The user "Blike" misquotes the article, and says that there's an all-time homeless rate, when the article only talks about homeless shelter population. I'd assume that the homeless use the shelters more when safety in the shelters are improved, which probably follows crime in general to some degree. In anycase, that article draws no such conclusion on homelessness in the city.

As for the average salery, of course the average of the top 20% surpases the bottom 20% by an enormous degree, and we have the broadway stars, actors, an other industry leaders paying taxes for that, but the median is pretty close to national average so I don't think there's a significant skew.

Anyone who's upset about the poor suffering in new york but at the same time refuses to let a wal-mart enter the city are fooling themselves. No wal-mart in the city is a pure symbolic statement that hurts our citys poor much more then it effects wal-marts bottom line.

I love pandas, too, esp. panda babies.

Bloomberg will ignore the poverty rate, just as he ignores the all-time historic high of NYC's homeless rate.

I was watching a rerun of SNL this weekend and they had an episode of one of those comedy shorts "Bear City" (in which a meteor destroys humanity and leaves bears with the ability to live as humans did, except they're bears, but for two plucky brave human children, who are promptly eaten by bears). Anyway, the episode was called "Pack of Smokes" and it involved a bear going into a convenience store and trying to buy a pack of cigarettes except the bear worker couldn't understand the unintelligible gruntings of the customer and the latter became more and more exasperated. Maybe it was late, but it took me a while to realize that the bear behind the counter was a Panda (whereas all the other bears are brown) and thus supposed to be Asian, and unable to speak the domestic bear language. Completely off topic, but I thought a funny use of pandas in an amusing and mildly transgressive way.

That Panda Cam is addictive. Much better than the litterbox cam.

Be silent or i shall eat you all when i grow up.

New York also imports poverty - as immigrants (including my own parents long ago) continue to flood in in search of opportunities. Outside of Vegas, it is one of the few places a high school grad can make a decent living (so long as they live in the boroughs)

That’s because people who make 100k a year are stupid enough to rent a high priced shoebox in the city when they can live in Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, LI, or Jersey for much less.

I'd rather live in the burbs and save.

Does that poverty figure have anything to do with the fact that anyone in this city earning less than $100K a year is basically at the poverty line?