New Yorkers are facing an acute affordability crisis, one that extends beyond housing to our overall cost of living. It’s forcing thousands of everyday people – young and old, individuals and families, people of color, people who enrich our city and make it diverse and unique – to leave New York.
Every year, for more than two decades, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), in partnership with Lake Research Partners, has conducted a rigorous scientific poll – The Unheard Third – to hear from New Yorkers, especially low-income New Yorkers, about their living situations. We ask them about their housing struggles, their healthcare expenses, their economic hardships and more. We also seek their opinions about what can be done to help them get ahead.
With this poll, we always learn something new about what stands between low-income New Yorkers and economic security. But this year’s results have revealed a disturbing new pattern: Moderate- and middle-income New Yorkers are facing increasing financial hardships, owing mainly to the high cost of living in our city. Mostly, these New Yorkers are employed, often earning between 200 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level, i.e., between $62,000 and $128,000 for a family of two adults and two children. Despite this, these families are still struggling to afford housing, to pay for childcare, to repay their student loans and put something away for a rainy day.
These complex and increasing hardships represent a creeping crisis for a segment of New Yorkers often unseen, even ignored, by policymakers. To be sure, it remains necessary to measure poverty and material deprivation. Yet we cannot rely solely on a 60-year-old, federal poverty measure to fully capture the financial needs of New York’s families. Not in 2024. Too much has changed over the decades. We must now – all of us, but especially our city’s leaders – do more to better understand what it truly costs to live in New York City.
It is time to adjust. We need a True Cost of Living Measure that every New Yorker can see themselves in. Such a measure must consider the well-known expenses – housing, childcare, transportation, debt, taxes, to name a few – that take a big bite out of household budgets. At the same time, this measure must also recognize that New Yorkers must be able to plan for the future – for financial emergencies and retirement – to achieve lasting economic security. Unfortunately, policymakers have been without such a comprehensive measure, leaving them unable to adequately address the hardships confronting more moderate-income households in our city.
Our poll results reveal that increasing numbers of moderate-income families are struggling with food, housing and transit costs, struggling to get out of debt, and struggling to save up for future needs. Often, these families suffer the same hardships as those living in extreme poverty. Sometimes, even more. For example, as compared with our survey results on eviction risk in 2017-2019, this year’s poll showed a big rise (14 percent) in eviction threats for moderate-to-middle income New Yorkers. Now, the majority of New Yorkers at risk of eviction come from this group.
Our survey also revealed a similar trend for transit affordability. In 2023, New Yorkers living above the poverty line experienced transit hardship at the same rate – 30 percent – as those living below the poverty line. And, notably, those well above the poverty line, earning up to 400 percent of FPL, experienced rising levels of transit hardship – at 21 percent – levels never before seen in our survey’s history.
Even when measures of economic need try to be more expansive, they fail to properly account for debt. And yet many New Yorkers are carrying multiple kinds of debt – student loans, credit cards, medical debt, mortgage and auto loans, to name a few – that they struggle to pay off. Our poll this year showed that nearly 70 percent of moderate-income households struggle to pay student debt, a seven percentage-point increase over the previous year. We see similar patterns across several other categories in our poll, including rainy-day savings and food insecurity hardship.
As a city, we should feel deeply challenged by these data. In some cases, moderate-income New Yorkers are struggling just as much as low-income New Yorkers. Yet what’s happening to moderate-income families is often lost in debates that focus either on extreme poverty or on extreme wealth. Furthermore, although there are well-known official metrics to capture the challenges for both extremes, no such measure exists to shine a light on all struggles, including for those who find themselves in the middle.
We are excited that the City of New York is mandated to develop a true cost-of-living measurement in 2024, which 81 percent of the NYC electorate supports. Such a measure must take all New Yorkers – including those straddling moderate to middle income – into account to capture what it truly costs to live with dignity and to attain full economic security in our city.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on April 23 in Crain’s New York Business.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.