Race and Housing Insecurity in New York City

Key Takeaways

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Racial disparities in housing affordability are more pronounced in NYC than nationally and widen further when accounting for the city's higher cost of living.

New York’s large public housing footprint, which has experienced decades of federal disinvestment, serves a low-income tenant base that is overwhelmingly Black and Latino with few market alternatives.

Market-driven displacement masks the severity of the racial affordability gap, as rising rents push long-term low-income residents, who are disproportionately residents of color, out of several rapidly growing neighborhoods.

This spring, New York City released its Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan, the first of its kind in the city’s history. Put together by 45 city agencies over a multi-year process spanning two mayoral administrations, the report documents racial disparities in housing, health, education, and governance across the five boroughs while laying out more than 200 goals to reduce them.

As experts and advocates digest the report’s findings, we examine how New York City’s racial housing disparities compare with the national picture, which structural forces are disproportionately affecting the five boroughs, and the role market pressures may play in displacing communities of color.

Poverty and Racial Disparities are Higher in NYC

As explored in Chandan Economics’ 2026 Racial Inequities in US Housing Report, the US poverty rate rose during the earlier part of the decade in concurrence with pandemic-related inflation and rising housing costs, while poverty levels continue to vary widely across racial groups.

Estimated using data from the US Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, 20.6% of all US renter households are at or below the 100% federal poverty level (FPL), while there is a 1.26 percentage point gap between the racial group with the highest (Native American and Black) and lowest (White) poverty rates.

Roughly 3-in-10 Native American and Black renter households live below the poverty line. 22.0% of Hispanic renters and 21.5% of renters who self-identify as other or multiracial are below the line, while the rates drop for Asian/Pacific Islander and White renters, at 18.0% and 17.4%, respectively.

Within New York City’s five boroughs, housing insecurity and racial disparities are more pronounced. 22.2% of the city’s renter population lives at or below the poverty line, 1.8 percentage points higher than the national average. Meanwhile, the racial poverty gap widens by 1.61 percentage points, roughly 20% larger than the US average.

The 100% FPL comparison offers a useful baseline, but applying the same threshold to New York City as to the rest of the country understates the economic reality on the ground.

Due to NYC’s substantially higher cost of living relative to the national average, urban policy researchers often use a 200% federal poverty line (FPL) threshold to better capture economic hardship in the five boroughs.

According to a 2024 report by the Poverty Tracker Research Group at Columbia University, which uses the 200% FPL threshold, nearly 5 million New Yorkers, or roughly 3-in-5, live in relative economic insecurity. Narrowing our observations to NYC renter households, we estimate that 39.4% of residents live below the 200% FPL mark.

Within this expanded definition of poverty, racial disparities widen. At the 100% FPL level, the racial poverty gap for NYC renters is 16.3 percentage points, while at the 200% FPL level, the gap increases to 26.9 percentage points.

Zooming in further, we find that at the 100% FPL, the share of Black and Hispanic renter households in NYC that live with housing insecurity is relatively similar. However, at the 200% FPL, there is a modestly higher number of Hispanic renter households living with housing insecurity, sitting at 50.6% compared to 47.5% of Black renter households.

The poverty gap between Black and AAPI renters also widens, as does the gap between AAPI and other/multiracial renters, and the gap between other/multiracial and White renters.

Disproportional Representation in Public Housing and Homelessness

Part of New York’s disproportionate racial disparities in housing relates to the city's significant public housing footprint and homelessness levels.

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the nation’s largest public housing authority. It houses over 511,000 residents across 335 developments in the five boroughs, with a tenant base that is overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

Even though NYCHA’s annual budget shortfall has somewhat stabilized in recent years, subsidies and non-recurring revenues continue to support over 1/4^th of its operations, and rent delinquency rates have been increasing.

NYCHA's most recently approved capital plan, adopted in November 2024, outlined $7.84 billion in planned commitments but against a backlog of deteriorating infrastructure spanning more than 650 active projects.

The housing authority’s complications, in part, reflect decades of federal disinvestment, and mounting proposals to cut funding to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have kept federal funding risk an outsized concern for the agency.

The recently adopted FY2026 Appropriations Bill provides $77.3 billion in funding for HUD, a roughly 10.5% boost over FY2025. Nonetheless, it also reduced public housing funding by $700 million, which will likely create new financial constraints for several of the nation’s housing authorities as demand pressures rise.

Many New York households on the margins of these programs have no market alternative. In turn, rising emigration and homelessness develop downstream.

The scale of the city’s homelessness epidemic adds another dimension to racial inequities entirely. According to data from the NYC Comptroller’s Office, in fiscal year 2023 (FY 2023), Black New Yorkers made up 44% of the shelter population, compared with 23% of the city's general population, while Hispanic residents accounted for 46% of shelter residents, compared with 29% of the city's general population.

Language access compounds this further. Roughly two million New Yorkers have limited English proficiency, and housing court proceedings across all five boroughs have documented significant barriers for tenants with limited English proficiency.

Market-Driven Displacement

Not all the forces influencing NYC's renter poverty gap are unique to the five boroughs.

Market-driven displacement—more commonly known as gentrification—has metastasized beyond the up-and-coming blocks of Brooklyn and San Francisco. The trend of higher-income residents driving neighborhood turnover through rising rents has often come with implicit yet obvious demographic consequences, and its scale in New York is well-documented.

Market-driven displacement has reshaped large portions of New York City over the past two decades, and the demographic data reflects it. According to neighborhood data profiles from NYU’s Furman Center, in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights alone, the share of Black residents fell from 78.1% in 2000 to 45.5% in 2023, while the White population quadrupled over the same period.

While the causal link between gentrification and the displacement of communities of color is often contested, the idea that rising rents create an affordability squeeze on long-term low-income tenants is more widely accepted. Between 2013 and 2023 alone,

Brooklyn's median monthly rent rose by an inflation-adjusted 17.9%, which is above NYC's 13.5% average and the highest among the five boroughs. By 2023, more than 1-in-4 renter households in Brooklyn were spending over half their income on housing.

Looking Ahead

Demographic disparities in New York housing do not exist in isolation. Across the five boroughs, several headwinds bearing down on renter households are shared experiences nationwide. Further, the structural forces entrenching New York’s racial disparities compound one another in ways that aggregate poverty figures do not fully capture.

Closing the gap requires equally layered interventions. If reducing inequities for the city is important, policies will need to be targeted, adequately funded, and designed with the racial composition of housing insecurity in mind rather than around it.