​Poverty in Rochester: Is it getting better or worse?

By James O’Neil
 
The more that we look around Rochester the more problems that you can point out and acknowledge and one of the biggest ones is poverty. Almost every corner that you step on has someone that was put out or did not have the privilege to even try to live their own life. And due to the high prices, that make it hard for people to do better for their families more and more people are losing money and their family’s homes.  The poverty rate as we speak is currently 29.3% that is 59.5k out of 203k people in Rochester NY in my opinion that is still too many people to be suffering without any place to live or have anything period to survive.  And it is not getting better by any means at all and that is the sad part about it all is that our economy makes so much money from the state taxes and the prices of things like gas and groceries so the fact that we as a community should be more open to helping others but choose to only worry about ourselves is so upsetting.  In 2013-2017 is when the poverty level seemingly increased making us 3rd on the poverty rating scale.