It is rather early in the day for welfare reform's supporters to be claiming that it is the new policy and not just the old business cycle which is responsible for last year's decline. Poverty in New York City For New York City, the more things change, the more, it seems, they remain the same. In 1997, one out of four city residents lived in poverty and four out of every ten of the city's children were poor. As illustrated in Figure 2, this sentence could have been written at any time in the 1990s. While poverty is widespread in New York, it is not evenly distributed among the city's residents.
Children are poor.
The poverty rate for New Yorkers 17 years of age and younger was 38.1 percent. Minorities are poor. The poverty rate for Blacks was more than two times and for Hispanic New Yorkers nearly three times higher than for White city residents. In 1997 the poverty rate for Blacks was 27.3 percent, Hispanics 38.1 percent and Whites 13.2 percent. Poverty is concentrated in female-headed families with children.