NEW YORK! NEW YORK! BIG CITY OF DREAMS! BUT EVERYTHING IN NEW YORK AINT ALWAYS WHAT IT SEEMS! 1.5 MILLION PEOPLE LIVE BELOW THE POVERTY LINE!

Is New York the greatest city in the world? Without a doubt, it is for some. Although for hundreds of thousands of its residents, who seem to survive only by the grace of God in the most expensive city in the country, it may be difficult to give their hometown the thumbs up.
New York is a place of startling contrasts and deep disparities.

It has the richest mayor in the country (who is also the city's richest citizen) presiding over a huge and growing population of poor people. For all its greatness, our city is a study in contradictions.

A new report on poverty in the city released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau makes this clear. The report gives voters plenty to consider before making up their minds about who will run the city for the next four years.

More than 1.5 million New Yorkers (or as the New York Coalition Against Hunger puts it, enough to fill Yankee Stadium 25 times over) lived in poverty last year, the study shows. This, before the full impact of the economic downturn hit the city.

More worrisome, the report confirms what many New Yorkers already knew: Poverty in the city and the state has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last few years.

Actually, as hard as it may be to believe, more than 125,000 city residents last year had to survive on an annual income below the meager federal poverty line of $17,660 - about $340 a week - than in 2000.

How anybody can live in New York on that kind of income is a mystery. After all, this is a city where $1,000 a month for a shabby, one-bedroom apartment is considered a bargain.

"Rhetoric, promises and pilot initiatives aside," said Joel Berg, the coalition's executive director, "the fact that there are more people in poverty in the state and the city in 2008 than in 2000 proves that city and state policies are failing in fundamental ways."

Berg obviously has a point. He joined with other anti-poverty advocates, community leaders and elected officials to react to the report at Cabrini Immigrant Services, a food pantry and social service center at 139 Henry St. in Brooklyn that has seen the number of people seeking help soar.

"The demand we've seen for our services at Cabrini Immigrant Services exemplifies the heightened need for food throughout New York City," said Cabrini director Christina Baal. "Providing people with health care, food stamp benefits and living wages would all help reduce poverty and hunger in the city."

Meanwhile, there is no more powerful symbol of the city's profound contradictions than seeing our billionaire mayor spend nearly $100 million to get reelected to a controversial third term, while more than a million of his constituents try to scrape out a meager living.

It is not reassuring, the report says, that the state of New York continues to have the highest level of inequality in the country. And neither is it reassuring that a study conducted by the Coalition Against Hunger found that "all pilot anti-poverty programs initiated by Mayor Bloomberg's Center for Economic Opportunity combined involved approximately 42,000 people."

Keep in mind that more than 1.5 million New Yorkers live on an income below the federal poverty line.

As long as this is the case, New York will be the greatest city in the world only for the few who can afford it.