Poverty Measurement – New York City

With new formula, an official helped unmask the face of poverty in New York, By Rachel R. Swarns, December 8, 2013, New York Times: “Over and over again, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has hammered it home: Forty-six percent of New Yorkers are poor or nearly poor. It is his mantra, the figure he holds up as proof that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has failed nearly half of his citizens. Yet the man who came up with that statistic is no Democratic operative. He is a wry, bespectacled Bloomberg administration official who is far more familiar with complex statistical methodologies than with rough-and-tumble political brawling. His name is Mark K. Levitan, and he is Mr. Bloomberg’s director of poverty research. Over the past five years, he has completely transformed how New York City measures poverty…”