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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Here is a stark statistic just released by researchers at Columbia University and the anti-poverty organization Robin Hood. The stat is this, more New Yorkers are living in poverty today than at any point in the last decade. Again, that's according to a new analysis from the anti-poverty organization Robin Hood as well as Columbia University. Robin Hood has been tracking economic hardship in New York City since 2012. Their latest report finds that as of 2024, 26% of New Yorkers, roughly 2.2 million people, including about 450,000 children, were living in poverty.

This data, more than a quarter of the city's residents under the poverty line, predates the Trump administration's sweeping cuts to the federal safety net, which have just started to be implemented. Let's talk to the CEO of Robin Hood, Richard Buery. One of his jobs before that, for which he was on the show at the time, was as New York City's deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives. In that role, he was a key architect of Pre-K for All, which is an anti-poverty program as much as it is an education program under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Mr. Buery, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Richard Buery: Likewise, always good to be with you. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. Are you one of the 2.2 million New Yorkers living in poverty? How do you get by? Did your finances go downhill in recent years, adding to this unhappy trend, this record, for the city as a whole? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also chime in if you're a social worker, a teacher, healthcare provider, any other type of direct service professional working with people experiencing poverty and can help us report this story. 212-433-9692, call or text. Mr. Buery, just to be clear, how do you define poverty for the sake of your report?

Richard Buery: Of course. We use something called the supplemental poverty measure, which is a much more effective measure of poverty than the federal measure. The supplemental poverty measure does two very important things. One is on the resource side, it looks not only at after-tax wages, but it also looks at other public benefits that you might have available to you to help you make ends meet. For example, if you are on SNAP and receive-- If you receive what used to be called food stamps, that counts. If you have a housing voucher, that counts.

We look at the totality of resources you have available to you. It also looks at real expenses. The national poverty measure is one size fits all. The poverty rate in Jackson, Mississippi, is the same poverty rate as in New York City, the same poverty rate in San Francisco. What we look at is the actual cost of living of basic needs in New York City. The cost of food, of housing, of childcare, utilities, clothing. It gives you a real specific picture of what did it actually take to make ends meet in New York City. That's a supplemental poverty measure. Just to close the loop for a family of four, two adult, two child family, that's about $50,000 to sort of basic subsistence to survive in New York.

Brian Lehrer: That would encompass more people than the federal poverty line would?

Richard Buery: It absolutely would.

Brian Lehrer: There are three categories. I see that you designate income poverty, material hardship, and health problems. Very briefly, distinguish between those three, and then we'll get into more of it.

Richard Buery: Yes. What we try to look at with the Poverty Tracker is not only income poverty, so that's what would be measured by that poverty line of $50,000 for a family of four, but it's also looking at what we call material hardship, and that's, are you struggling to buy food? Are you struggling to pay your rent? Are you balancing different bills? Because what we know is that you don't have to be poor as a measure of income to experience material hardship.

What we find is that in New York, even if you are double the poverty line. If you earn $100,000 for a family of four, your experience of material hardship is very similar to those who live in poverty. Which means that even if you're earning $100,000 a year, you are probably struggling in New York to make ends meet. You're balancing, and you're making choices. At the end of the month, you're worried about running out of food. Am I going to go to the grocery store? Am I going to pay my Wi-Fi bill?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. To be clear, you're not counting anybody making $100,000 a year as living in poverty per your definition in this report.

Richard Buery: No, no, you would not be living in poverty, but you might be living a life that looks in many ways similar to someone who's living in poverty, because at the end of the day, the resources you have available to pay your bills is not enough to pay your bills because of the deep unaffordability of living in New York City. Medical, it's similar. It's just, are you struggling with medical or mental health challenges that similarly impact your ability to lead a vibrant life?

Brian Lehrer: Can you put a face to the figures? Who, demographically, are the 2.2 million New Yorkers who you categorize as living in poverty?

Richard Buery: I'll say a few things. First of all, 2.2 million New Yorkers living in poverty, if you double that, again, talking about those earning $100,000 a year, you're talking about 60% of New Yorkers. It's important to say that who we're talking about is most of us, most of your neighbors. If you're walking down the street, if you're riding the subway, if you're in the market, most of your neighbors are struggling to make ends meet. People living in poverty are overwhelmingly people of color. Black and Latino New Yorkers, Asian New Yorkers are much more likely to be living in poverty.

Women are more likely living in poverty. Immigrants are more likely to be living in poverty. It's also important to understand that poverty is racialized, it's gendered, and it absolutely matters where you come from. The one thing I should also say is that it's important to remember that although this is a national phenomenon, the affordability crisis is certainly a national phenomena, it's much deeper in New York. The poverty rate in New York City is double the national poverty rate. 26% in New York versus 13% around the country. Again, that's driven by the high cost of living, the high cost of basic necessities like food, housing, and childcare in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: To go even deeper on the stats, just citing from your report, you find some stark and widening racial disparities. Asian and Latino New Yorkers are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as white New Yorkers, 30% and 33% of them versus 14%. Black New Yorkers weren't far behind at 27%. The report says there's evidence these gaps are widening.

Richard Buery: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you, as somebody who is a deputy mayor fighting just this kind of thing in the de Blasio administration, does this indicate that the de Blasio program, eight years under a mayor who got elected specifically to fight inequality in New York, and you were a part of that, and then Adams after that for four years, that these programs under de Blasio and whatever Adams did have been failures?

Richard Buery: No. Quite the contrary. Part of what the data shows is how critical those supports are to keeping people out of poverty. We know, for example, that if you just look at major federal anti-poverty programs, if you look at SNAP and Medicaid, because our poverty measure looks at the value of public benefits. We know that SNAP and Medicaid, for example, alone kept 800,000 people out of poverty. We know that child care access, when child care is affordable, again, because that reduces the costs of living here, we know that that brings people out of poverty.

In fact, we know very clearly and what the data clearly demonstrates is that smart investments in anti-poverty programs have a huge impact. These numbers would be significantly worse but for these public investments. We also know-- This data that we're talking about, this is 2024 data. This is data before the OBBBA HR1 cuts, before 187 billion cuts to SNAP nationwide. We know that, for example, just looking at SNAP, because we've modeled this with Columbia, we know that the cuts to SNAP benefits risk pushing 70,000 people a year back into poverty each year beginning in 2028.

It's quite the contrary. We know that when we invest in housing support to make housing more affordable, when we invest in early childhood education and make childcare more affordable, when we expand access to food, all of those things drive down the poverty rate. They make it easier for people to live here. They have longstanding positive impacts on people's health, well-being, employability. The numbers would look much, much worse without these investments. Now those investments are under grave risk. We risk making these numbers in future years look even more devastating than they do right now.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. On SNAP, I see that in your report, SNAP recipients are more than three times as likely to have a work-limiting disability or health condition than non-recipients and more than twice as likely to rate their own health as fair or poor. These folks are already sick in many cases. Then we have the Medicaid cuts that are likely to come down in the federal so-called reconciliation bill. The New York Times reported this month, how many people is this? 180,000 New York City residents are at risk of losing their SNAP benefits altogether or having them significantly reduced.

Before we get into your proposed solutions, just one other recent history question. Where does the personal finances or poverty arc curve since the start of the pandemic, which by the way was six years ago this week, that the lockdown began in New York City for that period of time? Because we talked so much at the time that child poverty went down during the first few years of the pandemic. That's my recollection.

Richard Buery: Yes. I want to say two things. If I could go back to a point you made before, which is very important, that this is largely a story about working people who just can't get ahead. You talked about SNAP. Among working-age adults, this is adults aged 18 to 64, on SNAP, 54% are employed or have a working partner. Then 41% have a health ailment that keeps them from working. The majority of people on SNAP are either working or struggle to work. The problem is that those who are working earn less than $25 an hour, which is not enough to live in New York.

It's just important to put a note on that when I talk about this being most of our neighbors, it's most of our neighbors who are struggling through these challenges. What you said about the pandemic is right. It's often surprising to people sometimes that child poverty, as you say, reached a historic low during the pandemic. Since the pandemic ended, we've seen overall poverty and child poverty come back up again, as I said, back up to 26% for families, 27% for children. The reason why, again, it goes back to the power and effectiveness of smart evidence-based anti-poverty programs.

The reason why child poverty reached a historical low during the pandemic is because public policy at the state, federal, and city level invested in families. We expanded access to child tax credit. We extended unemployment insurance. We saw that when you have smart public policy, it stabilizes people's lives. Unfortunately, when the pandemic ended, rather than continuing to invest in the programs and policies that we know work, we as a society began to disinvest.

It's a strong reminder that none of these numbers, none of the dynamics that we're talking about, none of them are inevitable. None of them are necessary. They are all the result of the decisions that we make as a community. We can decide to invest in children and families, or we can decide to disinvest in children and families. Results are direct.

Brian Lehrer: Where would you start? My guest, if you're just joining us, is Richard Buery, the CEO of the anti poverty group Robin Hood, which is out with a new report based on data from them and Columbia University, that more people are living in poverty in New York City, a little more than a quarter of the population, based on the way they measure poverty, more people now than any time since they started tracking this, which was what, 2012? Is that--

Richard Buery: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: That's your benchmark. You helped lead the implementation of the universal Pre-K program under Mayor de Blasio. Where would you have Mayor Mamdani start? Is it with his stated number one priority of universal no-cost childcare?

Richard Buery: There's a range of things that we can do in response. One, you start with a good one. The investment in the expansion of child care is a powerful anti-poverty tool. On the shorthand, it makes it possible for people to work. One of the reasons why women have higher rates of poverty in New York is that it's challenging for women to go into the workforce because of the lack of affordable childcare. It also has massive long-term benefits because we all know the powerful impacts of high-quality early childhood educational experiences and developmental experiences have a massive multiplier in terms of long-term anti-poverty outcomes. Certainly, childcare is one.

I serve on the state's Child Poverty Reduction Advisory Council, which is tasked with reducing child poverty in New York State by half. Under Governor Hochul's leadership, we have made massive investments in things like a historic expansion of the child tax credit, which alone will have about a 9% reduction in child poverty. We call for targeted state SNAP supplements of $100 for the lowest benefit households when they continue to expand rental assistance. We want to make sure that we're covering the nearly half million New Yorkers at risk of losing health coverage. You want to continue to grow the child tax credit, and they're going to have to give the governor great credit here and the legislature, but we need to continue to grow that state child tax credit.

There's a lot that we can do at the state and local level. Some of the recent progress we've made in the past year on expanding the supply of affordable housing, both through the passage of City of Yes, but also through the four charter amendments that were passed this past November, will all help to bring housing costs down to those all matters. There's a lot that we can do at the state and local level, but it's worth noting that all that we do at the state and local level ultimately will not be able to overcome massive disinvestments at the federal level.

Although the lot that we have to do at the state and local level, we have to continue to fight at the federal level to invest in smart evidence based effective programs like Medicaid and SNAP that are critical because there's no way that the state and the local government can fully balance the great holes that are being caused by federal disinvestment.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Curious what your guest thinks about the effectiveness of broader programs like building housing versus more targeted programs like SNAP. Do all ships rise with the tide?"

Richard Buery: Yes. This is not at all an either-or. The housing question is a great one. On a certain level, housing is a supply and demand issue. The more housing we build, the more affordable housing will be. Now, that being said, it's important that we have targeted programs that ensure the development of affordable housing for New Yorkers and so much of the City of Yes, and again, I was honored to chair the Charter Revision Commission that proposed those four policies that will hopefully expand the supply of affordable housing in New York.

Absolutely, the more we can build housing in New York, the more we can build up, build everywhere. That relieves pressure, that makes housing more affordable. It is equally important that we have targeted investments like SNAP, which put hands directly in the pockets of poor and working New Yorkers. This is not an either-or choice. There's not one magic bullet that solves all these problems. We have to put more resource in people's pockets. We have to have policies that improve wages, that increase benefits like SNAP, and we also have to keep costs down by expanding access to affordable housing, expanding access to affordable, quality childcare.

Brian Lehrer: Let me end by asking you kind of the opposite question from one that's been in the news a lot as they debate Mayor Mamdani's tax increase proposals for the wealthiest individuals and corporations in New York. Part of the debate is always, well, will people leave in those income categories, thereby reducing the tax base? My question for you is, should lower-income people just leave? If federal support is contracting, housing costs keep climbing, the gaps are widening. As you document in your report, more people are living in poverty in New York than previously. Is staying in New York City still a rational choice for someone currently here living in poverty?

Richard Buery: Unfortunately, we are seeing an exodus, particularly of the Black working and middle class leave New York to go to other communities that are more affordable. I think what you're asking is a profound question, and it's one that has devastating consequences for New York City. We need this to be a city where everyone can thrive. We need this to be a city where people who grew up here can stay here and build lives here. If this becomes a city where working people can't make a living, can't get ahead. If we hollow out the working and middle class, this city won't survive.

My answer to your question is that we have to make sure that the answer to that question is that, no, those people can't leave. We as a city will not remain the city that I love, that I know you love, if this is not a city that my children, middle-class children, working-class children, can't build a future here. That has to be unacceptable. We have to make the city work for everyone. We can do it. We see that these policies work. We just need the will and the focus to make sure that we continue to deliver for low income and working class and middle-class New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: With their report on more New Yorkers living in poverty, a higher percentage over a quarter of the city's population than, by their definition, at any time since they started tracking in 2012, has been Richard Buery, CEO of the anti-poverty organization Robin Hood. Thank you for sharing, even though they're distressing, the results of your survey with us.

Richard Buery: No, thank you. I would just ask everyone to go visit our website, robinhood.org, download the report. I just think it's important that everybody understands the threats facing our city, but also understands that there are things we can do about it.

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