singular_me
30th April 2014, 03:06 PM
thanks to so-called financial experts with their so-called academic degrees
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Apr 30, 2014 10:45 am
From 2011 to 2012, the number of New Yorkers who were at or near poverty levels remained constant at 46%. According to a new report [PDF] released by the City's Center for Economic Opportunity and obtained by the Times, "nearly half of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a figure that describes people who are struggling to get by."
Being gainfully employed does not necessarily keep you from "struggling to get by": 17% of families with a full time worker remained in poverty, as did 5.2% of families with two full time workers.
The poverty rate has stopped growing since the recession, but this belies the reality of a city that is impossibly expensive to live in and has only seen an increase in low-wage jobs with no benefits.
Mayor de Blasio's first deputy mayor Anthony Shorris says that the new administration "got elected almost entirely on this question," and vowed to fight "this stubborn undercurrent" with paid sick leave, a living wage law, municipal ID cards, and universal pre-K.
New York's reality mirrors what the country is experiencing. Per another report on the meager wage job boom in the Times:
The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit.
Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.
http://gothamist.com/2014/04/30/almost_half_of_new_yorkers_are_poor.php#.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/ceo_poverty_measure_2005_2012.pdf
NYT article
Nearly Half of New Yorkers Are Struggling to Get By, Study Finds
By SAM ROBERTSAPRIL 30, 2014
“After years of trying to nibble around the edges with pilot programs that were well-intentioned, but that were not moving the needle,” he said, the de Blasio administration would confront “this stubborn undercurrent” full throttle through paid sick leave, expansion of the so-called living wage law, municipal identification cards, universal prekindergarten and after-school programs.
“Everything we’re trying to do is at scale,” he said.
The report concluded that “the recession-related growth in the poverty rate, which began in 2008, has ended.”
Still, some groups, some of them overlapping, plunged deeper into poverty. Since 2008, when the city initiated its more comprehensive poverty index, Asians overtook Hispanics as the poorest New Yorkers. In 2008, they were statistically identical at about 23 percent. By 2012, the rate among Asians was 3.3 percentage points higher than the rate for Hispanics, at 29 percent.
Under the less exacting federal standard, a family of two adults and two children was defined as poor in 2012 if it made less than $23,283, yielding a poverty rate of 20 percent in the city. But under the city’s definition, which takes into account benefits like food stamps and expenses like higher living costs, the income threshold was $31,039, resulting in a rate of 21.4 percent.
A smaller proportion of people (5.4 percent) were living in extreme poverty — below 50 percent of the poverty rate — by the city’s standard than under the federal standard (8.1 percent).
While more people were working, wages were lagging because most jobs were generated in lower-wage hospitality and retail fields.
Brooklyn was the only borough to register a decline in its poverty rate between 2011 and 2012............
“We’re not unrealistic about what a city can do,” he added. “But after four years, we’ll be asking whether our interventions were effective in changing what would have been the course of poverty in New York. What would the city have looked like had we not made those interventions?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/nyregion/nearly-half-of-new-yorkers-are-struggling-to-get-by-study-finds.html?_r=0
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Apr 30, 2014 10:45 am
From 2011 to 2012, the number of New Yorkers who were at or near poverty levels remained constant at 46%. According to a new report [PDF] released by the City's Center for Economic Opportunity and obtained by the Times, "nearly half of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a figure that describes people who are struggling to get by."
Being gainfully employed does not necessarily keep you from "struggling to get by": 17% of families with a full time worker remained in poverty, as did 5.2% of families with two full time workers.
The poverty rate has stopped growing since the recession, but this belies the reality of a city that is impossibly expensive to live in and has only seen an increase in low-wage jobs with no benefits.
Mayor de Blasio's first deputy mayor Anthony Shorris says that the new administration "got elected almost entirely on this question," and vowed to fight "this stubborn undercurrent" with paid sick leave, a living wage law, municipal ID cards, and universal pre-K.
New York's reality mirrors what the country is experiencing. Per another report on the meager wage job boom in the Times:
The National Employment Law Project study found that there were about a million fewer jobs in middle-wage industries — including parts of the health care system, loan servicing and real estate — than there were when the recession hit.
Economists worry that even a stronger recovery might not bring back jobs in traditionally middle-class occupations eroded by mechanization and offshoring. The American work force might become yet more “polarized,” with positions easier to find at the high and low ends than in the middle.
http://gothamist.com/2014/04/30/almost_half_of_new_yorkers_are_poor.php#.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/ceo_poverty_measure_2005_2012.pdf
NYT article
Nearly Half of New Yorkers Are Struggling to Get By, Study Finds
By SAM ROBERTSAPRIL 30, 2014
“After years of trying to nibble around the edges with pilot programs that were well-intentioned, but that were not moving the needle,” he said, the de Blasio administration would confront “this stubborn undercurrent” full throttle through paid sick leave, expansion of the so-called living wage law, municipal identification cards, universal prekindergarten and after-school programs.
“Everything we’re trying to do is at scale,” he said.
The report concluded that “the recession-related growth in the poverty rate, which began in 2008, has ended.”
Still, some groups, some of them overlapping, plunged deeper into poverty. Since 2008, when the city initiated its more comprehensive poverty index, Asians overtook Hispanics as the poorest New Yorkers. In 2008, they were statistically identical at about 23 percent. By 2012, the rate among Asians was 3.3 percentage points higher than the rate for Hispanics, at 29 percent.
Under the less exacting federal standard, a family of two adults and two children was defined as poor in 2012 if it made less than $23,283, yielding a poverty rate of 20 percent in the city. But under the city’s definition, which takes into account benefits like food stamps and expenses like higher living costs, the income threshold was $31,039, resulting in a rate of 21.4 percent.
A smaller proportion of people (5.4 percent) were living in extreme poverty — below 50 percent of the poverty rate — by the city’s standard than under the federal standard (8.1 percent).
While more people were working, wages were lagging because most jobs were generated in lower-wage hospitality and retail fields.
Brooklyn was the only borough to register a decline in its poverty rate between 2011 and 2012............
“We’re not unrealistic about what a city can do,” he added. “But after four years, we’ll be asking whether our interventions were effective in changing what would have been the course of poverty in New York. What would the city have looked like had we not made those interventions?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/nyregion/nearly-half-of-new-yorkers-are-struggling-to-get-by-study-finds.html?_r=0