Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Big challenges in the Big Apple
North America | Economy | COVID-19
December 6, 2021 – As one of the first epicenters of the global COVID-19 pandemic, New York City was hit early and hard. Now, more than a year after it went into lockdown, the United States’ most populated metropolis and one of its greatest engines for economic growth still has problems: many New Yorkers are struggling to meet basic needs such as food, healthcare, transit, and internet access.
Interactive
To read the article, see “Twelve insights for an inclusive economic recovery for New York City,” October 27, 2021.
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Visual form
Multi-frame dot-matrix comparison sequence.
Layout / body structure
The chart is a slide-by-slide sequence of nearly identical pages, each one showing a single respondent group across the same eight expense categories. Reader moves frame by frame from all respondents to Black, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, and White respondents, and within each frame reads left to right across the eight dot arrays.
What is being compared
The sequence compares the share of New York MSA respondents who could cover basic expenses by race or ethnicity. It repeats the same categories – nutritious food, necessary transportation, internet service, financial services, housing, health insurance, mental-health services, and childcare – across different respondent groups.
Measurement system
Every category is measured as percent of respondents and displayed as a 100-dot array with the percentage printed above it. Because each frame keeps the same format, the viewer can compare both within a group across expense types and across groups for the same expense type.
Visible structure inside the graphic
Each frame contains eight dot grids in one row, all using the same dark filled-versus-light unfilled pattern. The all-respondents frame shows figures such as 82 for nutritious food, 82 for transportation, 82 for internet, 77 for financial services, 76 for housing, 75 for health insurance, 64 for mental-health services, and 72 for childcare, while later frames replace those values with group-specific sets for Black, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, and White respondents.
Main takeaway from the visual
White New Yorkers are consistently more likely than racial and ethnic minority groups to say they can cover basic needs, with especially visible gaps in housing, health insurance, childcare, and mental-health services. The frame-by-frame repetition makes the disparity easy to see because the White slide stays higher almost everywhere, while Black, Hispanic and Latino, and Asian slides show more missing dots in several categories.
Key standout values or extremes
On the White frame, the values reach 88 for nutritious food, 87 for transportation, 88 for internet, 84 for financial services, 84 for housing, 82 for health insurance, 69 for mental-health services, and 80 for childcare. Black respondents are lower on many categories at 70, 76, 70, 67, 68, 68, 61, and 65; Hispanic and Latino respondents run 75, 76, 76, 71, 67, 63, 58, and 62; and the Asian frame shows the lowest childcare value in the visible sequence at 54 while transportation peaks at 83.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
No user-controlled interactivity appears in the published version; the source behaves as a fixed multi-frame image sequence rather than an filterable chart.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart is the full visual on this page.