Roughly 3.4 million New Yorkers — about half the adult population of the world's richest city — spent one of the last few years living below the poverty line, according to a new report from the Robin Hood Foundation and Columbia University.
On Thursday, the anti-poverty group, in partnership with Columbia's Center on Poverty and Social Policy, released the findings of their Poverty Tracker, a longitudinal study that checks in on thousands of New Yorkers every three months to measure several categories of hardship.
They found that, even amid a period of historically low unemployment, the rate of poverty in NYC remained eight points above the national average. Between 2015 and 2018, half of NYC adults spent at least one year in poverty — meaning single adults earning less than $17,000 and an adult with two children making less than $30,000 annually.
"It speaks to just how precarious the situation is for one out of every two New Yorkers," Jason Cone, the public policy director for Robin Hood, told Gothamist. "If you’re sitting on a subway in New York City today, it's entirely possible that the person across from you has fallen into poverty between 2015 and 2018. Thats pretty striking in the largest city in the United States."
Those figures were disproportionately higher for both people of color and women. 59 percent of Black New Yorkers and 68 percent of Hispanic New Yorkers lived in poverty at least one year between 2015 and 2018, the report found. Women were seven percentage points more likely to be living in poverty than men.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has frequently boasted that the citywide poverty rate has reached historically low levels, and the study does note a steady decline in recent years — from 24 percent in 2012 to 20 percent in 2018.
But Cone says that their report offers a much more nuanced picture of the struggles faced by everyday New Yorkers, and urged policy experts "to look beyond a single year when we think about poverty rates." Of those able to escape poverty between 2015 and 2018, 35 percent returned to living below the poverty line by the following year.
The study also tracks "material hardship," a broader measure that looks at whether a person has struggled to afford food, housing, utilities, or medicine in a given year. In 2018, more than a third of households with children experienced at least one material hardship.
The most effective means of addressing poverty and disadvantage across the city, says Cone, is through government programs. In 2018, housing subsidies and rent regulations reduced poverty by 5 percentage points, while cash transfers and tax credits lowered the rate another 4 points, according to the report.
But there are ominous signs on the horizon that such benefits could be eliminated. As Governor Andrew Cuomo seeks to close a $6 billion budget gap, New York City could see Medicaid cuts up to $2 billion. President Trump's budget request for the next fiscal year would drastically slash the social safety net, scaling back affordable housing efforts, federal food stamps, and student loan assistance. (For now, the budget proposal is expected to go nowhere in the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives.)
"These are programs that ensure mundane life events don't become impoverishing events," said Cone. "So it's a very precarious progress."
