City reports progress on poverty rates

The city’s poverty rate continued to drop in the leadup to the COVID-19 pandemic — though it remained higher than the national average, according to the de Blasio administration’s final report on the issue.

The report, which was exclusively provided to the Daily News before its Monday release, found 17.9% of the city’s population lived below the local poverty threshold at the end of 2019, down from 20.2% when Mayor de Blasio first took office in 2014.

For a family of four, the local poverty threshold was an annual income of $36,262 in 2019, the latest year for which data are available. That’s higher than the national poverty threshold, which stood at $25,926 in 2019.

Based on the national threshold, the city’s poverty rate in 2019 was even lower at 14.5%, according to the City Hall report.

But that’s still significantly higher than the national poverty rate, which stood at 10.5% in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

City Hall’s latest report does not account for poverty rates in 2020, when hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lost jobs and incomes due to the pandemic.

De Blasio, who is set to leave office Jan. 1 and is likely to announce a run for New York governor next year, touted his administration’s final poverty report as evidence his “progressive” economic policies are having an impact.

“My mission for the past eight years has been to make our city a fairer place to live for those who had been left behind for too long,” the mayor told The News.

“This report reveals that progressive policies from the $15 minimum wage to paid sick leave to universal pre-K are actually working to redistribute wealth, cut poverty and uplift low-income New Yorkers across our city.”

De Blasio first ran for office in 2013 with a promise to turn the tide on the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Though rates have dropped since de Blasio became mayor, the city’s poverty remains concentrated in a handful of traditionally underserved neighborhoods, the City Hall report shows.

Bronx Community District 5, which includes Morris Heights, Fordham South and Mount Hope, had a 35.4% poverty rate between 2015 and 2019, the highest in the city, according to the report.

Manhattan Community District 8, covering the Upper East Side, had a 6.1% poverty average, the lowest in the city.