Carroll Gardens Has One Of Brooklyn's Lowest Poverty Rankings

CARROLL GARDENS, BROOKLYN — Carroll Gardens, Park Slope and Red Hook are the neighborhoods with the least residents living in poverty in Brooklyn, a new city report shows.

Those three neighborhoods, grouped together in the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity's annual poverty report, had just a 9.6 percent poverty ranking in 2017, the lowest in the borough. The report, released Monday, calculates the poverty rates using its own threshold for what is considered poor, defined as a family of four with an income less than $33,562 in this report.

The Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook rankings fell far below the city's average of 19 percent, which indicates that nearly one in five New Yorkers was considered poor that year. The 19 percent average was the lowest rate since the city started tracking the numbers in 2005, the city said.

The neighborhood's ranking were closely followed by Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights, which had an 11 percent poverty rate. Canarsie came in third with 14.6 percent.

Those numbers are also well below some of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Brownsville, the highest rate in the borough, had a 29.4 percent ranking, and East New York, with 28.7 percent was the second highest.

Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park had the third highest at 27.9 percent, followed closely by Kensington and Borough Park residents with 27.2 percent.

The city's poverty rate threshold accounts for the higher cost of living in the five boroughs. That means the city's poverty estimate is higher than the federal government's, which said the city had a poverty rate of 16.6 percent in 2017.

The numbers show that the de Blasio administration is on track to reach its goal of getting 800,000 people out of poverty or near-poverty by 2025, the mayor's office said.

"The good news in this annual report is that poverty has steadily decreased," wrote Matthew Klein, the executive director of the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity. "The data also serve as a reminder, however, that many New Yorkers continue to live in poverty and near poverty."