Where are the Asian homeless people?

In the city in which I reside (pop. 1M), there is a pretty sizeable population of Asian descent. But it occurred to me today that I’ve never seen an Asian homeless person. Can any inferences be made of this? Can the lesson be applied in helping to reduce homelessness?

My WAG is that the conditions that lead to homelessness can more easily manifest in the long established race, than in a fairly recent immigrant race which originated overseas. The latter being an indicator of wealth.

Asia?

That makes a great deal of sense. Both of the points!

I wouldn’t want to WAG more than absolutely necessary, but Asian culture puts much more emphasis on the extended family than typical middle-class America. It’s possible that an Asian immigrant who finds himself homeless is more likely to seek and find shelter with a cousin, uncle, in-law, etc.

I’m not sure this is the answer. When Mrs. Slow was a middle school teacher, she had an Asian student that had epileptic fits that led to her pissing herself. Obviously, very embarrassing for her, and the extended family did try to help out. Loving mom and dad were trying to trade her to an extended family member so that they wouldn’t have to put up with the humiliation of having a defective child. :eek:

There’s plenty of Puerto Rican homeless people, and they’ve been here a much shorter time than most Asian immigrants.

If this phenomenon is true, I would ascribe it to more closely knit extended families among Asians. (And I think SlowMindThinking’s anecdote goes more to support this than disprove it - even though the girl’s parents didn’t want her, an extended family member might take her in. In a culture without such closely knit families this option would never even be considered.)

This page says

I believe that alcoholism is strongly linked with homelessness, but I guess that brings up the question of what’s a cause and what’s an effect.

I met an asian homeless guy in Austin a couple of times. He was real raggedity and looked a lot like a picture of Gengas Khan. He walked around collecting cans and muttering to himself in some language… Once He stopped me and tried to say something to me but he just pointed at things and said words that were either some asian language I’d never heard before or crazed ramblings in English. I couldn’t tell.

In NYC at least, the poorest ones all have jobs. Lousy jobs, mostly, but the number of Asian delivery boys, waiters, busboys, etc. is huge. And unlike some groups they’re willing to spend a few years in their new country crammed into substandard housing, sometimes even alternating a bed with the guy who works the night shift or whatever, while sending money home and saving enough to go back home in triumph or move on up to the suburbs, where I see plenty of single Asian guys living now with roommates.

I also might (wild-assedly) guess that, in cultures that stress keeping face and harmony in the family circles, screaming at someone for disobeying rules/sleeping around/drinking/drugging until they get fed up and throw your sorry ass the hell out or until the malcreant stomps out–which seems to be a major cause of homelessness among younger people–is much less common.

I have seen drunk guys in Chinatown stumbling around with friends, but I don’t have to go three blocks in Woodlawn to see Irish guys doing the same thing. But they’re stumbling home to jobs and a warm bed. The most common homeless people I see are black and white middle-aged men (almost always substance abusers), mentally ill women (much rarer), and runaway kids.

I guess you mean that some Asian groups began arriving on the mainland before Puerto Ricans did as a group. I don’t really think it matters when the group started arriving. What perhaps does matter is the relative numbers of recent immigrants- (maybe the Asian population in Standup Karmic town is predominantly recent immigrants. and few, if any second or third generation Asian-America). I work with parolees, and something I’ve noticed is that although immigrants from all sorts of places end up in prison, few immigrants from any country end up homeless upon their release. It probably has something to do with extended family being more important in other cultures, but I think it also has something to do with the living conditions people are willing to put up with. It seems to me that recent immigrants are more willing to tolerate crowded conditions. My next door neighbors (who are fairly recent Chinese immigrants) have about eight people living in what used to be a three bedroom house. My husband ( who is second generation Chinese, and close to his extended family ) might tolerate four extra people for a few days,but would never do what my neighbors did- convert the kitchen to a bedroom, convert the living room to a bedroom, and make the former dining room into a combined kitchen/dining area. I’d say that maybe it’s just this particular family, but I’ve noticed that among the parolees I work with, those immigrants who end up staying a family sister or seem to be in a relatively permanent situation- living rooms are converted to bedrooms, kids are moved around to leave a extra bedroom for an uncle or a cousin, walls or room dividers are erected to create a room in a basement, etc. , while those whose families are more assimilated end up sleeping on a couch in what still functions as a iving room.

I think the answer is simple: Asian cultures value self-reliance more. If an Asian person finds him or herself in a tight spot, he or she will most likely take responsibility instead of laying blame, bite the bullet and try to get any job possible, no matter how low-paying or degrading the work is.

The importance of education is also heavily stressed early on in Asian children, which leads to even the least-educated Asian person to be above the minimum across the racial board.

I would find the only exception being mental illness, as in the case of the homeless Asian man TitoBenito met. And even then, that man was collecting cans, trying to do even a little bit about his situation.

Of course, I’m generalizing like crazy. I could be wrong.

Adam

There are plenty of homeless in Japan, Korea and China, so I’m not sure just how much Asian culture comes into play. Might there be a distinct ‘Asian immigrant culture’?

Do Asian immigrants to America tend to come individually, or as family groups? That may have a big effect on how close-knit the family support nets are.

Yep. There are a lot in Japan, especially since the recession hit: I lived near Osaka, and there were scores sleeping in the parks and stations or just shuffling the streets, usually collecting cans or old comics to sell. Last estimate I read of the homeless population of Osaka was about 3000, and that was a good two or three years ago.

In Japan at least, any governmental social welfare system is pretty minimal, and the idea that an individual should look to his or her “group” for support is pretty strongly entrenched. There’s less of a generalised concept of social obligation - which springs, dare I say it, from Judeao-Christian ethics - than in most Western countries.

There are plenty of religious as well as official welfare organisations in the West, but relatively few in Japan: shrines and temples are more privately run affairs, and pretty well dedicated to lining their own pockets - the Buddhist focus on the self has a nasty underbelly of callous selfishness, and Shinto is just old-fashioned animism that takes cash, and lots of it.

Fall through the cracks and lose a group to support you, whether it be your family or your company - and a lot of people found themselves in that position once the companies started laying off - and you’re pretty much on your own. Failure ostracises you from your group pretty fast, and once you’re down, you’re nobody’s problem: the scary thing is that the Japanese homeless, to the Japanese at least, aren’t a concern or even a nuisance - they’ve simply ceased to exist.

I don’t know how far that extends outside of Japan, although from what I’ve seen of other Asian countries I’ve visited it seems to hold pretty true, but in the West I suspect that a lot of “Asian self-reliance” stems from being unused to a social system based, however tenuously at times, on reciprocal obligation: they don’t want to fall throught the cracks because in their experience there’s nothing beneath. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing for society or the individual is probably a topic for Great Debates.

How unlucky would you have to be to gather the funds and the will to travel across an entire ocean just to become homeless in another country? Occam’s Razor, people. Anyway, I’ve seen at least one person that unlucky around where I live.

Ahh, you missed my scarcasm. If any of the extended family had actually “traded” for the poor girl, she wouldn’t still have been with her parents.

Yes, but you did say they were trying to help out. And the parents hadn’t actually kicked her out yet. If they had, would the extended family have allowed her to live on the street?

Ah, America. The land of opportunity, dreams, and crushed hopes.

As for the general topic at hand, does anyone have actual data for homelessness by race? From a census, perhaps?

Well, the homeless are pretty lousy at returning their census forms. :smiley:

OK, OK. NYC does a homeless census every year, and in fact the volunteers finished the latest a couple of nights ago, but the results won’t be out for months. Now, there’s a difference between homeless families and street homeless, but the thread seems to be about the ones on the street. Here’s a page of pdf files. One of them says that the single-adult demo is very very hard to pin down as many of them simply will not interact with the social service people and, thanks to some harebrained judges, they have the right to freeze to death under the Brooklyn Bridge if they want.

Anyway, the demo is: 60% Black, 25% Latino, 15% White, with “very small percentages of Asians and Native Americans.” 10% of the city’s population is Asian or Native American, but I’m not sure if they count people from India and all. I’ve never seen a subcontinental homeless person either, BTW.

Here’s a link to the U.S. Conference of Mayor’s Hunger and Homelessness Survey for 2002 (reports for 2003 and 2004 have been issued, but I couldn’t find online copies of them at the USCM website). It’s a big PDF file, but if you scroll down to page 97, there’s a nice chart with a breakdown of the homeless population of for 25 American cities.

The city with the highest percentage of Asian homeless people was Portland where 6% of the homeless are Asian. In all of the other cities surveyed, 3% or less of the homeless were Asian. Nine cities were listed with 0% of the homeless as Asian.