New York Poverty

In the city with the country's greatest concentration of billionaires, the number of New Yorkers who cannot afford a meal is growing. New York has the widest gap between rich and poor in the country, 9.2% unemployment, 20% poverty rate and 10.5% living in deep poverty - those making less than half the poverty level of $21,000 for a family of four. 400,000 New Yorkers - 118,000 of them children - suffer from severe hunger because they can't afford a meal. St. John's Bread & Life, located in Bedford-Stuyvesant has seen the demand for food go up by a 30%. It serves 1,800 to 2,000 meals a day and served almost half a million meals last year.

"We see many young parents who have lost their jobs. They end up needing the services we provide," said Anthony Butler, the group's executive director. Most of them, Butler said, do not fit the traditional idea of what poverty-stricken people look like. "Many of these individuals have been working at good-paying jobs for years, but the state of the economy has caused them to fall on hard times,"

According to the Children's Defense Fund a child is born into poverty every 17 minutes in the city.