Latest Census Data Shows Poverty Remains Stubbornly High in New York City
According to the latest American Community Survey (ACS) data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate in New York City remained unchanged at 18.2 percent in 2023. This is the third consecutive year since 2019 when the poverty rate held steady. In 2023, 1.5 million New Yorkers lived at or below the official federal poverty level—about 187,000 more than in 2019, before the pandemic hit.[1]
Unlike most years, however, these results tell us little about the current grim state of our city. Emerging out of the pandemic and the recession that followed, the city endured historically high inflation and many residents relocated to places that they felt were more affordable. The high cost of living in the city eroded most of the wage increases over the previous year, leaving the median household’s income 1 percent less than in 2022 and 5.3 percent less than in 2019. These data suggest that stronger anti-poverty policy measures are needed now more than ever, not only in alleviating suffering and hardship but also to further the pace of economic recovery. As the city continues down a path of uneven recovery, New Yorkers’ daily struggles to afford necessities like housing, food, transportation, childcare, and healthcare costs have taken on a renewed urgency.[2]
Select characteristics of poverty in New York City in 2023
The 2023 ACS paints a picture of a city reeling under increasing levels of distress.[3] The share of New Yorkers in deep poverty (incomes below 50 percent of the official poverty threshold), while lower than in 2022, was still higher than in 2019, showing that an estimated 118,000 more New Yorkers were stuck in abject poverty.
In 2023, racial disparities in poverty rates persisted. While the proportion of White New Yorkers living in poverty is now lower than prior to the pandemic, New Yorkers of color continue to experience poverty at disproportionately high rates. In 2023, 24.8 percent of Hispanic and 21.7 percent of Black residents lived in poverty, compared to 11.5 percent of White residents. The proportion of Asians living in poverty also increased in 2023 to 16.8 percent (up from 15.2 percent in 2022)—the only racial/ethnic group for whom poverty increased over the last year.
While immigrants experienced a significant increase in poverty, going from 15 to 18.5 percent between 2019 and 2023, the increase among native-born residents was much smaller, rising from 16.6 percent to 18 percent over the same period. Of grave concern, in 2023 child poverty remained unchanged from its 2022 level at 24.5 percent. Over a third of single mothers with children continued to be in poverty (36.4 percent) and their poverty status was largely unchanged since 2019. Notably, the poverty rate among seniors rose by 3.6 percentage points to 21.5 percent, whereas poverty among working-age adults increased 1.8 points, from 13.5 percent to 15.3 percent between 2019 and 2023.
Poverty rates remained high in 2023 compared to pre-pandemic 2019 for all New Yorkers regardless of education level. New Yorkers with less than a high school education showed an uptick in poverty from 28 percent in 2019 to 31.8 percent in 2023. Similar trends were observed among those with a high school education (from 17.7 percent to 22.5 percent) and those with a bachelor’s degree or higher (from 5.9 percent to 6.9 percent) in the same period.
Income, inequality, and health insurance coverage
Perhaps the most important factor behind the city poverty rate’s failure to decline is the fact that earnings grew at a slower pace than expenses. Adjusted for inflation, earnings for all workers grew by a meager 0.3 percent. For women working full-time, year-round, earnings grew by 0.9 percent (from $65,603 in 2022 to $66,170 in 2023), while for their male counterparts, earnings decreased by 0.3 percent (from $71,150 in 2022 to $70,920 in 2023).
The lack of robust growth in earnings has left the overall income distribution largely unchanged. As a result, New York City continues to be the most unequal large city in the nation, as measured using the Gini Index.[4] The bottom 40 percent of New Yorkers continues to receive only 8 percent of the aggregate income, while the top 20 percent receives almost 58 percent. This distribution, while unchanged over the past year, has worsened since 2019.
Inflated housing costs also continue to be a primary barrier to poverty reduction and overall economic health. In 2023, the median gross rent in New York City was $1,748, a hair higher than last year’s inflation-adjusted average. According to the ACS, most (51.9 percent) New York City tenants are rent burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.[5] While the share of rent burdened households declined by 2.1 percent over the past ten years, this is not an indication of improving housing affordability. Rents continue to rise faster than incomes, after adjusting for inflation. Decades of housing unaffordability are forcing low-income New Yorkers to leave the city and state in search of cheaper housing. Meanwhile, according to the latest Consumer Price Index report persistently high housing prices remain the driving factor in national inflation levels, contributing significantly to the erosion of overall wage gains in recent years.
One bright spot is continued progress in terms of the uninsured rate in the city. While the rate of New York City residents without health insurance was unchanged in 2023 from the previous year (at 5.8 percent), it remains lower than in 2019, when the rate was 6.9 percent.
Recommendations
These data remind us that even though the city seems to have recovered from the pandemic, the scars still remain. Most households are still not better off than they were pre-pandemic. Income inequality and housing unaffordability have become normalized in New York City and must be addressed through bold policy.
- By expanding the Child Tax Credit and tweaking its design to allow lowest income households to receive the full credit, we can make a serious dent in the child poverty rate.[6]
- By revising the cash allowance amounts under public assistance, we can make it easier for New Yorkers in abject poverty to meet their basic needs, and hopefully transition to a stronger economic footing.[7]
- We can extend the Earned Income Tax Credit to ITIN filers and alleviate poverty among foreign-born residents.[8]
- We can eliminate sub-minimum wages for tipped workers[9] and ensure greater gender pay parity to not only help New York’s working women, but also to help them be more productive, contribute to the local economy, and invest in expanding opportunities for their children.[10]
- To reduce rent burdens, New York must take even more of an active stance toward housing market interventions. Small reforms to the zoning and tax codes will help spur some new housing development but will not fundamentally alter the status quo in the ways the data suggests are necessary. A bolder approach would include:
- deepening rental assistance (by expanding CityFHEPS, as the law demands, and passing the Housing Access Voucher Program at the state level),
- expanding rent stabilization (by reforming the Emergency Tenant Protection Act to cover more units),
- reinvesting in existing public housing (through federal, state and city budget allocations) and by supporting the production of new social housing (by passing the Social Housing Development Authority bill at the state level, increasing funding for Open Door and Neighborhood Pillars at the city level, and passing the Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase Acts at the state and city levels, respectively).
It is only through these kinds of bold policy interventions that we will see different results when the Census releases a new round of poverty measurements next year.
Notes:
1. For a two-adult, two-children family, the federal poverty threshold for 2023 was $30,900 (U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty Thresholds by Size of Family and Number of Children, (n.d.), https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html)
2. Community Service Society, ”New Yorkers and the Unaffordability Crisis: New Data Shows Hardships are Rising Among Moderate-Income New Yorkers,” https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/new-yorkers-unaffordability-crisis-new-data-shows-hardships-rising-moderate-income.
3. See Hinojosa, Chatterjee, and Torres, A Call to Action: Bronxites Recovering Slower Than Rest of the City Due To Hardships, (June 2024), https://www.cssny.org/publications/entry/a-call-to-action-bronxites-recovering-slower-than-rest-of-the-city.
4. According to the US Census Bureau, “The Gini Index is a summary measure of income inequality. The Gini coefficient incorporates the detailed shares data into a single statistic, which summarizes the dispersion of income across the entire income distribution. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0, indicating perfect equality (where everyone receives an equal share), to 1, perfect inequality (where only one recipient or group of recipients receives all the income).” www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/income-inequality/about/metrics/gini-index.html
5. We consider the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) to be the gold standard of local housing data, and so it is worth noting that while the housing values in the ACS are slightly higher than those found in the HVS, the trends are roughly the same.
6. https://nysfocus.com/2024/04/09/child-tax-credit-poverty-new-york
8. Debipriya Chatterjee, Make Work Pay Again: An Argument for Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, (May 2022), https://www.cssny.org/publications/entry/make-work-pay-again-expanding-earned-income-tax-credit-eitc.
9. See One Fair Wage New York, https://www.onefairwage.org/newyork.