Brian Lear on WNYC. We'll talk to Richard Bury now, CEO of the New York City

nonprofit known these days as Robin Hood. Bury was previously the deputy

mayor for strategic policy initiatives under Mayor Bill DiBlazio and he was a key

architect of the city's universal pre-K program universally hailed as the

the Blazio administration's best thing.

You may have seen Richard Buries or Robin Hood's name in the news this week for the report

they just released, along with the Poverty Tracker Research Group at Columbia University University that found a shocking recent

increase in poverty in the city 500,000 more New Yorkers in poverty in

2022 than the year before they say and it's a paradox right because the city has recovered to the same

number of jobs from before the pandemic one key finding they're not the same kind of jobs and to Bury's main policy

interests children they are bearing the brunt of the poverty surge let's find out more

now about the findings and what he thinks can be done from Robert Hood CEO,

Richard Bury. Richard always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNY

Thank you Brian always good to be with you. Can I ask as a starting point, how do you define poverty for the sake of your report?

Absolutely.

That's a great place to start.

So we define poverty using the supplemental poverty

measure, which is a robust measure of poverty, then through the traditional

poverty measure which was adopted by the federal government, the Social Security Administration in the

1960s, which you know looked at the cost of the bread basket approach, you looked at the cost of food and you multiplied that by three and you got the poverty rate the

supplemental poverty measure is much more dynamic it includes all expenses not not only food, which of course is a relatively smaller portion of people's expenses, but housing, health care, all the things that actually you need to thrive, it's also tied to the local cost of living.

So it acknowledges that living in New York City is more expensive than living in other places.

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