Poorest New Yorkers struggle to afford food, housing

New York is one of the wealthiest cities in the world with more than 349,000 millionaires in its ranks, but it is also home to low-income families who battle each day to afford basic necessities such as housing, food and visits to the doctor.

At least a quarter of the city's residents are living in poverty, a record number not seen since 2022, the Poverty Tracker report by Columbia University and Robin Hood, an anti-poverty charity found. Out of more than 2 million New Yorkers who live in poverty, 1.6 million are adults and 420,000 are children.

Elisa, 35, who declined to give her surname, is a mother of six young children. She is unemployed, barely survives on public assistance and lives in a shelter in Brownsville. She is fed up with the effects of inflation.

"Things keep going up in the grocery store. I think it's ridiculous, especially the price of eggs, $12 for a dozen," she told China Daily. "I mean honestly, I just have to pay for it. I go to BJs and other places that have things on sale because it's really ridiculous. I feel like it's going to get to the point that there's going to be food that we are not even going to be able to eat. Pantries could do a better job.

"My family and a lot of people I know are going through things because of the prices, and for a lot of people it's a struggle, people are sick, a lot of people are on disability. Housing costs too much," Elisa said.

While poverty is scattered across most boroughs of the city, some of the poorest New York neighborhoods include the South Bronx, which has one of the highest rates of poverty, and Brownsville in Brooklyn.

Around 14 percent of residents in Brownsville were unemployed in 2018, data from the US Census shows. At least 28 percent live in poverty.

Staff at local supermarkets and food pantries say that the families they see daily are in desperate need and simply cannot afford both food and rent.

Several local churches in the area give out donated free food throughout the week, including Glover Memorial Baptist Church, which has a soup kitchen, God's Deliverance Temple Inc and the New Hope Pentecostal Church of Jesus Christ.

Tom Williams, a retired 75-year-old welder, said he is having a hard time dealing with the rising cost of living as a senior on a fixed income. Originally from the Caribbean, he immigrated to the US in 1971. He has watched as things have gotten very tough for everyone.

Williams told China Daily: "People around me are crying over the high prices. They can't manage. Last week I went into a store about four blocks away on East 98th Street. The Dollar General Brownsville. I used to buy canola oil there for $5; now it's $10. That's too much.

"I'm alone and I don't do excessive, enormous shopping. I would say my increase right now is about like, $50 a week. You just budget and you just take your time and make adjustments. As a senior, there's some privileges that other people might not get. There are programs. You can get subsidies to help pay rent. But it's never enough."

Throughout Brownsville, rows of low-cost shops include a pizza parlor and a 99-cent store. The discount stores Dollar General and Family Dollar are located across the street from each other. Prices there can be as low as $3 for household goods and tinned food. Both shops were packed with families on a Monday afternoon, all carefully budgeting for what they can afford.

Darren McMillan, 56, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, works in Brownsville and said he's been forced to scale back on some things he used to buy to cope.

McMillan told China Daily: "I'm really choosing whether to pay this or pay that or don't get this and don't get that so we can eat. I think that the community that we don't know of, we have to become more familiar with. That way we can work together to heal problems.

"I think that we have to stop looking for outside help to do it. No one is going to help us, not the government, no one," he said. "I don't have much, but what I do have I share with people and help people. We need more of that."

President Donald Trump pledged to bring prices down on "day one" if he got back into office. A month into his second term, grocery prices remain high.

Trump's move to enact a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods on March 4 could mean households pay an extra $1,600 to $2000 for items per year, the Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan public policy research center found.

The US imported more than $1.3 trillion in goods from China, Mexico and Canada in 2024. Mexico is a huge source of food imports into the US. Canada delivers oil and cars, and China exports clothing and electronics.

New York's poverty rate of 25 percent is nearly double the national rate of 13 percent. The poverty threshold for a family of four that rents their home is $47,190.

While the poor carefully watch every dollar they spend, the Big Apple is also home to 60 billionaires, 744 centimillionaires (with investable wealth of more than $100 million) and the highest number of millionaires of any city in the world, according to immigration consultancy Henley & Partners. Together their combined total wealth is $3 trillion.