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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. There's a significant finding about poverty and the pandemic in New York City that might surprise you, and could have big implications for what the country should do to fight poverty. This is from a new analysis about some of the trends and changes around income, wealth, and poverty witnessed in the five boroughs during the early stages of the pandemic. Reporters from the non-profit news organization, THE CITY, looked at data from the Census Bureau's 2020 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimate, as they call it, meaning the Census Bureau had its eye on New York City as the pandemic was beginning. That's all that means.

Here's the first line of the story in which the news organization, THE CITY, presents their findings. The Coronavirus rejiggered New York's economic calculus, at least temporarily. Now, once significant finding, Queens overtook Staten Island as the borough with the lowest rate of poverty. Another, the borough with the sharpest decline in its rate of child poverty was the Bronx.

Though Manhattan remains the wealthiest borough, its median household income fell between 2019 and 2020. We think that's because so many of the richest people fled during the early days of the pandemic, because they could. We'll get into the analysis, more of what it revealed about the pandemic's impacts on New York's economic calculus and particularly, child poverty, and the implications for future policy to fight it.

With one of the reporters who dug into the data, he is Stephon Johnson, Manhattan reporter at the non-profit news organization, THE CITY, though I'm told he's from the Bronx and has lived a lot in Queens. Stephon, welcome to WNYC. Great to have you with us.

Stephon Johnson: Thank you for having me. Yes, I was born and raised in the Bronx and lived in Queens for the past decade-plus. I can give you multiple perspectives about this thing.

Brian Lehrer: Good. The finding that strikes me as most significant and I'm going to go right to it, even though there are all these curiosities in it. The wealth of Manhattan went down a little, Queens surpassed Staten Island as the borough with the least poverty. To me, the thing with the real significant implications is that the child poverty rate in the Bronx went down by six points.

Now, it's going to shock people what the child poverty rate in the Bronx is. If we did a snap quiz and people were able to call in, the person who has the right answer would probably shock a lot of other listeners that the child poverty rate in the Bronx was 30%, still remarkably high. That's after it went down by six points from 36%, more than a third of the children in the Bronx live below the federal poverty line.

Take us into your article now, what's behind that steep decline in the rate of child poverty in the Bronx, just as the pandemic was starting and it seemed like the whole world was suddenly unemployed?

Stephon Johnson: You had the pandemic starting and figuring out how to school your kids and all of that. With federal assistance for COVID-19 assistance, and the eviction moratoriums, and everything else like that, it helped decrease poverty despite the fact that the Bronx is still the most impoverished borough. People like to claim that Staten Island is the ignored borough. You can make a claim that the Bronx is still ignored in many ways, and that poverty rate proves it.

Now, the steep decline, like I said, is attributed strictly to federal aid. That can pretty much end at any moment. It's pretty much ended. What we've seen according to city records, recently has been a slow increase in legal evictions. That could lead to homeless issue, which is a completely different story.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Evictions, if they come from inability to pay the rent, a function of poverty. There was an eviction moratorium even for people who couldn't afford the rent. In normal times, eviction comes largely because you can't afford the rent, which means, it seems to me, you have to fight the source which is poverty.

Stephon Johnson: Yes, you put a delay on things for the time being, like a rain delay in baseball, we'll continue this tomorrow. The fear which might be the guarantee is that things will "come back to normal." Come back to mean which is poverty rates go back up, particularly in the Bronx because their federal assistance will be gone, the eviction will return we'll be gone. We're right back to square one.

Brian Lehrer: Normal is completely unacceptable.

Stephon Johnson: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: If anybody was asked and it doesn't get nearly enough news coverage, if anybody was asked, is a child poverty rate of over 1/3 in the Bronx acceptable? The answer is obviously no. Unless people think this is all the result of individual behaviors leaving themselves in poverty, which I don't think most people think. Too many people probably do think that but probably still, most people don't think that. There's something systemic that needs to be addressed and we're not addressing it.

Stephon Johnson: Yes, you can go into the usual, the Bronx is X, Y, and Z, it's historically been this. The Bronx has changed a decent amount from when I grew up in the '80s and '90s. There have been significant amount of improvements, there have been more apartment buildings, more amenities, there are more businesses coming to the Bronx. The actual residents, their economic situation hasn't really improved that much. When-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Listeners-- Go ahead, you want to finish the thought? Go ahead.

Stephon Johnson: Yes, sure. You have the poverty rates, they're basically remaining consistent 30s, but having the number go down now, it's like fool's gold. We know that things are coming back to normal, which is not necessarily a good thing. In the story, we talked about how the number of children, 5 years and under, have decreased in Manhattan. Part of that is, like you mentioned before, families leaving the city and those tend to be well off, usually, white families go to places like Miami, LA, Jersey, Connecticut.

LA is an interesting concept, because they've had a lot of issues with COVID as well. Miami, same thing but it's easier to fly South and have better weather while dealing with COVID. Speaking to Brad Hoylman, he believes that these folks are going to come back. That's mostly due to the loss of Governor Ron DeSantis, he will push them back to the city. What people realize is the whole term of you pay your rent for the neighborhood, not necessarily for the apartment, people are going to, or should, demand more out of their living situation within their department.

A lot of people realize how many New Yorkers spend the time outside. You don't realize how much time you spend outside until you're inside for a long time. You had families, husband, wife, maybe two or three kids, a dog, whatever, who realized they were in this cramped space, and just couldn't take any more. Those who had the money left. Where does that leave the people who are still here, especially children? That's where we're at right now, that's a big question mark.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. If you live in the Bronx and you're poor, tell us your own story. Did pandemic assistance help you, help your children not live in poverty for a little while, and now you're back in because that has expired but the rest of the structural  reality of economics in New York and in America has not changed, or if you work with people in poverty in the Bronx, call and help us report this story. What are you seeing? Did poverty go down? Why? Is it returning? How much? 212-433-WNYC or anyone else for Stephon Johnson from the news organization, THE CITY, which had a really interesting data dive the other week.

We were going to have them on last week and then something changed in our schedule and so he is here today talking about this article, it's now a week or two old, with such an interesting data dive into poverty and other economic fortunes in New York City at the start of the pandemic, how they changed then, how they're changing now. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Ora in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ora. Thank you for calling in.

Ora: Hey, Brian. It's good to chat with you. What's up, Stephon? Hi, you guys. I live, work, and serve here in the Bronx, and I work in food access, so I'm often working alongside community members who are trying to gain access to resources for their basic staples and necessities. All of these things are connected just like Stephon mentioned. All of these things are connected. The cost of housing is pretty fixed. You can't really change that, even though we have seen an increase of roughly 30% increase in a lot of these new leases and contracts that are coming out for rental housing in New York, so people are already being hit with that increase.

Additionally, during the pandemic, we saw a drop in poverty levels because we were getting this additional financial support from the government and what it did was it allowed us to actually close the gap and a lot of the insufficient wages that people are already seeing within the workspace. That helped us to increase our overall food security level in children, so for the first time ever, we saw a drop in childhood food insecurity rates. We also saw innovative programs coming out that helped to remove barriers in accessing foods, so things like direct-to-door delivery and helping to provide more mobile services and going directly to where people are, as opposed to requiring them to come to another site in order to get their services.

All of that has an impact overall on how someone can navigate in space and be able to gain access to stability, so the ability to not just have the resources they need for today, but actually provide long-term stability. When we started rolling back these programs and taking away the pandemic funding that we are providing for families, we immediately started to see a regression in that progress that we've made.

Things like housing costs have gone up, food costs have gone up, almost doubling in some cases. The cost of eggs has gone up over 70%. We've also seen increases in food costs and transportation costs. There's all this conversation around the MTA raising and increasing their prices again because of decreased ridership. All of these things are hitting people on multiple fronts, and a lot of times when it comes to what you can and cannot manipulate in your budget, your fixed costs like housing cannot change.

You have no choice. If you don't pay your rent, you become homeless. A lot of times we see those other flex costs like food costs being manipulated and people will decrease the amount of food that they're eating or not eat at all because they can't purchase more food. In New York State, this isn't just siloed to the Bronx, although it is extremely highlighted within the Bronx community, a recent survey was done through a grocery store chain looking at purchasing patterns for New Yorkers across the state.

They show that 47% of households are manipulating their purchasing processes in order to help their food dollars last for longer. That is the first sign of food insufficiency, and I don't think enough of our politicians and people in charge are recognizing that. Our federal minimum wage has been fixed at the same exact price, at the same exact dollar amount, for much longer than what our inflation has been growing so rapidly at.

There are no caps in sight for the cost of housing. There is no support even being projected out over these next few months to adapt to these increased rates of COVID that are still here, monkeypox that are coming in, and even now with polio in New York City. It just seems like there's a lot of foresight that's being missed and there needs to be a lot more to make sure and ensure that families have the baseline needs met in order to provide stability and eventually upward mobility, but right now people's agency are being taken away to even advocate for themselves because they're struggling just to survive.

Brian Lehrer: When you mentioned the minimum wage, if the minimum wage theoretically is set to keep a full-time worker earning it out of poverty- there's a progressive law in New Jersey that was passed a few years ago that does index the minimum wage to inflation. New York doesn't have that. Certainly, the federal government doesn't have that. Of course, Bronx residents benefit by the New York minimum wage of $15 an hour. The federal minimum wage is still below $8 an hour, people in New York don't realize it, but it's not indexed to inflation and here goes inflation.

That's one of the reasons you're seeing, in your food access work, the increased levels of food insecurity of people buying less food than they were before, as well as the government supports coming off at the same time, at the end of the pandemic. Are you seeing something-- I don't know exactly what work you do in food access, but what's the most concrete thing that you're seeing change recently that you can report?

Ora: I work for a food pantry. I work for New York Common Pantry as the director of nutrition. What I have found during this time that has been the most beneficial is a lot of the funding that's coming in to support and sustain food purchasing around emergency food settings. Within our normal food access, grocery stores, and the whole network of green markets that we have, a lot of times when it's the direct-to-consumer market, you can pass on the increase in cost directly to the consumer.

On our end in emergency food, there is no one paying for the food that we are providing on the receiving end. There is no one there to eat those increased costs except for the organization providing these vital resources. There has been an influx in additional funding going into helping to cover the costs of the right kind of food coming into our network as emergency food providers, but also for the people who are at most risk of having adverse effects if they are not gaining access to these foods because these are foods that we do not have readily available, in abundance, in our communities already.

These are the foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, the things that we know we need to be eating in order to protect and preserve our health. There is more funding going in like Nourish New York funding at the state level, which is providing a lot of that support and helping us to expand our purchasing power for the right kinds of foods.

However, if it weren't for Governor Hochul's signing the Nourish New York funds into our state budget, up until this point, that has just been a temporary funding that we would only have for three to six months at a time and it's very unpredictable, and it's extremely difficult to maintain the kind of support that you're providing without having long-term solutions to be able to address this.

The emergency food setting is a band-aid for a much bigger issue within food insecurity and it's a fact that we are not providing people with the resources that they need in order to gain access to this kind of food on a consistent basis. We need to do more to make sure that people, one, are making enough money to actually provide for themselves, their baseline needs, and two, making sure that the things that we need for our baseline needs, healthcare, housing, and food, are actually affordable.

It's hard to preach to someone that they need to eat better or do better with their diet or exercise or their overall health when more than 30% to 50% of their take-home pay is going directly to their rent. It doesn't make sense. There's a disconnect, so we need to do better.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for calling in. We really appreciate your relevance to the topic and giving us all your insight from that much insights. Stephon Johnson from THE CITY, any thoughts about any of the-- a lot of stuff that Ora put on the table there from the Bronx.

Stephon Johnson: Everything she said was absolutely on the money especially with bringing foods to the people instead of people having to wait for the food. With the amount of food deserts in the borough and from personal experience, you'll have a lot of families cook one big meal on a Sunday and that will last them until Thursday. They come home, they get a bowl of whatever, warm it up and that's what they do.

For kids, you just have local bodega, you get your candy, you get your soda, you get everything else, but you're not getting nutritious food. I think places like New York Common Pantry have hit the nail on the head knowing exactly what these kids need and what these adults need. People tend to forget about the elderly as well. The elderly who are being underserved all over New York, but especially in the Bronx. They don't live in places where people tend to own a property, they tend to rent, and they tend to struggle in many other ways. For this to change in government everywhere else, it will take a completely different way of not looking at things, but how you treat things. It feels like we're going back to more of the same. Now, maybe our current mayor, Eric Adams, can change that, but right now, it feels like more of the same. With the economy the way it is, and people wanting to donate, we're not being able to donate as much as they usually do to organizations.

It's just a domino effect to the point where we're right back where we started from [unintelligible 00:21:11] having an increase again.

Brian Lehrer: An important question here is, how much can Mayor Adams do on his own even if he does everything he could do? Which is a question as opposed to some set of things needing to be done at the federal level because, as your article documents, it really was federal supports that came at the beginning of the pandemic that reduced the child poverty rate by six percentage points in the Bronx.

This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. Few more minutes with Stephon Johnson, data reporter, Manhattan reporter from the nonprofit news organization THE CITY with their data dive into Census Bureau data that showed that significant drop in poverty in New York's poorest borough, the Bronx, ironically at the beginning of the pandemic. Jim in the South Bronx wants to push back on some things that have been said. Jim, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Jim: Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I've been in this South Bronx for over 30 years now, and I'm really exasperated with this so-called analysis. The lady you had on said everything correctly. What is not being discussed ever by this kind of discussion is that the underlying reason is that you have too many people who simply have too little education, job skills, and other kinds of things to actually improve their earning potential.

So long as you don't create that, so long as you don't have a sustained program to create a labor force in which people can earn better wages, you will always have to subsidize poverty through government checks, rather than getting to the systemic roots of poverty. The lady you just had on talked about all these issues. She's absolutely right about that, at least largely right about that, but not one thing was said about what are the structural issues of poverty, and in my view, is a lack of sufficient skills to meet the job market.

[unintelligible 00:23:26] show before, Brian, they're important people to help build the Second Avenue subway from Europe because you don't have the trained labor force to do that here in New York. Instead of addressing those issues, the guests you have on just listed a subside people who live in poverty, rather than taking sustained long-term policies that will improve their ability to earn a decent living themselves. I find it extremely frustrating.

Brian Lehrer: Jim, let me follow up, because when I say federal support from the beginning of the pandemic, and things that have been discussed, at the national level, I'm thinking of structural things, specifically, that got dumped from Joe Biden's Build Back Better. The things that might matter to fighting poverty structurally and the way that both you and the previous caller might mean, you tell me.

The child tax credit, which was extended and then dropped, universal pre-K was in Build Back Better, paid family leave, a national childcare program. I'm curious if you think those things build the basis for low-income working parents to be able to go out and build their skills, to get more education, and the way that you're describing, those kinds of federal supports being investments rather than just subsidies.

Jim: They can be dealt with sustainable long-term economic policies. For instance, you hear all these so-called progressives talking about the European model of the welfare state. What they always learned from that is that, in tandem with those kinds of subsidies you're talking about, that you have sustained long-term national economic policies to create a trained labor force, in which not everyone needs a college degree.

They have internship programs, they have apprenticeship programs, they have all these kinds of programs to take the population, and to train them in the kinds of skills, the skill sets, like the use of heavy equipment to build a Second Avenue subway, for instance, if you don't have here, that enables people to earn themselves, as opposed to waiting for the next government set. That's what these so-called progressives will not get through their heads.

Brian Lehrer: Jim, thank you for your call. Stephon, any thought about that exchange before we start to wrap it up?

Stephon Johnson: He's not wrong at all. The issue is that this is a multi-pronged effort. On one side, you have better education, getting people ready for the workforce, and the other side, you have making sure they're fed so they don't have to worry about nothing but getting their education and trying to become the workforce. Everything is connected. What the caller said isn't that a pushback, it's an addition.

The Bronx needs all of this. You can't forget that, when people bring up the economic models that some European countries use, which he mentioned, he mentioned the programs they have, the internships, the apprenticeships, you cannot forget about that one word no one wants to say, race, and how that affects who gets what, who gets treated. America in general, our history hasn't been great when it comes to race, to say the least. We can go back to the G.I. Bill, we can go back to the different government policies that were designed to benefit all Americans but weren't designed to fit all Americans, if you know what I mean.

It'll take an effort for bringing more food, healthier food, helping education, and dealing with the race issue as well because we know that affects who gets help. For an anecdote that a lot of people like to joke about, even though it's not a joke, the epidemic right now of opioids and meth and how it usually affects white people and is being treated as a problem, was we were all here during the crack epidemic, and even crack users, Black and brown crack users were treated as criminals.

It's all about behavior towards groups of people on top of what they actually need. It's not that all these people need it, just that a certain section of these people don't have the access that is required for most Americans to be successful, they don't have it. Better food, better education, better preparation for the workforce. I believe the pandemic expose all of that. That's the one, I guess, positive thing that came up from the pandemic, if there was a positive thing at all, is that it exposed exactly what our economic situation is really like. [unintelligible 00:29:10] collective eyes of all New Yorkers and Americans. [unintelligible 00:29:15]

Brian Lehrer: As we run out of time, I'll just say you bring up such an important point about how the same behaviors by different groups of people are treated differently. I think we have a long history with gun violence, for example, where, if a Black teenager commits a crime of gun violence, they're labeled as super predator, and there's political pressure and media pressure to treat them like an adult in the justice system. When a white kid goes in and shoots up his school, people start asking how are we failing our children that this thing could happen. Just to put an exclamation point on that aspect. Tell us one other thing,  changing the subject, just because it's interesting from your article on the news site, THE CITY, the analysis of census data from early 2020, or early in the pandemic that Queens became the borough with the lowest poverty rate surpassing Staten Island. Do you know how that happened?

Stephon Johnson: We're still looking into how that happened because, well, a lot of people are trying to figure out how that happened. Now it's only 0.3 percentage points, but that's still significant if we consider the number of people who live in this city. Let's say if you want to go back to places like the staples and houses and on Staten Island, we don't know if that contributed or people who were already on the edge and were working class dropped down to poverty a little bit because there's a significant working-class population there. With Queens, in terms of pure numbers, I don't get yet. I have to look more into the data.

Personally, it looks like the only things that have changed about this borough since I live here is the amount of construction for new buildings. In my neighborhood alone, they're constructing three or four different "luxury apartment buildings". You have the same thing going on in places like Astoria, Long Island City. I think the assumption is that Queens is going to be the new Brooklyn. It's whatever part of the borough is the closest to Manhattan is going to benefit significantly, and we've seen that already.

Like I said, with Astoria, with Long Island City. I believe, theoretically, it could be the possibility of people with more money moving into the borough. It might necessarily have been a decrease on Staten Island's part that was strictly just an increase on Queens' part. That's what I can see from my perspective at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Stephon Johnson, Manhattan reporter at the nonprofit news organization, THE CITY. Along with his co-author, Suhail Bhat, who's the data reporter for THE CITY. They did a really interesting deep dive over the last few weeks into poverty data from the Census Bureau, from the beginning of the pandemic, what had changed from pre-pandemic levels and what's starting to go back to, for better or worse, normal. Stephon, thanks so much.

Stephon Johnson: Thank you. I want to wish Suhail a quick recovery. He tested positive for COVID. He wasn't able to join us.

Brian Lehrer: I know. He was going to be on with you this morning.

Stephon Johnson: Yes. I figured I'd publicly wish him a great recovery on top of privately wishing him a great recovery.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks a lot, Stephon.

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