Poverty Report Released for First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic
NYC Opportunity has released its annual poverty report, which contains a measure of poverty in New York City for 2020, the latest year for which data is available. This year’s report is different from past reports: the Covid-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the collection of poverty data in 2020. Because of these data issues, the 2020 findings should be thought of as “marked by an asterisk.” Even so, the poverty measure calculated for 2020, 16.6 percent, suggests that poverty fell in 2020, though it is difficult to say with any confidence by precisely how much.
The City Charter requires the City to report on poverty rates in New York City on an annual basis. The City created its own poverty measure, the NYC Government Poverty Measure (NYCgov Poverty Measure), designed to measure poverty in the city more precisely than the federal poverty measure. The NYCgov measure accounts for the high cost of housing in New York City, and it also includes income that the federal measure does not, such as nutrition and housing assistance.
The Covid-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on poverty in the city, unleashing forces that both increased poverty levels and decreased them. Many New Yorkers lost jobs or income when their employers cut back or closed entirely. At the same time, temporary federal, state and city government programs designed to address the economic impact of Covid-19 added billions of dollars to household incomes.
This year’s report was hampered by a number of pandemic-related challenges. Most notably, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS), which is an important source of data for calculating poverty, was suspended for several months. When it resumed, the response rate was lower than expected, and responses were not evenly distributed across demographic categories.
The Census Bureau took steps to compensate for the data deficiencies, including creating a set of “experimental” one-year data that was adjusted in various ways. Using this experimental data, the Poverty Research Unit of NYC Opportunity calculated a 2020 NYCgov poverty rate of 16.6 percent, which is a 0.8 percentage point decline from the 2019 rate. Poverty rates are not available for demographic subgroups (age, sex, race/ethnicity, family type, etc.) because of data issues when working with smaller population groups. The last chapter of the report provides a detailed analysis of problems with using the data for smaller subgroups and includes important insights for users of the 2020 ACS data for New York City.
The 2020 poverty rate number — 16.6 percent — cannot be directly compared to previous years because of the differences in data quality. It is plausible, though, that poverty declined in 2020, given the large amounts of temporary Covid-19 aid New York City households received ranging from stimulus credit to expanded unemployment benefits and more. As the poverty report says in its preface, “because of underlying data problems, the trend’s trajectory is more reliable than the actual rate.”
Read the full poverty report, “New York City Government Poverty Measure, 2020,” here: https://www.nyc.gov/site/opportunity/poverty-in-nyc/poverty-measure.page
