How to reduce child poverty

Anew report by Columbia University researchers and the Robin Hood Foundation shows that between 2021 and 2022, the share of New Yorkers living in poverty — defined as income plus benefits that don’t cover basic needs — rose by 500,000 people, now with one in four children living in poverty, up from just 15% the year prior.

The sharp uptick might seem puzzling during an ostensibly strong jobs and economic recovery, but there are clear culprits: a growth mainly in lower-paying jobs, and the end of COVID-era economic support programs, which began petering out that year and which continued falling into 2023.

This is a tricky thing, because these safety net efforts were never designed or intended to be permanent, and were instituted specifically as an emergency response. Yet that certainly doesn’t mean that they must all be tossed by the wayside the moment we deem the crisis over.

Plenty of programs and advances that we take more or less for granted now have their roots in crisis. The economic ravages of the Great Depression birthed banking and commercial regulations that helped guide the nation’s 20th century economic surge, as well as New Deal programs that reshaped not only social services but culture, industry and the role of government. Post-WWII, the needs of returning service members and the Baby Boom ushered in not just federal but state and local initiatives to improve access to housing and higher education. And so on.

We have an opportunity here to take some lessons learned from COVID programs, as reactive as they were to a specific and severe situation, and build them into useful permanent fixtures of our government. The arguments against this sometimes take a logistical tack, but they’re very often ideological; they center around the idea that there is some significant level of child poverty that is, for lack of a better word, appropriate. We disagree.

In practical terms, it’s not really possible to eliminate each and every single possible instance of child poverty that might arise, but getting as close as we can to zero is a worthy goal in and of itself, and we now have ample evidence that some of these tools work very well to do that.

The House, taking a break from phony impeachments and toppling speakers, has passed an expanded child tax credit, of the kind that worked so well during COVID. Subsidized child care can help people stay stable. There’s also plenty of data to show that this stability can have lifelong positive impacts for children, whose literal brain development can be stunted by the stress of housing insecurity and poor nutrition, among other factors.

If the full Congress can get its act together long enough to utilize this moment of surprising economic resilience and post-pandemic recovery to put in place some measures that can insulate the needy from the shocks of another such crisis, whenever it might come. President Biden will stand ready to sign it.

And if our local lawmakers can stop killing potential developments and suing to implement housing voucher expansions that will have no housing stock to go towards, we can move towards resolving our own housing crisis and taking some of the pressure off families for whom housing is often the largest expense.