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New York's Chinatown still hurting

A woman in New York's Chinatown looks over fish at a local market. Chinatown is still reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks, with businesses hurting and thousands of workers laid off, according to a report released Thursday. PHOTO: AP

The effects of the World Trade Center attack on Chinatown included layoffs of about one-fourth of the area's 34,000 workers, and economic ripples in Queens and Brooklyn, because half of Chinatown's workers live outside Manhattan, according to a new report released Thursday.

Chinatown accounts for 1 percent of New York City's employment, but 10 percent of the jobs lost in the three months after Sept. 11, the authors of the report said -- or about 7,500 of the 75,000 jobs lost in that period.

Until now, much information about Chinatown's economy has been anecdotal and difficult to collect, because its immigrant economy is largely insular and cash-based. This report is arguably the most comprehensive economic analysis in the history of the more than 150-year-old neighborhood.

Drawing on data from government, business surveys, newspaper reports and charitable organizations, the Asian American Federation of New York, a nonprofit public policy group, spent three months putting together a 60-page glossy report detailing the rates of unemployment, business closings, and lost revenues in Chinatown in the three months after Sept. 11.

"It will be a map and a guidebook for getting attention and support that are needed here," said C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president.

Chief among Chinatown's priorities is gaining a representative on the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, which is in charge of the rebuilding effort. In addition, Chinatown's leaders have been frustrated that the line for economic aid has often been drawn at Canal Street, the northern border used to define the zone of the most severe restrictions after the attack, but one that slices through the heart of the neighborhood and neglects many of those in need.

The report estimates that wages lost after the attack totaled US$114 million. In garment manufacturing, Chinatown's largest industry, 40 out of 246 factories have closed because of the sagging retail economy and restrictions on trucking, the report said. Details of the long-term impact of Sept. 11 are a bit murkier, since much of the information dates to December.

The community, less than a half-mile from ground zero, was paralyzed in the immediate aftermath of the attack, when large swaths of the neighborhood were closed by the police. Businesses suffered from telephone and electricity cutoffs.

When asked on Thursday about what could be done for the unemployed in Chinatown, Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed to the hotline and Web site the city has set up (in English) to help job seekers.
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