NYC Poverty Rate At Lowest Level Since 1970s, City Says

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration boasted about a historic drop in New York City's poverty rate on Tuesday even though nearly one in five city-dwellers is poor and income inequality persists.

Some 17.3 percent of New Yorkers were in poverty in 2018, the lowest rate the city has seen since the 1970s, according City Hall's analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. The nationwide poverty rate last year was 13.1 percent, the survey found.

The mayor's office says the local poverty rate has dropped significantly since de Blasio took office as the city has seen other promising signs of economic growth.

"I was elected on a promise to end the Tale of Two Cities and that’s exactly what we’ve spent every day of the last five years working to do," de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Last year's poverty rate was down 3.6 percentage points from 20.9 percent in 2013 and marked the lowest rate recorded in the city since the American Community Survey was first released in 2006, the mayor's office said.

Median household income also increased 13 percent from 2013 to 2018 and more than half a million jobs were added to the local workforce in that time, according to City Hall.

But other data points suggest that income inequality has remained a thorn in the city's side even as the number of people living in poverty has shrunk.

Among them is the "income diversity ratio," a metric tracked by New York University's Furman Center that measures how much more money the city's richest residents make compared to the poorest.

A household in the city's 80th income percentile earned 6.7 times as much as a household in the 20th percentile in 2017 — up from a factor of 6.2 in 2013, according to data analyzed by the Furman Center.

Another recent analysis by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that the city's Gini coefficient, a metric of how equally a society's income is distributed, has not budged since de Blasio took office on a pledge to narrow the divide between the rich and poor.

City Hall has argued that the Gini coefficient changes very slowly and does not capture the progress the city has made in reducing poverty. City officials attributed those gains to initiatives such as the $15-per-hour minimum wage, guaranteed paid sick leave and universal pre-kindergarten.

"Family income gains and poverty reduction are benefiting a broader cross-section of city residents than at anytime since the 1960s," James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policies at the New School's Center for New York City Affairs, said in a statement.