More than 5 million New Yorkers are not earning enough to keep up with expenses and would need nearly $40,000 more to match rising costs, according to a new report.
The city on Monday released two reports: the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan and the inaugural NYC True Cost of Living Measure. Together, the reports will help establish a new framework for how city government measures affordability, understands inequity and plans for a more equitable future, officials said.
The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan is the first racial equity framework in the city’s history, outlining data-driven agency goals, strategies and indicators to address long-standing disparities across public policy, services and practices. The True Cost of Living Measure, spearheaded by the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice in collaboration with the Urban Institute and the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, provides a picture of what New Yorkers need to meet essential needs and achieve foundational economic security.
Together, the two reports make clear that New York City’s affordability crisis is deeply tied to its history of racial inequity. Patterns of disinvestment, exclusion from homeownership, unequal access to health care and employment and concentrated environmental burdens have shaped who has resources, who faces the greatest costs and who remains most economically insecure today, officials said.
The median household net worth of white New Yorkers is approximately $276,900, nearly 15 times greater than that of Black New Yorkers, at $18,870, while 62% of New Yorkers, or 5.04 million people, do not meet their true cost of living, compared with roughly 18% to 20% identified as poor under traditional measures, according to the reports. The average annual resource gap is $39,603 per family.
"Too many people cannot afford the city that they love. New York City is home to skyscrapers, million-dollar listings, nine-dollar lattes," Mamdani said at a press conference at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. "And yet more than three in five New Yorkers, 62%, cannot keep up with the cost of living in this city."
The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan
The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan marks the first time any New York City administration has required major city agencies to examine their work through a racial equity lens and identify and eliminate disparities.
The plan sets goals across seven domains: Children, Youth, Older Adults and Families; Economy; Housing and Preservation; Infrastructure and Environment; Health and Wellbeing; Community Safety, Rights and Accountability; and Good Governance and Inclusive Decision-Making.
From the redlining that locked generations of Black and immigrant New Yorkers out of homeownership to highway construction that tore through Bronx communities in the 1950s and 1960s, the report confronts the city’s role in creating structural inequities.
Key Data:
- 45 City agencies participated in the first governmentwide racial equity planning process.
- The median household net worth of white New Yorkers is approximately $276,900 — nearly 15 times greater than that of Black New Yorkers, at $18,870.
- Black New Yorkers have the lowest life expectancy of any racial or ethnic group at 76.1 years, compared with 81.8 years for white New Yorkers.
- The plan proposes more than 200 agency-level short, medium and long-term goals, over 800 strategies for implementation, and 600 indicators to track and report progress.
Key Goals:
- Economic Opportunity: Expand access to capital for underserved businesses, connect New Yorkers in high-unemployment communities to quality jobs, and help young people build generational wealth.
- Housing: Apply a racial equity framework to all new housing proposals to ensure fair geographic investment.
- Health: Ensure that every New Yorker has access to a primary care physician by 2034 and reduce truck-related pollutants in communities of color that are disproportionately affected by warehousing activity.
"This preliminary racial equity plan is the first step in developing a whole-of-government approach to tackling that reality," Mamdani said. "It is a plan that lays out these first steps to solve decades of neglect and discrimination, and it places the work of 45 city agencies within a singular framework. Too often, the story of Black and brown New Yorkers is one of being forced to stretch that same dollar that a little bit further."
The True Cost of Living Measure
The True Cost of Living Measure calculates what families must earn to meet essential needs across eight categories: housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, taxes, savings and other essentials.
Key Findings:
- 62% of New Yorkers — 5.04 million people — do not meet their true cost of living, compared with roughly 18% to 20% identified as poor under traditional measures.
- The average annual resource gap is $39,603 per family.
- The median annual costs for a family with children are $159,197 to achieve economic security but median resources are $124,007 — a gap of more than $35,000.
- 73% of children in New York City — 1.2 million — live in families that don’t meet their cost of living; in the Bronx, that figure rises to 87%.
- New Yorkers with self-reported disabilities face the highest burden, with 92% unable to meet their cost of living and an average resource gap of $76,178.
- Hispanic New Yorkers face the highest TCOL rate at 77.6%, followed by Black New Yorkers at 65.6% and Asian and Pacific Islander New Yorkers at 63.3%, compared with 43.7% for white New Yorkers. Intraborough racial disparities are starkest in Manhattan, where Hispanic residents face a TCOL rate of 85.3% and Black residents a rate of 80% compared to 32.9% for white residents.
- Approximately 3.58 million New Yorkers earn above the federal poverty line but still don’t meet their cost of living — a “missing middle” often largely invisible in traditional poverty measures.
- Government supports, including stabilized housing, Universal Pre-K/3-K, SNAP and tax credits, reduce the overall NYC TCOL rate by about 5 percentage points.
The release of the two reports come as new research underscores the urgency of the crisis. Columbia University's Poverty Tracker, published this winter in partnership with Robin Hood Foundation, found that nearly 2.2 million people, including 450,000 children, lived in poverty in 2024 — the highest level in the study’s 10-year history, with widening racial disparities. Asian and Latino New Yorkers were more than twice as likely to live in poverty as white New Yorkers, and Black New Yorkers faced similarly elevated rates.
Every year as wages stagnate, an exodus takes place, Mamdani said.
"When I say exodus, I refer to the fact that from 2000 to 2020, more than 200,000 Black New Yorkers were pushed out of the city, because they could not afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America because rent was too high, childcare was too expensive, and groceries cost too much," he said.
For the next 30 days, the city will gather public feedback at https://bit.ly/
"This plan lays out a roadmap to address inequities through both targeted programs and deeper structural reforms," said NYC Chief Equity Officer and NYC Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice Commissioner Afua Atta-Mensah. "It challenges us to examine how systems operate, how decisions are made, and how resources are distributed, and to change what is not working."
