Half of New York City households don’t make enough money to meet their basic needs, up from 36% in 2021, according to a new report sponsored by the United Way of New York City and the Fund for the City of New York.
The new “true cost of living” accounting out Tuesday – including housing, childcare, food, healthcare, transportation, taxes, and other miscellaneous costs without public or private aid – shows costs have more than doubled across the city since 2000, far more than wages have risen.
The necessary hourly wage for a single adult is more than $20 across all boroughs, according to the researchers, ranging from a little over $22 in the Bronx to nearly $36 in downtown Manhattan, the report concluded.
For a family of four with two adults, a preschooler, and a school-age child, researchers found that expenses totaled more than $100,000 across the city. The figure was as high as $142,000 in Northwest Brooklyn and $152,000 in downtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, citywide, the median annual earnings for such a family was less than $50,000.
It starts to really crystallize the gap between what folks are getting today versus what they're actually spending.
“It starts to really crystallize the gap between what folks are getting today versus what they're actually spending,” United Way President and CEO Grace Bonilla said.
The report, titled "Underlooked & Undercounted," provides a fresh glimpse into the economic state of New Yorkers across the income spectrum and the five boroughs in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to take a toll on employment in various sectors of the economy.
The city will soon release its own “true cost of living” measure, as authorized in a ballot initiative overwhelmingly approved by voters last fall. The goal is to capture a more complete universe of economic insecurity beyond the poverty line. Federal and local measures of poverty are widely criticized by researchers and economic justice advocates as too low and outdated, yet remain the standard measuring stick for public benefits.
Under the country’s Official Poverty Measure, only 16% of working-age households live below the poverty line. That threshold is based in part on a formula tied to what was a minimally adequate diet in the mid-20th century, adjusted for inflation and family size.
Meanwhile, the “true cost of living” as tallied in the report relies on more factors and varies based on family composition and location. The report also excludes elderly and disabled adults, who may have unique expenses not fully captured in the “true cost of living.”
The city’s new analogous metric could be used to negotiate wages, or to lobby for raising the income cutoff for government aid programs from food stamps to Medicaid, Bonilla said.
She attributes the stark rise in the cost of living since 2000 to the city’s aim to lure more out-of-town professionals, and the resulting transformation of the rental market to cater to them. Meanwhile, she said the city underinvested in boosting job growth for existing residents.
'Fabric of families'
With the onset of the pandemic, rampant death and the ruptured “fabric of families” only added to financial precarity, she said. A rollback of pandemic-era safety net policies, like a moratorium on evictions and the end of extra food subsidies, caused more harm.
“We've made policy decisions that actually have made things better for people, and now we're going backwards at the worst possible time,” she said.
According to the report, the share of struggling households was even higher for immigrants and people of color: 64% of non-citizen households; 65% of Latino households; 60% of Native American households; and 58% of Black households didn’t make enough money to cover their basic needs. That’s compared to less than half of U.S.-born households and less than one-third of White households.
The share of people making below the “true cost of living” was also significantly higher – nearly 20 percentage points – among families with children, and even higher for those with toddlers. The rates were highest for households led by single mothers: 4 in 5 didn’t make enough to cover costs, compared to 69% of single fathers, with even higher rates for Latino and Black mothers.
And having a working adult in a household was essential, but no guarantee, of making ends meet – especially when people of color are heads of the household. Eighty percent of households below the “true cost of living” line had at least one part-time working adult. And among households with at least one full-time working adult, 57% with a Latino worker struggled to meet their basic needs, compared with 24% of white households.
