Tough Times in New York

A recent study conducted on the city of New York reveals that the metropolis that contains the stock market and the headquarters of some of the richest financial firms on the planet has registered an alarmingly high level of poverty among its residents in the past few years. The study, conducted by the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), showed that among the tens of thousands who slid below the poverty line from 2009 to 2010, youth and families with children were those hit especially hard.

According to CEO researchers, in just one year, 100,000 New Yorkers found themselves below the poverty line, amounting to a 1.3 percent increase that brought the grand total to 21 percent. This startling percentage is the highest since 2005 when city officials modified the criteria that established the poverty level in the city. With regard to minors, more than one in four under 18 years old —25.8 percent versus 22.9 percent in 2008 – are forced to live in these conditions.

Families with children, as was previously mentioned, are especially strained, coming up at 23 percent. If the crisis and unemployment that exploded post-2008 are any indicators of the reduction in New Yorkers’ incomes, it shouldn’t be surprising that even in families where both heads of households are employed in full-time jobs, it is becoming ever more difficult to make ends meet. In fact, in 2010, about five percent of such households (with two adults employed full-time) were beneath the poverty line, when on the whole, residents of the city in 2010 who were classified as “poor” amounted to 1.7 million.

New York’s millionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, founded the Center for Economic Opportunity in 2006 ostensibly in order to “implement innovative ways to reduce poverty.” In this same spirit, he praises the modest initiatives adopted by administrators in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the crisis on residents of the city in its most recent report “The CEO Poverty Measure 2005-2010.”

Tax credits, rent subsidies, food stamps and other public programs that were ramped up starting in 2007 have only served to restrain the poverty epidemic by a percentage point or two, barely enough to scratch the surface of the general trend towards ever higher levels of inequality.

In any case, the alarmingly high number of New Yorkers who are participating in these social programs is evidence itself of the gravity of the situation. The number of residents making use of food stamps, for example, went from 773,000 in 2008 to over 1 million in 2010.

The inclusion of these benefits by CEO and the city of New York’s determination of the poverty line resulted in a higher number than the federally established level, amounting to $30,055 and $22,113, respectively, for a family with two children in 2010. Consequently, the final data doesn’t match up. According to federal statistics, New Yorker’s in extreme poverty—that is those who bring in half the income of those considered at the poverty line, are only 7.7 percent while the city calculates 5.5 percent.

Not surprisingly, minorities have taken the biggest blows with 26 percent of Latino residents falling below the poverty line, 25 percent of Asians, 21 percent of blacks and 15.2 percent of whites. Residents without citizenship come up with 27.8 percent compared to 19.9 percent of American-born residents and 17.8 percent of naturalized immigrants.

Such statistics are sobering in the face of optimistic forecasts continuing to herald an upswing in the economy since the hard times of 2008 and claims that the U.S. recession ended in June 2009.

In reality, June of 2009 only represented a turnaround for a restricted class of privileged individuals. The divergent paths taken by the economy in the past few years are most shockingly revealed in cities like New York, a city that boasts the highest concentration of wealth in the nation, perhaps in the entire world, while 1 in 5 of its residents struggles to pay the bills at the end of each month.

The Center for Working Families, another research center with headquarters in New York conducted a recent project that compares social inequalities in sprawling metropolises such as the Big Apple to the situation in some Latin American countries like Honduras, where the distribution of wealth is among the most unequal on the planet.