas for the public. In his own experience, a few years ago, he rented a studio apartment in Jersey City, a walking-distance to the PATH train station in Journal Square, because he couldn’t afford the skyrocketing rental rates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. He said Staten Island was out of the picture because of its distance from his school. But one night, on his way home, he was mugged.
“I found a low-rent apartment, but my life was endangered. That sounded more ‘pricey’ to me. Most of these low-rent apartments are situated in unsafe areas,” he said.
Although New York City housing quality has improved dramatically over the last 30 years, the backlog on application for public housing piles up each year.
Howard Marder, public information officer of the New York City Housing Authority, said that there are currently about 345 public housing projects in the city. But of that number, the vacancy rate at present is only three-quarter of 4 percent. There are about 140,000 applicants on the waiting list.
“The biggest problem of the city is that it has no more apartments to give,” Marder said.
In an effort to expand housing developments, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his address on December 10, has envisioned a $3 billion plan to build houses on the waterfront. His key plan is to whisk off the “junk” yards at the water’s edge and make use of them by building tens of thousands new apartments in the future.
But Bloomberg’s proposal has been welcomed with more skepticism than admiration. The waterfront housing, say advocates for affordable housing, is for households earning more than $50,000 a year—and apparently not for low-income families.
“New York City is considered one of the greatest, most beautiful cities in the world. When a struggling immigrant, however, lives in a congested, badly maintained housing, he feels as though he’s in a vast rat-hole,” said Enrique Gapiz, 45, a Filipino worker for a cargo shipping business in Woodside, Queens. “And because he needs to survive the grind of the city, he could even sleep standing.”
This article was written as part of the Ethnic Press Fellowship of the Independent Press Association-New York.
