Housing Tax Credits at Stake as Census Bureau Lets NYC Head Count Stand

NEW YORK CITY-In a decision that could mean $7 billion less in federal aid—including private activity “bond cap” and low income housing tax credits—coming here over the next decade, the US Census Bureau said its 2010 count of the city’s population will stand. The Census Bureau’s count of 8,175,133 is about a quarter of a million lower than the estimate of about 8.4 million that the bureau, in cooperation with the Department of City Planning, had produced in July ’10.

The Bloomberg administration filed a formal challenge to the count this past August, via the bureau’s Count Question Resolution program. However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said as early as a year ago that the city was planning an appeal.

“We believe that errors have occurred in putting together the Census results for Brooklyn and Queens,” he said in March 2011. “It seem evident to us that something incongruous happened in the Census count in these two boroughs.” He later said, “If we're successful through this process, the 2010 Census numbers would change—a great result for New York City. It wouldn't change the process of determining our Congressional representation, but it would change the population numbers that federal agencies use to apportion funds to cities and states.”

Borough president Marty Markowitz sharply criticized the bureau’s findings when the results reported that Brooklyn’s population had grown by only 1.6% since 2000, in contrast to the bureau’s earlier estimate of a 4.1% gain during that time period. “It is inconceivable that Brooklyn—the hottest borough in which to live, work and play—grew only a small percentage in the past decade,” Markowitz said in a statement in March ‘11.

In announcing the bureau’s decision to let the count of 8,175,133 stand, DCP said Monday that the Bloomberg administration believes “there has been a significant undercount of our city’s population.” The undercount, according to DCP, was due in part to the ‘10 census finding an increase of 82,000 vacant units in New York City, or a 46% rise since 2000. “A disproportionate share of this increase was found in two local census offices covering southern Brooklyn and northwest Queens, two vibrant sections of the city. The huge concentration of vacant units in these two areas cannot be explained by new construction or foreclosures; nor is it consistent with other survey and administrative data.”

However, a letter to Bloomberg from Arnold A. Jackson, acting chief of the bureau’s Decennial Management Division, noted that aside from a minor geocoding error, which was corrected, “we did not find evidence of boundary or processing errors that affected the 2010 Census counts for the challenged blocks.” Therefore, neither the total census count nor the housing unit count for the city was affected, Jackson wrote.

One reason the decision stood, according to DCP,  was that the CQR process doesn’t consider the types of errors that the Bloomberg administration maintains were responsible for the undercount. “Admissible errors are only those concerning geographic boundaries and the processing of data already collected in the census enumeration; the Census Bureau does not change numbers produced from an enumeration, unless the error falls into those categories,” according to a release from DCP.

In the release, DCP says the bureau showed “a real willingness” to work with the city, “but it is unfortunate no mechanism exists to rectify the errors we identified. City Planning’s demographers and technical specialists will continue to engage with their counterparts at the Census Bureau to examine what occurred and to improve census procedures for the future to ensure that New York is more accurately counted in the 2020 Census.”