More Americans are poor than ever before, and the national poverty rate is at its highest level since 1994. Meanwhile, one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty. But poverty is absent from our civic discourse. Everyone is tired of talking about poverty, it seems, except poor people. Perhaps that’s because the rhetoric around the topic has rarely resembled reality. The latest issue of City Limits explores that lives of four low-income New Yorkers, including Beverly Davis.

Beverly Davis has always worked. From when she was 15 years old, she says, she worked part time at a Dr. Jay's clothing store in the Bronx, while finishing high school and raising two children. In 2009, after six years on the job, Davis was told by a new manager that she was being let go. "I wasn't upset, but I understood how the business went. So I wasn't going to let that stop me. I was still on public assistance, receiving my portion that they gave me, but I wasn't comfortable with it. I was only doing that to make ends meet and to feed my children."

City Limits Magazine


July-August 2011:
Remember Poverty? The Problem 1.5 Million New Yorkers Can't Afford to Forget

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Census Tract 192

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Neil deMause
Neil deMause
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Instead, she applied for a training program run by Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker-owned and cooperatively run home care agency in the Bronx. "It was public assistance ready," she says, meaning that HRA works with the employer to ensure that the job counts toward her mandated work hours. That, she says, "made it a plus for me."

But more than that, Davis sees it as the perfect stepping-stone to a better life. She's not only raising two children and working 36 hours a week but also studying criminal justice at Monroe College. With her home care job and public benefits tiding her over until then, she's con¬ dent that she won't be long for the low-income world: "I'm going to be a cop for five or six years. After that, I'm going to go back to law school and become an attorney. And After I become an attorney, I'm going to go to become a judge. Hopefully, it works out."

Working in poverty

Of New Yorkers who work full time, 6.6 percent have incomes below the poverty line, according to Census data; many more workers are "near poor," earning less than twice the poverty threshold. It is a vast population that goes largely unnoticed by many in the city, even as low-wage workers staff the city's restaurants and retail stores. And they are most likely only getting more numerous: A May report from the Drum Major Institute noted that 82 percent of all job growth in New York City in the previous year came in the city's five lowest-paid industries: hotels and food service, retail, administrative and waste services, health care, and "other services," which includes maintenance and laundry services.

One of the biggest—and fastest-growing—fields of low-wage work is home health care. By 2016, according to the state labor department's projections, nearly 300,000 New Yorkers will be employed as home attendants, either as health aides or personal caregivers for the elderly or infirm. As a job that doesn't require a college degree, it has attracted a large number of applicants, mostly women, from around the city. (HRA says 12 percent of its job placements are in home care.)

But in part because the pool of potential labor is so huge and in part because of a state home care bureaucracy that has encouraged the growth of subcontractors that siphon off much of the state's fixed Medicaid payments for home care, wages are invariably low: $8.50 an hour on average in the city, according to Meghan Shineman, New York policy analyst for the Bronx-based direct-care advocacy group PHI National. As a result, she says, 1 in 7 low-wage workers in the city is a home care worker.