More Than Half of New Yorkers Live in Poverty

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll talk to Richard Buery now, CEO of the New York City nonprofit known these days as Robin Hood. Buery was previously the deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives under Mayor Bill de Blasio. He was a key architect of the City's universal pre-K program universally hailed as the de Blasio administration's best thing. You may have seen Richard Buery's or Robin Hood's name in the news this week for the report they just released along with the Poverty Tracker research group at Columbia University that found a shocking recent increase in poverty in the City.

500,000 more New Yorkers in poverty in 2022 than the year before they say. It's a paradox because the City has recovered to the same number of jobs from before the pandemic. One key finding, they're not the same kind of jobs. To Buery's main policy interest, children, they are bearing the brunt of the poverty surge. Let's find out more now about the findings and what he thinks can be done from Robin Hood CEO, Richard Buery. Richard, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Richard Buery: Thank you, Brian. Always good to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask as a starting point, how do you define poverty for the sake of your report?

Richard Buery: Absolutely. That's a great place to start. We define poverty using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is a more robust measure of poverty than through the traditional poverty measure which was adopted by the federal government, the Social Security Administration in the 1960s, which looked at the cost through the breadbasket approach. You looked at the cost of food and you'd multiply that by three and you got the poverty rate. The Supplemental Poverty Measure is much more dynamic. It includes all expenses, not only food, which of course, is a relatively smaller portion of people's expenses, but housing, healthcare, all the thing that actually you need to thrive.

It's also tied to the local cost of living. It acknowledges that living in New York City is more expensive than living in other places. We use the Supplemental Poverty Measure. What that is is for a family of four, it's almost $44,000. As you say, what we find is that using that poverty measure, really disturbing result that from 2021 to 2022, which is what this survey is reporting on. As you said, an additional 500,000 New Yorkers living in poverty compared to the year before, so up from 1.5 million New Yorkers to 2 million New Yorkers. Over 400,000 of those New Yorkers are children living in poverty in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: These numbers are from 2022, it's now 2024. Why is this about the state of the poverty two years ago and not more recently?

Richard Buery: One of the things that we do is-- This is from our report called our Poverty Tracker report. For the last 12 years now, every year, we interview thousands of New Yorkers living in poverty and we interview them every few months. It allows us to get a rich picture of how their lives, they're experienced over the course of a year, and how it changes, and how their experience in poverty changes.

It's a representative sample of New Yorkers. We're not looking at real-time data, we're talking to people and asking, "Well, what did you earn this year? What have your experiences been like? What have you struggled with?" It's a little bit behind current data, but it allows us to have a richer understanding of what New Yorkers are actually experiencing.

Brian Lehrer: 500,000 more New Yorkers in poverty in 2022 than the year before. You mentioned children, can you put more human faces on that cold heart stat besides how old are they? Who else are they demographically? Where do they live in the City? Anything else?

Richard Buery: Absolutely. I'll say a few things. One is you can imagine that the experience of poverty is not experienced equally of everyone. We know that for New Yorkers are more likely to be people of color. Latino New Yorkers have more than double the poverty rate of white New Yorkers. Asian and Black New Yorkers have also much higher poverty rates, 24% for Asian New Yorkers and 23% of Black New Yorkers. We know that female New Yorkers experience higher rates of poverty and hardship than male New Yorkers. We know that it's not experience in every borough the same. The Bronx have a higher concentration of poverty.

We understand that this disadvantage is not equally experienced. The other thing I would say when we talk about poverty, in some ways looking at this poverty number, it doesn't tell a full enough picture because it's not as though only those 2 million New Yorkers are struggling. If you look at people who have double the poverty rate, so again, that's $88,000 for a family of four in a year, what you find is that their experience is in many ways a very similar to the experience of New Yorkers who are further down the income line. They are twice as likely to struggle with paying their bills.

They're making choices every month between, "Am I going to pay the rent, or am I going to put food on the table, or am I going to go to a doctor if I get sick?" That's more than half of New Yorkers, 56% of New Yorkers who earn $88,000 or less. The story it tells us is that it's not just a few of us that are struggling, it's most of us that are struggling. That the affordability crisis, the challenges of our economy are burdening too many of us. It means that we are not living in the City that we want to live in. Children are not experiencing the lives they deserve to experience. It is a crisis.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite your phone calls for Richard Buery, CEO of the group, Robin Hood. Are you or is anyone you know in a family with children struggling financially in or close to what we might call poverty? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. What would help you or someone you know at a policy level or how can Richard Buery give you some tips perhaps on qualifying for all the benefits you're eligible for or maybe even finding the best work?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, with a story to tell, or a question, or a comment with this new report out showing 500,000 additional New Yorkers went into poverty in 2022 compared to the year before, disproportionately children. 212-433-9692, call or text. Was much of the jump in poverty in 2022 from the expiration of certain pandemic-related benefits that were in place in 2021?

Richard Buery: Absolutely, Brian. There's a confluence of factors, but the driving factor is certainly the end of pandemic-era benefit. What's so interesting, if that's the right word, is that during the pandemic when so many of us were suffering, New York City like much of the country saw historic declines in poverty. Indeed the poverty rate fell by 68% and driven by federal state and local policy that were designed to help people stabilize their lives during this incredible public health and economic crisis.

Brian Lehrer: That's a paradox we've talked about many times before on the show, but it's still incredible that those government benefits could have more than made up for all the lost jobs that people are experiencing during the lockdown.

Richard Buery: Absolutely. Things like if you know everything from stimulus payments to expansion of unemployment insurance to most critically, the expansion of the child tax credit, which was expanded and made fully refundable and was paid every month as opposed to once at the end of the year really helped stabilize people's lives. It's so important to remember that we look at the world, all of us, we go out in the world and it can be so overwhelming. It's so easy just to see people struggling, see people who are homeless, see people who are challenging and to think, "Well, it's just natural, it's just the nature of the world.

It's just the way the world is," or you say, "Well, it's somebody's moral failing," or, "It's someone's bad luck." The truth is these are choices that we make of the society, these are policy choices because we know one we saw that when we as a country decided that we were going to do something, we did it. We helped improve and stabilize people's lives during one of the most difficult periods that this City and this country have ever experienced. That's part of what's so heartbreaking is that now we are making different choices and people are struggling. It's hard to overestimate how important it is, especially for children because as you know, so much of the way that children's brains develop, so much of what happened and what set them on the course of their life happens at the early ages. What happened in the baby's mind, the one-year-old's mind has so much impact on their entire life trajectory. There was a study that NYU is leading right now that we're one of the funders of called Baby's First Years, which is investigating what happens when you give parents to the very young children money.

Some of the early findings of that study are extraordinary because they're seeing substantial changes in brain activity for children whose parents receive a large cash infusion of young children versus those who don't. You can only imagine what impact these supports had on the children during the pandemic. Again, we're learning so much about how what happened in the earliest year to this is so important, but we're just not acting on what we know.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you an ultimate question, and you could probably give a two-hour speech on this. You'll have to figure out how to give a radio interview-level answer. Now that you've been studying poverty full-time at Robin Hood and with your experience as deputy mayor before that in the de Blasio administration, which came in with equality as its main focus, inequality, what are the biggest underlying causes of structural poverty in the City today?

Because if we look back, I think this station is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and I'll bet we could go back in the archives and have clips that we could find of many, many conversations like this with many, many hosts and many, many guests and we still have high poverty rates in the City. What are the biggest underlying causes of structural poverty in the City today? I realize it's a big question.

Richard Buery: It is a big question. In some ways, there are some straightforward answers. One thing I would say that in America it is impossible to disentangle the experience of poverty from the experience of racism. It's not a coincidence why many of the indicators of poverty are more pronounced in communities of color. Even beyond that, I think it's fair to say that one of the reasons why we as a country, we as a society don't make the investments that we're supposed to make is because we have racialized poverty. Even though it's always been the case, there have been more poor white people than Black people.

However, I think in a country which has racism driving so much of its core, I think that fact and the idea that we have a narrative of poverty that describes the poor as the other, the unworthy, but it stopped us from making common-sense investments, common-sense decisions that we know would make life more equitable and expand opportunity for more Americans. We don't do them almost because we don't want to help those who we see as the other. I think it's impossible to disentangle that. Then I would just say, again, as a country, we continue to ignore what we know matters.

We understand how important early childhood experience indication are, but we fail to make the investments that we know would drive opportunity there. We know that people need affordable and safe places to live, but we refuse to make the investments in expanding access to affordable housing. While it's not just one policy issue, we need education, we need housing, we need food access, we need healthcare, I think we constantly find ourselves failing to make these investments because we're unwilling. We don't always mean it when we talk a language that says we care about and we believe in equal opportunity.

I just honestly think too many of us don't believe it. I remain hopeful because although it is certainly true that we've been talking about these issues for a long time, it's also true that we've made tremendous progress over those years. We've made tremendous progress when it comes to racial equality. We've made tremendous progress when it comes to learning how to teach students and how to build better schools and expand access to education. Just look at New York City, look at the advancement in our higher education system.

CUNY, the City University of New York, I think is one of the most important opportunity-driving institution in the country because it's doing the work every day and it's always learning about how to do a better job of helping students living in poverty enter the working class. There's good reasons to be upset and frustrated. I know we've been having these conversations for years and for decades, but I also think we have to embrace the successes we've had.

Again, looking at the child tax credit and what we did at the society in 2020 and 2021, even though we were not able to make those extensions permanent, we now know what happens when you provide people with resources. I'm confident that we can do better now that we know better. I think it's important for all of us to maintain that confidence because without that hope comes despair, and if you have despair it's hard to get to action.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a question from a listener. Listener writes, "Doesn't Robin Hood mean take from the rich and give it to the poor experiencing poverty as one of the first movements seeking to fix inequality in a lobbyistic plutocracy," which this writer calls our society?

Richard Buery: It does. I'm not sure what the writer means by lobbyist plutocracy, but part of what Robin Hood does, to be honest, that name comes from the fact that we are a public charity that every year raises money from generous New Yorkers, over $140 million in a typical year. We invest that money in organizations that are on the front lines of helping New Yorkers in need, food kitchens, schools, affordable housing providers, homeless services providers, community centers.

We're investing in highly effective organizations, organizations that have evidence that the work they're doing is truly impacting opportunity by helping families escape poverty, not only today but permanently. We also invest in advocacy based on what we learn from the work of our community partners. We work with government to advocate for policy that we actually know will help New Yorkers do better in life and we invest in research to help us understand the nature of poverty.

That's what this Poverty Tracker is all about. It's to help us understand the nature of poverty, but then to use that information as an advocacy tool to encourage and push our government partners to do what we know works to actually make the promise of economic opportunity real for every New Yorker. It's absolutely what we do. We raise money from New Yorkers with means who can afford it, and we reinvest that money in programs that are helping those of us in need.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a question from a listener via text message. On another aspect of this it says, "Wouldn't less red tape/forms to fill out for government assistance benefit these families? Many people don't have access to computers, the internet, or grasp on legal language. The forms are confusing and it almost feels like a deterrent," writes this listener. I think a constant struggle in the City and I wonder what your view on this is from over time as a former deputy mayor that some administrations are more aggressive than others in doing outreach to New York City residents and letting them know what benefits they're eligible for and how to apply for them.

Some administrations, I think certainly Giuliani, I think it's fair to say, maybe even Bloomberg worked to limit outreach because they thought that would lead fewer New Yorkers to sign up for any kind of benefits in the first place.

Richard Buery: Your listener is fundamentally right, 1,000% right, is that we make it so hard for families to access the benefits to which they're entitled, the resources to which their children need to that itself becomes a barrier and a boundary to allowing people to access benefits. A lot of our work at Robin Hood has been really focused on making it easier for the public to access and to get public benefits. You're also right that a government can decide to go out and make it easier to connect people to services or to make it harder. You talked about my time in the de Blasio administration.

One of the things that I'm most proud of when we were building the pre-K system, we spent as much time thinking about how do we get up these classrooms and hire teachers? We spent just as much time thinking about how do we help parents understand what this program is? How do we make it easier for them to find the program that works for them? How do we make it as easy as possible for them to enroll? These are the decisions that we make when we're trying to figure out how to support people. Some of the work that we're doing at Robin Hood right now is investing in organizations and tools, including technology-based tools, acting on the resources that are designed to trying to use technology and artificial intelligence, again, to reduce these access barriers, to everything from, how do we use snap benefits or weak benefits, to how do you apply for housing, or how do you get services if you are recently returning home from incarceration. Really trying to reduce these barriers that stand in the way of people getting what they need to thrive. Your caller is absolutely correct.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener writes, "I teach at CUNY, City Tech. So many of my students have dropped out this year alone, in large part due to mounting responsibility to support their families and economic crisis or on the poverty line. All of these systems are connected and youth need resources," writes that listener who teaches at CUNY, City Tech. Here's Janine, a former New Yorker now living in Virginia calling in. Janine, you're on WNYC, hello.

Janine: Hey, Brian. I miss living in New York so much, but it was so hard. I'm an artist, I work in entertainment industry. I knew my life was not going to be easy in New York, but it seems as if the system is really built to keep people in poverty. I paid 70% of my income to rent. I worked jobs when I wasn't working, and then there came at I was waiting tables, and being a chef, and being a personal chef, and I worked for wealthy people who never wanted to pay.

Even with my peers, I was up to see friend's shows last week and I had a friend who used to be a nanny and the woman didn't want to pay her a living wage to watch her kids, so she found someone who would take less. It's so hard in New York because the wealthy people who are taking over, honestly, they'll pay, I guess, to the Robin Hood Foundation, but then they'll use an undocumented worker to be the person who cleans their house, and they don't pay people living wages. \

A lot of people, I was too proud, I was not raised to look for public assistance. I just would work three and four jobs and I didn't have kids because I knew I couldn't afford them. Beyond all of that, it's figuring out ways to, I don't know, encourage people who are wealthy to actually pay their staff. I'm talking personal assistants, this is what the strike was about. Poverty actually works for this system. They always want to have people who don't make money, they don't have to pay.

Brian Lehrer: In the pandemic, we call them essential workers.

Richard Buery: Sorry, what was your name again? I apologize, I missed your--

Janine: Oh, my name is Janine.

Richard Buery: Janine. Thank you, Janine, for sharing your story. I really hope that people listen to and internalize what you're saying because our City can't thrive if people like Janine can't make a way here. We need a City with artists, and artisans, and teachers, and firefighters. We need all of these people to make our City go, but the problem is that too many people can't afford to live here, truly can't afford to live here, can't see themselves building a future here. I think, ultimately, that is the biggest threat to our entire City. Whether you make $10 million a year or $10 a year, you should view that as an existential threat to the well-being of our City.

Also talking about the stigma of getting help, I think it goes to the other caller of the text about the difficulty of applying for benefits. We also have to remove the stigma of getting help because there's no one, again, the person who makes $10 million a year and the person who makes $10 a year, everybody gets help, everybody needs support. We have to make sure that people who want to be here and who want to make a life here have access to those support. The last thing I'll say, it's also so important that we protect the rights of the most vulnerable. One of the campaigns that we've been supporting is the campaign to end the tipped wage.

There's no reason why people who work as waiters should be dependent on tips to earn a living. It makes people so vulnerable, including women, especially, who become particularly vulnerable when they're relying on tips to just get to a minimum standard of living. The last thing I will say is, I think what you're saying, Janine, that the heart of the story of that, even looking at the 2 million people living in poverty widely understates the scope of the problem because the vast majority of New Yorkers are struggling with the thing that you were struggling with. I think the City is a less vibrant place because you weren't able to stay here.

Brian Lehrer: Janine, thanks for your call. I'll give a listener the last question to you as we run out of time. Listener writes, "What does Robin Hood think of or is doing to help achieve a minimum basic income? This could greatly address some of the inequality they are fighting to fix." Do you support that as a solution?

Richard Buery: We have not formally adopted a position on a minimum basic income, although it's something that we have explored and are trying to understand the research about. One thing that we have advanced is increasing the minimum wage so that at least earned wages should actually be, if you work a full-time job, you shouldn't be living in poverty in New York, you should be able to pay your rent, and buy food, and have a standard of living.

I think, fundamentally, it's a worthy idea to explore because fundamentally we know that families need stability in order to thrive. They need stability for their children to grow and develop, but they need stability to be able to think about their future, to focus on their education, to improve their skills. It's something that we're definitely learning and exploring, and we certainly commit to to getting smarter about it so that we can have a more effective answer to that question.

Brian Lehrer: Richard Buery, CEO of Robin Hood, we always appreciate when you come on with us. Thank you very much.

Richard Buery: Brian, thank you so much for having me. Have a blessed day.

 

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