Poverty Measure

This NYC annual poverty report updates the NYCgov Poverty Measure for New York City in 2021. This report covers the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the employment market was severely disrupted, and it shows the dramatic impact that government support can have on poverty levels.

The year 2021 saw the largest economic supports in U.S. history, most of it the form of direct cash payments. The result was extraordinary declines in the poverty rate. Child Poverty was cut in half, due primarily to an enhanced Child Tax Credit, which provided monthly payments of up to $3,600 per child from July to December of 2021.

Poverty fell for all demographic groups in every borough. Despite those positive trends, the differences across groups and neighborhoods persisted, and the intensity of poverty became worse for some. Even the best news, the historic declines in poverty, was short-lived. When the enhanced Child Tax Credit expired, national data for 2022 shows that child poverty, in particular, returned to pre-pandemic levels.

The data quality for 2021 improved compared to 2020, when data quality was severely impacted by the disruptions of the pandemic. Some problems still remain with the data, however, and this year's report compares the findings for 2021 to those of 2019, the year before the pandemic.

The latest NYC Opportunity annual report on poverty updates the NYCgov Poverty Measure for New York City in 2020. This year's report, which covers the first year of Covid-19, provides less robust poverty data than past reports because of significant pandemic-related limitations in data collection in 2020.

The NYCgov poverty measure that this report contains each year is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey (ACS) supplemented by city, state, and other national data. The 2020 ACS survey, however, was suspended for several months, and the overall response rate was lower, and uneven across demographic categories.

To compensate for these problems, the Census Bureau issued a set of "experimental" one-year data. Making cautious use of that data, this report finds that the poverty rate fell by 0.8 percentage points in 2020, a statistically significant drop that seems plausible in light of the temporary aid New York City households received. Because of the data problems, the trend's trajectory (a notable decline in poverty) is more reliable than the actual rate.