De Blasio Lauds NYC's Pre-COVID Poverty Drop, Transfer Of Wealth

New York City NY

13 December, 2021

3:41 PM

Description

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Bill de Blasio used one of his final days in office to yet again tout his record tackling a seemingly intractable problem facing New Yorkers. Whereas last week de Blasio focused — with mixed success — on crime, he devoted his daily briefing Monday toward poverty. "By the end of 2019, we had moved 521,000 New Yorkers out of poverty or near-poverty," he said. De Blasio's briefing coincided with the release of a city report that showed 17.9 percent of New Yorkers lived in poverty during 2019. The level is the lowest since officials started measuring it in 2005, the report states. But the report's finding comes with two significant caveats. For one, the report acknowledges the city's poverty rate remains above the national rate, which stood at 10.5 percent in 2019, according to the U.S. Census. And perhaps most significantly, the report ends right before the coronavirus hit New York City and created a devastating economic blow from which it is still recovering. De Blasio argued a raft of measures — from universal 3-K to a $15 minimum wage — contributed to "one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history" that will help carry the city beyond the pandemic. The impacts of those measures are detailed in another report with a name that riffs off his famous, Charles Dickens-inspired campaign slogan — "The Tale of a More Equal City." "The bottom line is this has worked," he said. "This is proving that a city can do something on its own that makes a huge impact. And when you add federal and state policies, we can actually do something transcendent."