Slipping through the cracks: the dark history of housing insecurity in the Asian community
by APASA Co-Executive Director Yusuf Rahman
When it comes to issues of housing and wealth, the Asian American community has long faced intense discrimination. Today, this history has evolved into something even more sinister: homelessness. As I learned from my mom’s story of being unhoused, we must realize that we are not so far removed from the problem as we might think. By replacing stigma with empathy, we can begin putting an end to the legacy of discrimination our community has faced.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1965. The act allowed immigrants from Asia to arrive in the United States, giving people a chance to settle permanently in America. Source: Tenement Museum
Thanksgiving is always the time of year when I miss my mom the most. As my friends visit family for the break and recuperate from a difficult semester at home, I typically stay back in Los Angeles and don’t get the chance to see her. It can be an awkward conversation at times, explaining to people that I don’t go home during breaks.
On some level, I always want to go back. But the truth I often hesitate to share is that I don’t exactly have a home to return to in the first place. A few years ago, my mom had to leave the apartment she was renting, and without the income or the credit, she could not find a new place. However, she did have one option as a seamstress with her own small business: to move into the little shop she had, which over the years, had become her only source of income.
She thus lost her permanent housing and moved into this place not meant for residential purposes. We effectively became homeless, without a real place to call home.
As a South Asian American, this experience often feels like an isolated one. While wealth inequality is a key issue for the Asian community, we are surrounded by a narrative that touts our success and claims that we have made it in a country that is supposedly hostile towards us.
In other words, poverty is not seen as a defining aspect of the Asian American experience, much less housing insecurity. At the same time, however, America’s homelessness problem has exploded beyond belief. In 2023, Los Angeles saw a 10 percent increase in its unhoused population, while places like Chicago and Portland saw increases of 57 percent and 20 percent respectively.
These issues can seem far away from us as Asian Americans, considering that many of us live in comfortable suburbs and work in well-paying professions. Yet we have to recognize that homelessness is a real part of our shared history as Asian Americans—it might, in fact, be one of the biggest struggles for our community. By destigmatizing housing insecurity and realizing that we are not so far removed from the issue as we might think, we can put an end to a brutal legacy that continues to destroy lives in silence.
To understand how homelessness has become such a crisis today, we need to start with the housing policies that got us here. The California Alien Land Law of 1913 was one of the first pieces of legislation to disenfranchise the Asian community, effectively barring Asian immigrants from achieving success in America. Under this policy, immigrants from Asia could not own any kind of property, under the justification that they were not citizens. Arising a couple decades after the Chinese Exclusion Act, the law transformed our definitions of citizenship and built an insurmountable barrier for immigrants to attain wealth.
California was not the only state to formalize barriers to citizenship. Fifteen other states, to be precise, enacted similar discriminatory laws which restricted the rights of Asian people to hold land. And when they were reviewed by the Supreme Court in 1923 for their constitutionality, each one was upheld as legal and just.
These laws ultimately plummeted families into homelessness. Vashno Das Bagai, a South Asian immigrant In San Francisco, for example, had his citizenship revoked in 1923 because he was not white—and therefore, he lost the property he owned in America. For several years, he ran a successful store with his family, but without anywhere left to go, he was rendered unhoused and eventually passed away by suicide.
In spite of such tragedies, the harsh discrimination against Asian Americans persisted. Even after 1923, several attempts were made to reverse the effects of the California Alien Land Law, but they were shot down in court each time. This meant that Asian families were unable to build any sort of equity, and in a country where having a home is one of the most important ways to achieve generational stability meant that many immigrants had no chance of survival.
It wasn’t until the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1965 when things started to change. Highly educated, highly skilled immigrants were now allowed to immigrate into this country, replacing the quota system with more open guidelines. Citizenship was being extended to people of Asian descent, and with citizenship came a chance at homeownership. By the 1980s, 57 percent of Asian households owned their homes, which increased to 60 percent by 2019.
It may seem, then, as though we overcame the immense discrimination in our history. And it’s true that on some level, we attained significant wealth. But because so many more immigrants and their families have bought homes, the realities of others are obscured.
On one hand, Asian Americans today still face hefty discrimination in purchasing a home. According to the Urban Institute, Asian prospective buyers were told about 9.8 percent fewer available rental properties when compared to their white counterparts. They were also told about 15.5 percent fewer available properties for sale than their white counterparts, and were shown 18.8 percent fewer properties on the whole. And when examining home ownership across race and income, Asian Americans are still at a disadvantage. For households with incomes from $100,000 to $149,999, the Asian homeownership rate is 66 percent, compared with 83 percent for white households.
But on the flipside, housing insecurity and discrimination has evolved into a different problem: homelessness. Nationally, Asian Americans comprise a small sliver of the unhoused population—just 2.9 percent. However, many areas have seen dramatic increases in Asian homelessness. In San Jose, for instance, the estimated number of unhoused Asian Americans increased 57% between 2017 and 2020. If anything, this is likely an undercount, and without disaggregated data, the rates for specific subgroups is unknown.
Why is this happening at all? It’s a tough question to answer because there has been such little research conducted on the experiences of unhoused Asian individuals. The first explanation might be that homelessness in general is increasing, but this does not account for the higher than average increases that Asian Americans have experienced in recent years.
Perhaps because we look at housing itself from the wrong angle. On some level, this is because homelessness is misunderstood by many Americans, myself included. After all, housing insecurity can look vastly different from case to case. Many unhoused individuals, for instance, hold jobs and go to work every day. Many live in public shelters and on streets, but there are also countless others who live in their cars or in shelters not designed for habitation.
Until it happened to my family, I never really understood these facts. But as I watched us struggle despite working excruciatingly hard, it became clear that America’s homelessness crisis has resulted from something greater—structural inequality.
At its core, homelessness is indeed a health issue. Since the 1980s, unhoused individuals have increasingly had a higher burden of co-occurring medical, mental health, and substance use disorders. For instance, 18 percent of unhoused individuals have diabetes, versus 9 percent of the housed population, and 36 percent have Hepatitis C compared to just 1 percent of the housed population. Over half of unhoused individuals also have clinical depression.
These are issues that can happen to anyone, especially for the Asian community for whom healthcare disparities have grown wider and wider. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, among adults with mental illness, 25 percent of Asian adults nationwide reported receiving care compared to 52 percent of White adults. This, in addition to a lack of diverse healthcare professionals and language barriers means that many don’t receive the help they need. Inevitably, when we don’t address these inequalities, we leave people more vulnerable to poverty.
At least, this is what I learned from my mom’s experiences with housing insecurity. As an immigrant without much education and limited English, my mom struggled to stay afloat in the West. With trauma from being a refugee at a young age and having untreated mental illness, we faced job losses and unstable family dynamics that left us with very little. The only thing that kept her going was her small business of selling handmade South Asian clothing, a creative outlet that allowed her to connect with others who didn’t speak the same language as her. Though it did not make much money, she was able to exercise her passion for sewing and entrepreneurship.
A little sitting area in my mom’s store where she would often pass the time. The bookshelf is filled with DVDs of some of her favorite Bollywood movies of the 80s and 90s.
Eventually though, the pandemic struck. The house we were renting—for which we didn’t have an official lease since it was owned by a family friend who let us stay there—became far too expensive and my mom had to make a choice. She moved into her store because it was cheaper, and although it had no hot water and no kitchen, it was the best shelter available to us. One bathroom for her and my grandmother, and two twin-sized beds pushed into the back where no customers could see, this became her new habitation.
Thus, she became part of that 2.9 percent. A small number, but for those who belong to it, a devastating reality.
Even for those who are not part of that statistic, we cannot get too comfortable. Just this year, Florida passed a law which restricts Chinese nationals from owning agricultural and residential land—and those who qualify for exceptions must complete a special registration with the state. Just as it did in 1913, America has once again weaponized housing to divide communities and prevent social mobility.
The fact that this is still happening today scares me. Until we as Asian Americans see these issues of housing insecurity as our own, we will continue to suffer from a long history that has treated us as subhuman. However, the more we acknowledge how we as a people have struggled, the more we can challenge the inequities in front of us. Though my background may not be the most common one in the Asian American community, I’ve found that people are incredibly understanding and willing to listen. I have shared my story, and I have had the chance to hear the stories of others as well. Though doing so is not always easy, I can see that it makes a real difference in how people view seemingly hopeless issues like homelessness.
For now, though, I have much to celebrate this holiday season. After these past few years, my mom was finally able to secure an apartment for her mother and herself thanks to receiving governmental help and more adequate healthcare. A two bedroom apartment with a spacious patio and a cozy living room, she adores the community she has now become a part of. It’s a little place called Winterhaven, famous in Southern Arizona for all of the holiday lights the residents put up every year.
She plans on joining them in this tradition, and as I reflect on her history, I also reflect on the history of those who came before us. My mom, after all, was not the only one who one day had to get up and start her life anew. There were millions of people, actually, who did exactly that from her very own continent of origin. Those people came, faced xenophobia and racist attitudes, but persisted in their hope—in the end, they laid a foundation for me and my mom to thrive.
This is ultimately what drives me forward. Before any kind of advocacy and policymaking must come a sense of empathy: the choice to humanize an issue like homelessness in spite of how it’s painted by the media and our culture. We can remain detached, or we can recognize our personal stakes and where we fit into the conversation. In my opinion, that’s the best starting point we have to make lasting change for our community.