NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- A new study shows half of New Yorkers lived in poverty between between 2015 and 2018.
Adults with two children who make less than roughly $30,000 a year, officially qualify as living below the poverty line but Sophie Collyer, research director at Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy says even people who make more than that are teetering near poverty and material hardship.
"Even in a single year, nearly 50 percent of New Yorkers are living below 200 hundred percent of the poverty line," Collyer says. "So if you double the poverty line, about half of New York City adults are living below that threshold which again, using the numbers you were talking about it's about $60,000 for an adult with two children -- which again is not a lot of income in such an expensive city like New York."
About one in five adults, or 1.4 million people were poor in 2018 compared to 2012 when the number was one in four, meaning that single adults earned less than $17,000.
Adults with two kids took home less than $30,000.
Hispanic adults were more than twice as likely than white adults to live in poverty in 2018.
The likelihood of women to be living in poverty was 24 percent and just 17 percent for men.
One of the major policy recommendations the study makes is to increase housing subsidies in the city, as they currently reduce the poverty rate by 5 percent.
Increasing the benefit could reduce it even more.