NYU Covid-19 Closures (CoClo) Project

In the summer of 2020, CSAAH undertook a comprehensive assessment to understand the impact that COVID-19 has had on the restaurants, grocery stores and produce vendors in Manhattan’s Chinatown and in Sunset Park.

To summarize from May to July 2020, the NYU COVID Closures Study (CoClo) found:

– Chinatown and Sunset Park experienced a greater proportion of closures of food businesses compared to other higher and lower resourced neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

      – 21% of food businesses in Chinatown vs. 15% on the Upper East Side, 7% in East Harlem.

     – 12% of food businesses in Sunset Park vs. 8% in Park Slope, 6% in Brownsville

– More food businesses in Chinatown and Sunset Park closed compared to the other neighborhoods.

     – 233 in Chinatown, 75 on the Upper East Side, 22 in East Harlem,

     – 88 in Sunset Park, 50 in Park Slope, 13 in Brownsville

– Restaurants and fruit & vendors were hardest hit, with nearly 40% being absent on the sidewalks of Chinatown and Sunset Park during this time period.

The CoClo dataset includes information on all food-related businesses in each of these six neighborhoods.

To learn more about CSAAH’s methods and detailed results of our study, click below to view a summary infographic linked below.

To listen to an audio walk-through of the data in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, visit the links below: