Living in Isolation: Issues of Access to City Housing Services Among Immigrant New Yorkers


March 5, 2007

By the CUNY Center for Urban Research and Communities for Housing Equity



EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In 2003, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched the much-anticipated 311 Call Center. “911 for emergencies, 311 for everything else,” said the mayor. The new easy-to- remember number was intended to give New York City residents faster access to government services and make it easier to file complaints with the city. As expected, the number of complaints filed increased dramatically.

The authors of this report took a closer look at the number and sources of those complaints, particularly with regard to complaints filed about housing conditions. Such data support the findings from our first report, Hear This! The Need for Multilingual Housing Services in New York City: that immigrant tenants, particularly those who are linguistically isolated, are unaware of and/or unable to access city services.

This report confirms that linguistically isolated households need greater access to housing services. Yet, these New Yorkers are limited in their ability to access city housing services because of language and cultural barriers. Our data also indicate that linguistically isolated New Yorkers have benefited far less from improved housing-complaint-collection processes than other New Yorkers.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)—the city agency that works to ensure that tenants live in safe and healthy housing—has taken some steps to address these barriers. Our data suggest, however, that more needs to be done to improve access to housing services for linguistically isolated New Yorkers.

Key Findings

(1) Access to City housing services has increased two fold over the course of a four year period.

  • Housing complaints to HPD increased by 60% from 2001 to 2005 from 300,000 to nearly 600,000.

    (2) Linguistically isolated New Yorkers are particularly vulnerable to living in unhealthy housing situations and most in need of HPD services.

    According to Census data, linguistically isolated households:

  • Have a median household income almost half that of non-linguistically isolated households

  • Pay less in rent, on average, than non-linguistically isolated households, but they have a far higher average rent burden because their wages are less than non-linguistically isolated households.

  • Moreover, neighborhoods with the most linguistic isolation have higher levels of housing deficiencies.

    (3) All New Yorkers do not equally enjoy increased access to City services through 311. Recent immigrant and limited English proficient New Yorkers are most isolated from critically needed housing services.

  • Our research shows that as the level of household linguistic isolation increases the number of housing complaints dramatically decreases. As the share of households that speak English not well or not at all in a neighborhood increase by 1%, housing complaints decrease by 15 points, even when housing quality remains constant. Similarly, as the share of recent immigrant households increase by 1%, complaints fall by 15 points.

    Recommendations

    We continue to call on Mayor Bloomberg and HPD Commissioner Shaun Donovan to have HPD take the following steps to improve access to HPD services for linguistically isolated New Yorkers. In addition, We further call on the City Council Speaker and Council Members to pass the Equal Access to Housing Services Act that would require HPD to provide all oral and written communications be conducted in the top nine languages spoken by linguistically isolated New Yorkers in each borough in the City, including legislation that would require that HPD:

  • Conduct targeted outreach to linguistically isolated communities, and diversify its media outreach;

  • Implement effective tracking of language needs of tenants and maintain records on language services provided;

  • Translate all written forms, correspondence, applications, informational materials and all other written communications

  • Hire more qualified bilingual inspectors, examine the language ability of these inspectors, and ensure that appropriate bilingual inspectors are sent to linguistically isolated tenants;

  • Improve and expand translation of published materials and the HPD website;

  • Enforce usage of existing protocol to ensure that tenants can directly communicate with HPD personnel; and

  • Increase funding for community groups to do outreach.

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      Living_in_Isolation_Report_3-5-07.pdf
      Call_311_Report_Housing_Violations_Poster_chinese_creole.pdf