Survey: Growing Financial Insecurity Along Race and Gender Lines
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
For more than 22 years the organization I lead, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), has surveyed the city’s low-income residents on a series of topics, from their financial challenges to their views on policies and programs that would help them get ahead economically.
The insights gleaned from the survey are integrated into our advocacy agenda and used to elevate the voices of low-income New Yorkers to ensure that their concerns are heard by politicians, community leaders and the media.
Findings from The Unheard Third — the longest running regular public opinion poll of low-income households in the nation — were the driving force behind citywide campaigns in the last decade to address transit affordability and workplace inequities. For example, the four-year campaign to get the city to establish and fund a half-price bus and subway fares program, known as Fair Fares, originated with data from The Unheard Third. It revealed that “one out of four” low-income New York City residents often could not afford the public transit fare. Today, more than 350,000 low-income New Yorkers with incomes at or below 120 percent of the Federal Poverty Level are enrolled in the program.
In 2013, six years before Fair Fares went into effect, The Unheard Third powered advocacy efforts that brought together a coalition of elected officials, advocates and economic justice activists, culminating in the City Council passing the “Earned Sick Time Act”. The measure requires employers in the city to provide their employees with at least a modest amount of paid sick time for illness and to care for a sick family member. An estimated one million low wage workers benefited from the law. Note: Mayor de Blasio expanded the law in 2014.
Worsening Financial Precarity for Low-Income New Yorkers
A new CSS report released this month and based on the latest survey findings, shows that financial security has worsened for many New Yorkers across income, gender and race since 2021. This is despite the fact that some New York households built a small financial cushion thanks to pandemic-era supports and wage growth.
But the expiration of pandemic-era assistance along with historic inflation during an uneven economic recovery has contributed to eroding people’s sense of economic security. A recent Federal Reserve report on the Economic Wellbeing of U.S. Households bears that out. It found that the proportion of Americans who felt they were “doing okay financially” fell six percentage points – to 72 percent – after peaking at 78 percent in 2021.
The CSS report, “Teetering on the Edge: The Unheard Third Survey Reveals Pervasive Financial Insecurity Among New Yorkers,” offers a sobering look at the daily struggles for nearly half of the city’s residents, many of whom are struggling to find their financial foothold and living paycheck to paycheck. What is particularly striking is how much financial precarity has permeated into the lives of New Yorkers in the middle of the income distribution.
According to the report, one-in-five women disproportionately experienced financial insecurity in 2023 with Black and Latina women especially impacted, a quarter of whom reporting they had no rainy- day savings. In all, 26 percent of low-income New Yorkers (those living in or near poverty) reported having no rainy-day savings. Overall, the proportion of survey respondents, both low-income and moderate-income, with zero savings increased in 2023.
To put it all in perspective, what the findings tell us is that despite some improvement in the economy, the rising cost of living in New York City driven primarily by the astronomical costs of housing and childcare, is leaving millions of New Yorkers in a state of almost constant financial stress. At the same time, those who lack the savings to meet a relatively modest $400 emergency expense have few places to turn to besides expensive loans and borrowing from family and friends, who themselves may be financially insecure.
Among big cities, New York City has always ranked high in terms of inequality. However, the fact that a quarter of our fellow New Yorkers have absolutely no rainy-day savings to fall back on underscores the seriousness of the problem.
The report offers several recommendations that city and state policymakers could act on to help New Yorkers cope with the rising cost of living and the financial stress it imposes on them and their families. These include increasing cash benefits to those on public assistance to reflect increased cost of living, improving and expanding access to the Empire State Child Credit (ESCC) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), fully funding and expanding the CityFHEPS housing voucher program, and expanding access to affordable banking and financial services.
The report also calls for an end to gender- and race-based discrimination in wage-setting by strengthening pay transparency laws, as women appear to be bearing the brunt of financial duress.
Here’s the bottom line: For too long we have underestimated the minimum level of resources and supports low-income and moderate-income households need to live in expensive cities like New York. Clearly, we have the tools to tackle these issues. Let’s use them.