A new report by the City University of New York (CUNY) highlights a complicated narrative about equality in New York City. Overall citywide levels of inequality improved slightly compared to the 2015 baseline, with positive and negative results across certain areas.
The report was produced by Equality Indicators, a project of CUNY’s Institute for State and Local Governance that began in 2014 to study and track the progress in reducing local inequalities regarding education, economy, health housing, justice and services across the city. This is the fourth annual report published by the project which is funded by The Rockefeller Foundation.
The report gave New York City an equality score of 48.52 out of 100, an increase of 3.56 from the city’s 2015 score of 45.07. The score for 2018 noted that disadvantaged groups continue to be almost twice as likely as those not disadvantaged to experience negative outcomes in essential areas of life, the report said.
The report also found that the largest positive change was in city services, with a 7.31 point increase; followed by education, a 6.31 increase; health, a 3.88 increase; and justice, a 2.38 increase. The scores for housing and the economy was relatively unchanged from the baseline year, with a positive increase of 0.94 and 0.06 points, respectively.
“We saw the greatest improvement in equality in the topics of Arts & Culture, Early Education, Access to Health Care, and Neighborhood. Conversely, we saw negative changes in scores for the topics of Safety & Victimization, Essential Needs and Services, Affordable Housing, and High School Education,” Dr. Michael Jacobson, founding executive director for the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance wrote in the report. “Quality of Health Care continues to be the lowest scoring topic (meaning the greatest inequalities) across the entire Equality Indicator framework, while Parks & Recreation had the highest score (most equality) across the entire framework.”
Dr. Victoria Lawson, project director of Equality Indicators said she believes the shift in attitudes and awareness of all races, sexualities and gender in NYC is a result of a greater awareness of these types of disparities nationally.
“For different reasons, they’ve all been in the public consciousness,” she said. “New York is an incredibly diverse city and one that has a lot of activism, so I think these issues really resonate with people here,” she added.
