A new report says the number of poor New Yorkers are on the rise, with a half-million more people living in poverty in 2022 compared with the year before.
The study, done in collaboration between the Robin Hood Foundation and Columbia University, determined that the increase to 2 million New Yorkers living in poverty represented the largest single-year jump since the Poverty Tracker research group began collecting data in 2012.
The child poverty rate also jumped from 15% to 25%, meaning one in four children in the city live in poverty, which is equivalent to nearly 420,000 kids.
Overall, 18% of New Yorkers lived in poverty in 2021, and in 2022 that number rose to 23%. That’s nearly double the national poverty rate at 12%.
The report cites the expiration of pandemic-era government interventions, like cash payments and enhanced unemployment insurance, as a reason for the rise in poverty after 2020.
"2022 saw some of the city's hard-won reductions in poverty and hardship of recent years reversed, at the same time that inflation and high rents took a toll on people's wallets," said Christopher Wimer, director of The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. "The news is certainly grim, but if there is a silver lining it is that recent years have proven that well-designed policies can and do reduce poverty dramatically. We know what works, it's just a matter of doing it."
Asian, Black and Latino New Yorkers were found to be much more likely to live in poverty than white New Yorkers, with 24% of Asians living in poverty, 23% of Blacks, 26% of Latinos and 13% of whites in the city.
Poverty is defined in the report as not being able to afford basic necessities like housing and food, with about one in five New Yorkers, 19%, saying they lived paycheck-to-paycheck during the past year.