The share of New York City residents who could not afford basic essentials jumped dramatically in 2022, with one in four children living in poverty, a new report found.
After several years of declining poverty, New York City saw a sharp reversal in 2022, when it experienced its largest yearly increase in the poverty level in a decade.
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Twenty-three percent of the city’s residents were unable to afford basic necessities like housing and food, according to a new report by a research group at Columbia University and Robin Hood, a large philanthropic organization. In 2021, that number was 18 percent.
The number of New Yorkers living in poverty, nearly two million in all, included one in four children.
The findings mark a major setback for New York City, where expanded government aid during the coronavirus pandemic had helped to counteract job losses, rising rents and high inflation.
With most of those programs ending, poverty has risen nationwide, but the surge has been especially clear in New York, said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia School of Social Work and a co-author of the report.
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