Study Finds Neglect of Asian Poor : Communities: Poverty rate in county is twice that of whites, UCLA researchers say. Report cites ‘model minority’ image as reason why many in need are overlooked by government policy-makers.

The myth of Asian Americans as the successful “model minority” is so widely accepted that more than 13% of poor Asians in Los Angeles County go unnoticed by public policy-makers, according to a report released Wednesday by UCLA’s Urban Planning Program.

“Policy-makers have a lot of misperceptions about Asians,” said urban planner Dennis G. Arguelles, an author of the report, which is the first to examine poor and low-income Asians in Los Angeles.

Arguelles said the researchers found that the poverty rate among Asians in the county is twice that of whites. Yet, government aid generally focuses on black and Latino communities, he said. Although blacks and Latinos clearly need help, so do Asian residents of Chinatown, Koreatown and the Westlake and Long Beach areas, Arguelles said.

“We hope this report can help to educate policy-makers and the public about the real issues and needs among low-income Asian Pacific Americans,” said J. D. Hokoyama, executive director of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics Inc., which published the 171-page study.

The report said more than 124,000 Asian residents of Los Angeles County are poor and their ranks are growing. In the central urban areas, one in five Asians is poor and 18,000 people of Asian ancestry--a majority of them Southeast Asians--are on welfare, said the study, sponsored by the Asian Planning Council, a consortium of 20 community-based agencies.

For these and countless other “voiceless and invisible” Asians who are working poor, dreams of a better life in America are on hold while they are stuck in low-paying, often-exploitive jobs in ethnic enclaves because of language and job barriers, the report said. Some families spend more than half of their income on housing.

Called “Beyond Asian American Poverty,” the 18-month study, begun shortly before the 1992 Los Angeles riots, was done by a team of nine urban planners headed by Paul Ong, a UCLA urban economist. Analyzing 1990 census data, the researchers surveyed 300 households from randomly selected blocks in the greater Chinatown-Echo Park, Koreatown-Westlake and Long Beach areas. The areas were picked because they had heavy concentrations of Asians, researchers said.

A four-page questionnaire seeking education, social, housing, employment and financial information was circulated in six Asian languages, researchers said. The 15-minute survey was followed up by lengthy personal interviews.

Among the findings:

* A significant portion of low-income Asian Americans face the prospect of being trapped in poverty indefinitely because they lack job skills and English-language proficiency to move out of their ethnic enclaves.

* Many Asians work full time but remain poor, earning less than $12,000 a year for a family of four. In Chinatown, a single Vietnamese mother with eight children lived on $1,425 a month--$625 in welfare payments and $800 earned by her eldest son.

* Asian business owners desperately need training in social responsibility and cultural sensitivity to respond properly to their employees and the communities in which they operate.

“Asians have much to contribute to inner-city economic development and should be partners in any urban revitalization strategy,” Ong said. “They should not only include us in policy-making but use our talents.”