New report shows most New Yorkers are living at or near poverty

More than half of New York City is living at or near the poverty line, according to a report released Wednesday from Robin Hood, a nonprofit that fights poverty, and Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

The report, which is called the Poverty Tracker, comes out annually. This year’s report measured rates of poverty in all five boroughs in 2022 and found the largest single-year increase in poverty since the Poverty Tracker was launched in 2012. 

Among the report’s key findings, the number of New Yorkers living in poverty grew from 1.5 million to 2 million between 2021 and 2022, with nearly 500,000 more people in New York living in poverty than the year prior.   

At 56%, most of the city’s population lives in poverty or with low incomes.

Children are experiencing these struggles at an alarming rate, too. The child poverty rate jumped by 66%, rising from 15% to 25%. The report also indicates that poverty in NYC is nearly twice as high as the national poverty rate. 

Chloe Sarnoff, director, policy research and initiatives at Robin Hood, called the statistics “disheartening.”

“One of the most powerful things about the Poverty Tracker is that we track families over time, so we can see how families move in and out of poverty or hardship,” Sarnoff explained. “We always knew that there were sort of half of New Yorkers who were experiencing some form of disadvantage, but more than half of New Yorkers living at or near poverty is really an alarming figure.”

What is the poverty line in NYC?

The city’s affordability crisis has presented challenges for many New Yorkers. For a renting household with two adults and two children in the city, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, or poverty line, is approximately $44,000. 

Sarnoff explained that the poverty line is a threshold established to try and determine what it would take to afford “a really minimal” basic-needs level. But doubling that 44,000 number would be a more…