Poverty and Hardship in Westchester County

Let’s start with a chart we used in Part 1: a breakdown of households by income bracket in Westchester County, across all geographies in the county.

The average number of residents per household in Westchester County is 2.67.¹ The federal poverty guidelines poverty line for a family of 3 (rounding up from 2.6) in 2021 (the year associated with the data we're using for the analysis in this post) was $21,960.² That puts the poverty level in the fourth bracket ($20k to $24.9k) used in our income chart. So the orange bars here show the four income brackets with homes under the federal poverty line.

Now let's stack the orange bars on top of each other. Together, the orange bars represent roughly 10% of the height of all the bars combined, meaning about 10% of all households in Westchester are below the federal poverty level.

Unfortunately, it is widely accepted among experts that the federal poverty level is not a good metric for determining whether a family is living in hardship.³ It was established almost 60 years ago, and has become outdated. Its flaws include its failure to account for geographic differences in cost of living, the fact that it is based entirely on the price of food and ignores the cost of many other living essentials, and that it uses a family model (two-parent household with a stay at home mom) that does not reflect the reality of many Americans today.

A number of organizations have developed alternative models that attempt to make up for these shortcomings. One of these is the ALICE model, developed by the United Way. ALICE stands for “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.” ALICE was designed to identify people who live above the poverty line, but who still do not earn enough to meet their basic day-to-day needs. The United Way says that ALICE analysis includes “the bare minimum cost of household basics necessary to live and work in the modern economy.” ALICE costs include “housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, and technology, plus taxes and a contingency fund . . . equal to 10% of the household budget.” ALICE also adjusts to account for costs on a per-county basis, and has separate metrics for different households based on the makeup of the household (seniors, children, etc.).

Let’s revisit our graph of Westchester County income brackets. According to the United Way, the ALICE line for an average household in Westchester (headed by someone under 65 years old) is $75,000. In this chart, those households in Westchester that are above the poverty line but below the ALICE line are combined, and shown in green. The number of households in this green category is about 24% of all Westchester households.

So now we can combine the bars associated with the poverty level and the ALICE level, and compare them to the combined bars for all households with incomes above the ALICE level. As you can see, more than 120,000 households -- more than one third of all Westchester County households -- live below the level necessary to meet basic living requirements.

Now let’s compare Westchester to the rest of New York state. We'll start by showing the same breakdown of the poverty, below ALICE, and above ALICE categories in Westchester County that we used in the previous chart, but this time shown in a single horizontal line representing 100% of Westchester households.

Here's a chart showing a horizontal bar for every New York county. Each bar is the same length, and, once again, represents 100% of households in a county. The colors show the breakdown of income categories by percentage.

As you can see, the percentage breakdowns across the counties are pretty similar to each other. Westchester has the sixth highest percentage of total households above the ALICE line, but it's not much different from most other New York counties. Even in Nassau County, which has the highest percentage households above the ALICE line, nearly 30% of families struggle to make ends meet. The Bronx is the only dramatic outlier among New York counties, with almost two thirds of its households below the ALICE line.