The recession pushed an additional 100,000 people into poverty
in New York City in 2009. This number would have been about
three times as great had it not been for the relief provided by
President Barak Obama's economic stimulus package. New York
City's poverty rate rose by 1.2 percent in 2009, increasing from
20.1 percent in 2008 to 21.3 percent in 2009, according to
estimates by the Fiscal Policy Institute. Last year 1.8 million
city residents lived below the poverty threshold, and half of
that number had incomes below 50 percent of the poverty
threshold. Despite the fact that the city lost proportionately
fewer payroll jobs than the nation in 2009, the poverty increase
in the city easily matched the national poverty rise. For the
nation as a whole, poverty rose from 13.2 percent in 2008 to
14.3 percent in 2009). In the 50-year history of the federal
poverty estimates, there was only one year (1980) when the U.S.
poverty rate increased by more than it did in 2009. The city's
poverty rate remains about one a