A new report* to be published by the Asian American Justice Center will summarize an analysis of Asian American business participation in public contracting activities by the cities of Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco.  Bottom line: Asian American owned businesses in the industries of construction, IT/technology, and architecture/engineeing (the above video features one Asian American design firm - DScheme in San Francisco) are not getting their fair share of dollars spent by city governments on public projects. 

We forget sometimes that the government spends A LOT of cash (our pubic tax dollars) on construction, road work, design/engineering, data mangagement, purchases of office supplies, computers/equipment, food, etc.  This study checked to see if Asian American firms, given their relative presence in a geographic and industry market, get an equitable share.  Basically - Nope, not really.

• In Chicago though it's a mixed picture.  South Asian firm owners actually get disproportionately more contracts ($) than you'd expect given the number of South Asian owned firms.  
• But other Asian American firms in Chicago are WAY under-utilized in contracting.
• The City of Atlanta underutilizes Asian American businesses in contracting.
• And so does the City of San Francisco.

The magnitude of underutilization in each city is different, and it's interesting to note that the level of underutilization seems to coincide with the aggressiveness of each city's minority business/affirmative action contracting program. 

• In the Bay Area, Asian American businesses are EXTREMELY underutilized by the City of San Francisco, but the City can't use race-conscious policies to address this disparity because of Proposition 209.
• In Chicago, Asian American businesses are actually doing relatively the best compared to the other 2 cities.  Interestingly, the City has the most aggressively race and gender conscious policy of the three cities.
• In Atlanta, Asian American business participation in public contracting is somewhere in the middle between Chicago and San Francisco.  And their policy is kinda weak, but at least they have one unlike San Francisco.

And YES, the analysis found that these disparities are in fact a result of racial discrimination.

One might hypothesize that affirmative action policies actually HELP Asian Americans in this case, but further research is needed to determine that.

*I should note that I was the lead author and researcher on this report :-) One of the many reasons I've been too busy to write anything for APAP blog lately...