How Covid Spells Lingering Insecurity In One New York Neighborhood
After the past 15 harrowing months, the continuing and gratifying decline in new Covid-19 cases and the lifting of more and more social distancing restrictions have many New Yorkers feeling euphoric about returning to “normal” life.
Dimming that justifiable sense of relief, however, is the long and lingering shadow of economic suffering and emotional anxiety the pandemic has cast across the city.
Last week, The Center for New York City Affairs published “The Astoria Project Survey,” a close examination of the scope of pandemic-related distress among residents of that northwest Queens community. More than 720 workers from a broad range of occupations responded to our survey, which was conducted between December 2020 and February 2021 in cooperation with the Consortium for Worker Education, the workforce development arm of New York City’s Central Labor Council.
What they told us illustrates the profound and persisting impact Covid-19 has had on so many New Yorkers.
More than two-thirds of the survey respondents reported that they had been laid off, furloughed, or seen cutbacks in their working hours and employment income following the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. The hardest economic blows fell on lower-income households (those making $35,000 a year or less) and on Black and Latinx workers. The pace of re-employment has also been agonizingly slow; at the time of the survey only 38 percent of dislocated workers (those who had been laid off or furloughed after the onset of the pandemic) had returned to either parttime or fulltime employment.
Percent of Impacted & Dislocated Workers by household income group since onset of Covid-19 (2019$)
Emergency Federal relief notwithstanding, the pandemic-induced recession severely strained the wellbeing of many households. Food insecurity in Astoria increased, especially in households with economically dislocated workers. More than a quarter of respondents from such households also said they were unsure about their ability to meet the next month’s rent or mortgage payment on their homes. Many also expressed high levels of uncertainty about the continuity of their health care benefits. And fewer than half (42 percent) of dislocated workers thought they’d be able to return to fulltime jobs where they had worked pre-pandemic – indicating the need for a robust job retraining and placement effort in Astoria and other neighborhoods.
Not surprisingly, given these powerful economic stresses, the survey also found widespread evidence of emotional distress. More than three-quarters of economically dislocated workers reported feeling “nervous, anxious, or on edge” at least one or two days each week; over half these respondents said they felt that kind of anxiety more than half the time.
It’s worth pointing out that Astoria is not even close to being one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. In fact, it has a pretty complex socio-economic make-up. It’s an historically working-class community that, in large part because of proximity to Manhattan, is also home to increasing numbers of better-educated professional, technological, and managerial workers. At the same time, many other Astoria residents work in lower-earning so-called “face-to-face” occupations in restaurants, hotels, retailing, and the arts and recreation – sectors of New York’s economy devastated by the pandemic’s social distancing restrictions and business closings.
What our survey shows, in short, is that the pandemic has destabilized daily lives and clouded the futures of a wide cross-section of residents of even this fairly (by New York City standards) middle-income neighborhood. Repairing that damage will take a long time and a lot of effort, in Astoria as well as in even harder-hit communities. So even as New York City celebrates the end of one phase of our struggle against Covid-19, we also need to recognize that we still have a lot of work ahead of us.