Local Efforts to Update the Poverty Measure

NEW YORK CITY

In 2006, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called together leading economists, business executives, advocates and philanthropic leaders to come up with new ideas for fighting poverty. The 32-member Commission for Economic Opportunity soon realized, however, that their efforts were obstructed by the existing poverty data, which did not accurately capture the extent of poverty and the impact of public policies on the city’s low-income residents. The commission recommended that the city develop an alternative method for measuring poverty.

Mayor Bloomberg adopted the proposals and created the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) to implement a new poverty measure based on recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences. The results, released in August 2008, showed that the poverty rate for New Yorkers age 65 and older rose from 18.1 percent under the current federal poverty measure to 32 percent under the city’s new measure. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for children living in single-parent families, although disturbingly high, dropped from 44.4 percent under the federal measure to 41.6 percent under the New York City measure. City officials have used these findings as a basis for their anti-poverty policy agenda and in 2009 the CEO issued a follow-up report detailing the progress of the city’s poverty reduction efforts.

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Video

Mark Levitan of the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity joins Mark Greenberg of Georgetown University and the Center for American Progress and Indivar Dutta-Gupta of the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support to discuss lessons learned from New York City's new poverty measure and the implications for national efforts to update the measure.