Half of New York City residents say they are struggling economically, making ends meet just barely, if at all, and most feel sharp uncertainty about the future of the city’s next generation, a new poll shows.

The poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, shows great disparities in quality of life among the city’s five boroughs. The stresses weighing on New Yorkers vary widely, from the Bronx, where residents feel acute concern about access to jobs and educational opportunity, to Staten Island, where one in five report recently experiencing vandalism or theft.

But an atmosphere of economic anxiety pervades all areas of the city: 51 percent of New Yorkers said they were either just getting by or finding it difficult to do so.

Even in Manhattan, three in 10 said they were just getting by. (Fifty-eight percent said they were doing all right or thriving financially — the highest response of the five boroughs.)

In some respects, the poll echoed the “tale of two cities” theme of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2013 campaign: Residents of the Bronx and Brooklyn shared the most pronounced sense of economic insecurity, and the lowest confidence in local government and the police — a distinctly different experience from the rest of the city.

In those boroughs, nearly three in five residents said they were straining to make ends meet. In the Bronx, 36 percent said there had been times in the past year when they did not have the money to buy enough food for their family; only one in five said they and their neighbors had good or excellent access to suitable jobs.

But if the city appears divided into broad camps of haves and have-nots, it was, perhaps surprisingly, the less privileged segments of New York that shared the most positive outlook on the future.

Four in 10 Brooklyn residents said their neighborhood was getting better, and 36 percent of Bronx residents said the same. Manhattanites and Staten Islanders were most likely to say things were getting worse in their area.

Matt Walker, 28, a resident of Flatbush, Brooklyn, said in a follow-up interview that finding long-term employment was a challenge. Mr. Walker, who is an engineer, said he had recently lost a “middle management-type position” and was searching for stable work.

“I’ll probably find another job in a month or two, because of my field, engineering,” Mr. Walker said. “A lot of people say it’s difficult to find a steady job that pays enough and that you can hold on to. If anything goes wrong with the company, you’re out the door.”

By almost every measure, residents of the Bronx had the deepest concerns about their neighborhoods: Half of respondents there said it was likely that a young person in the neighborhood would abuse drugs or alcohol. Thirty-seven percent said it was likely that a young person in the neighborhood would join a gang, whereas 19 percent of Manhattan residents and 16 percent of Staten Island residents said the same.

Just six in 10 Bronx residents said it was likely that a young person in their neighborhood would graduate from high school, compared with about three-quarters of New Yorkers over all. Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents in the Bronx said it was probable that the children around them would grow up having a relative who is incarcerated. (The citywide number is lower, about one-third, but it rises to 52 percent among African-Americans.)

Government is not seen as addressing the problems that trouble these areas: In the Bronx, only one in five respondents gave local government high marks for meeting their needs. In Brooklyn, that figure was a bit higher, at 26 percent, compared with roughly a third in Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.

Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, said residents of Manhattan and Queens, as well as whites in general, were clearly more likely to say that they were doing all right or living comfortably. “But a majority of residents of the Bronx or Brooklyn and nearly three-quarters of those earning under $50,000 are either just getting by or finding it difficult to manage financially,” Mr. Levy said.

The citywide survey of 1,961 adult New Yorkers was conducted by telephone from Oct. 29 to Nov. 11, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Camila Thomas, 20, who lives in the Bronx, said there were fewer opportunities for young people to improve their lives there, “compared to other neighborhoods.”

“I feel like people who were born in this neighborhood stay here our whole lives,” Ms. Thomas said. “If it was true that we had opportunities for advancement, then all of us wouldn’t still be here 20 years from now.”

Anthony Scruggs, who moved to the Bronx after Hurricane Sandy caused him to leave his home in Queens, agreed. “In all reality these kids are being taught to survive, and not to live,” Mr. Scruggs, 45, said. “It’s not that they don’t have the mind-set, if they were afforded the opportunities.”

Much of the city expressed a basically optimistic sense of the future: A third of all New Yorkers said their neighborhood was improving, while four in 10 said it was staying more or less the same. Just over a quarter said things were getting worse where they live.

Only in Staten Island, where residents had a strongly favorable view of their borough as a place to raise children, and expressed clear confidence that their children would graduate from high school, did participants in the poll share a distinctively negative outlook on the future.

Forty-six percent of Staten Islanders said life in their borough was getting worse, and just 19 percent said it was improving.

The reason for that pessimism may be crime: Heroin abuse there has risen sharply, and, along with high reported rates of vandalism and theft, about four in 10 Staten Islanders expect children in their neighborhoods to fall victims to drug or alcohol abuse.

Despite the uncertainty of many respondents, New Yorkers’ pride in their city remains: 65 percent said it was still the greatest in the world.