Using the American community survey to create a National Academy of Sciences–style poverty measure: Work by the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity

Abstract

The need to improve the U.S. poverty measure has received renewed attention as state and local governments have initiated antipoverty efforts and wish to judge their effect. This paper describes the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity's implementation of the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations for measuring poverty. The center's decision to use the Census Bureau's American Community Survey as its principal data source created the project's central challenge; many of the items needed to construct the academy's measure of resources are not included in the survey and needed to be estimated through a variety of methods. The resultant measure creates a higher poverty rate and a demographic profile of the poor that is quite different from that generated by the official measure. The paper concludes with observations about these differences and how this new picture of poverty has begun to influence policymaking in New York City. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.