Posted on May 19, 2016 by Jessica Leber in FastCoExist FastCoExist, By Jessica Leber Living in New York City is not easy. Rent is high, food costs more than in most other cities, and paying for child care is all but impossible. Yet the usual poverty statistics often totally miss these day-to-day hardships that many people experience. Poverty statistics are misleading for many reasons, but one is that they look at random snapshots in time, overlooking how and why people are constantly moving in and out of poverty. They also only look at income, even though someone who makes far above the poverty line but who has student loans and high living costs may be entirely cash poor. As a recent piece in The Atlantic powerfully highlighted, nearly half of all Americans don’t even have $400 on hand to handle an unexpected emergency expense.
