Today’s Good News: NYC Develops New Ways To Measure Poverty
Whenever I hear statistics about poverty, I can only think about how many more poor people there really are.  Who could support a family of four on $20K a year, anywhere, much less in New York City?  Massively understating the problem surely doesn’t help us solve it.  City Limits reports that New York is forging ahead with figuring out the best way to take a new look.Â
This August, a Congressional hearing on this issue yielded a strong consensus that the federal measure is broken and must be fixed. (Who knew??) Public opinion polls, too, consistently show that people think families need to earn at least twice as much as the federal poverty guidelines to meet their basic needs.
New York City’s effort is led by Mark Levitan, director of poverty research at the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO). The city’s alternative measure is based on recommendations from the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
NAS poverty thresholds are based on the actual costs of food, clothing, shelter and miscellaneous items in various geographic areas, and are updated on a yearly basis to reflect changing costs. Additionally, the NAS measure deducts certain expenses from income, such as taxes, child care and medical costs, but counts benefits like food stamps and tax credits as income.
The CEO will use the new poverty measure to help create two annual reports: the first an analysis of the well-being of three target groups (working poor adults, young adults ages 16 to 24 and children up to age 5), and the second a look at poverty throughout New York City.
The idea is not just to get a better picture of who is really poor, but to better judge which of the anti-poverty measures government and society are deploying might bring better results.
Other groups in NYC are working on other ways to measure overty, as well. Check out the whole story here.Â
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