While Senator Schumer was doing his Sunday press thang and blasting the U.S. Census count for NYC, Mayor Bloomberg, fresh from his turn as Spider-Mike, announced that the City is going to formally contest the count. "We believe that errors have occurred in putting together the Census results for Brooklyn and Queens," he said in a release. "It seems evident to us that something incongruous happened in the Census count in these two boroughs."
The challenge, technically a "Count Question Resolution," would occur in June and would not include a recount. Instead it would be a review of errors in the existing data.
"They can't go back out in the field," Joseph Salvo, the director of the population division at the city's Planning Department, explained to the Journal. "It would be looking for geographic errors or processing errors." The city successfully challenged the Census's 1990 count of New Yorkers.
A Count Question Resolution won't change the process of determining Congressional representation, but it will correct the population numbers that the feds use to apportion money our way. The city thinks the census was off by as much as 225,000 or more.
According to the 2010 Census Queens only grew by 0.1 percent (or 1,343 people) in the past decade and Brooklyn only grew by 1.6 percent (or 39,374 people). Which many in those boroughs find incredibly hard to believe. As Bloomberg explained:
Jackson Heights is a good example of the problems we've discovered. According to the Census Bureau, the population of Jackson Heights decreased—that's right, I said decreased—by nearly 5,200 people, or by about five percent, between the years 2000 and 2010.
They also found that here in Jackson Heights between 2000 and 2010, there was a drop of some 1,300 occupied units and an increase of 1,200 vacant units. In the Astoria and Steinway areas of Northwest Queens, the Census Bureau reported similar population declines and large increases in housing vacancies.
Everything we know about these neighborhoods tells a very different story. These are vibrant, vital communities. People who have tried to find apartments in these neighborhoods can confirm that there just isn't an abundance of vacancies.
So what seems possible to us is that the Census Bureau was unable to get in touch with immigrants, and others, who live here, and in other parts of Queens and Brooklyn. And then it simply recorded their homes as 'vacant.'
Anecdotally, we're also hearing from a number of people that they simply didn't fill out their census forms this year (or talk to anyone at their door) and therefore weren't counted (if you didn't participate: shame on you!). Which is interesting since according to the Census, participation in the decennial count was at 63 percent last year, up from a reported 60 percent in 2000.
