NEW YORK (PIX11) — Poverty rates in New York are higher than the national average, with nearly 14 percent of residents facing economic hardship, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found in a report released Thursday.
Nationwide, the poverty rate in 2021 was 12.8 percent, DiNapoli said. New York has had a higher rate than the national average since 2014.
Poverty rates are also worse for Black and Hispanic New Yorkers than they are for white New Yorkers, DiNapoli said. They’re more than twice as high for Hispanic New Yorkers as they are for white residents and they’re twice as high for Black residents as they are for white residents.
Some counties have relatively low rates of poverty. Only 5.7 percent of residents in Nassau and Putnam lived in poverty in 2021, DiNapoli found. In the Bronx, however, the poverty rate was 24.4 percent. One in four people living in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse lived in poverty in 2021.
Other rates:
- Manhattan – 16.3 percent
- Brooklyn – 17.8 percent
- Queens – 10.3 percent
- Staten Island – 10.6 percent
- Suffolk – 6.1 percent
- Westchester – 7.6 percent
- Rockland – 14.4 percent
“New York has a robust safety net, and recently set a laudable goal to reduce child poverty by 50 percent; as the state considers evidence-based approaches to achieve this objective, it should sustain a cross-agency focus on high-needs groups and places where the needs are both chronic and acute,” DiNapoli wrote in the report. “Committing to an equitable recovery and targeting resources to those who most need them can facilitate improvements in the lives of millions of New Yorkers.