SECTION 3
SPOTLIGHT ON AFFORDABILITY
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HIGHLIGHTS
n For a renting household with two adults and two children in New York City, the SPM poverty line is $43,890, which represents what is needed to afford a minimal basic standard of need, but which many would argue is too low to capture what is needed to actually afford a more decent standard of living. While there is no “magic income line” for guaranteeing a person will be able to afford and access stable food, housing, and other necessities, there are compelling reasons to use 200% of the poverty line to approximate this threshold. n New Yorkers below the 200% poverty line are twice as likely to experience difficulty paying for housing, energy and telephone bills, and food than those above 200%, with almost 1 in 5 reporting that they lived paycheck-to-paycheck in the past 12 months. n 56% of New Yorkers (more than 1.1 million children and 3.5 million adults) live below 200% of the poverty line. n One in three New Yorkers live between 100% and 200% of the poverty line. This population experiences high rates of material hardship across the board, yet many are ineligible for income transfers and safety net programs like SNAP and the EITC. n Government transfers reduce the share of New Yorkers that fall below 50% of the poverty line by 10 percentage points (18% to 8%), moving 886,000 people above the 50% threshold, but only move 378,000 above the 200% threshold, just a 5-percentage point decrease (from 61% to 56%).
26 THE STATE OF POVERTY AND DISADVANTAGE IN NEW YORK CITY VOL. 6
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