Mapping Poverty in New York City: Pinpointing the Impact of Poverty, Community by Community

Posted on July 28, 2009

New Yorkers are living with the effects of poverty in every part of New York City, but the
experience of poverty remains closely tied to place. Half of the city’s 1.4 million poor
people live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is at least 24.8 percent (compared
to a citywide rate of 19.2 percent), and one-quarter live in neighborhoods where the rate
is at least 34.1 percent. The maps reveal that there is more to the geography of poverty in New York
City than is revealed by a glance. Poverty interacts in important ways with other factors,
such as immigration, which are distributed in a different way than poverty itself. And
the effects of poverty can be modified or mitigated by resources, such as subsidized
housing, that also have their own geographic patterns.