Tracing the impacts of COVID-19 on poverty, hardship, & well-being among New Yorkers

6/8/2020

Our team is looking at the immediate impacts of COVID-19 using Poverty Tracker data. The Poverty Tracker is a quarterly survey of adults in New York City for tracking dynamics of poverty, hardship, and other forms of disadvantage. For the past 10 years, the Poverty Tracker has been collecting annual & quarterly data on three core measures of disadvantage: income poverty, material hardship and health problems/challenges. It’s a nimble tool such that when new policy or new quality of life concerns come up, we’re able to add questions pretty quickly to our surveys and take the pulse of what’s going on in New York City.

By mid-March, the pandemic was in full force and we had developed a new survey module asking specifically about its immediate economic impacts. With it, we were able to link that data to our earlier data sets to identify who was losing work and what their experiences were before the pandemic. What we found was that the people who were losing work were more likely to be in disadvantaged circumstances beforehand, so they were much more likely to be in poverty or material hardship. For example, of the people who lost their jobs, 37% of respondents were rent-burdened (paying over 30% of household income on rent) prior to the pandemic.  

Now we’re working on another survey asking about a more comprehensive set of hardships, like falling behind on rent and risks of eviction, as well as food insecurities and inability to make utility payments. We’re also asking about how effective social networks of support have been during this time.