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Chinatown will receive $20 million in funding from winning the fifth round of the Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI), Governor Kathy Hochul announced in November 2021. last Wednesday.
The funding will be used to help increase housing, improve connectivity and create new arts and cultural spaces to attract more tourists to the area.
The grant is supposed to help areas like the East Broadway Mall — Chinatown’s oldest and largest mall — on the verge of shutting down, which owes $13 million to the city.
Before the pandemic, Asian American businesses owned over 20% of New York City’s businesses. Since then, most businesses have lost more than half their revenue, according to the Asian American Federation (AAF).
Between May 2019 to May 2020, Asian Americans unemployment rates rose by more than 4000%, almost three times the annual percentage change for the city.
This was the result of a combination of a few things: documents that these businesses did not have, being unaccustomed to the professional financing that the city required, and information not being translated to their native languages on time, if at all, cited Ahyoung Kim, the Associate Director of Small Business Programs at the AAF.
Despite the sizable impact the grant will likely have on the area, not many seem to be aware of it. Speaking to shopkeepers on the grounds of Chinatown, many had not heard of the award that the area received.
This is a microcosm of a larger issue that businesses in the area face. When the pandemic first started, many Asian-owned businesses struggled, in part because of the language barrier.
When the city government announced Covid relief programs, “it would take a month for translations to come out, and by that time the funding would be gone,” said Kim.
Almost half of small business owners cited that lack of translated information as a major challenge to applying for assistance according to a report by the AAF.
“It’s actually very difficult for us to find businesses that are willing to apply for such programs right now because of what we call application fatigue,” said Kim.
Application fatigue stems from these businesses having to pay for external help to apply for programs like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and being rejected multiple times.
The grant issued will certainly assist Chinatown, but without “a lot more assistance from the government for small business owners to get assistance that is relevant to their cultural and language needs,” Kim suggests that the area will continue to struggle.