Census Finds Less New Yorkers in New York Than Census Thought
By David Freedlander March 24, 2011 6:35 pm
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The 2010 census numbers are out, and they show that there are far fewer New Yorkers than many people–including the Census Bureau–believed.
According to the new count, there are close to 8.2 million New Yorkers, down from the 8.4 million that the Census Bureau and the Bloomberg administration believe actually live here.
The discrepancy is believed to be because of a vast under-count among New York’s burgeoning immigrant population, many of whom are difficult for census workers to find and who are reluctant to fill out census forms. For example, the census showed that Queens was populated by only 1,300 more people than lived there in 2000, and Brooklyn showed a population increase of 1.6 percent, numbers which are out-of-sync with the amount of development that has gone on there over the last ten years.
“We are concerned that there has been a significant under-count,” Mayor Bloomberg said at a news conference today. “In all fairness to the census people, it’s very difficult to do these counts, and the numbers depend on when you do them and how you do them, there is a lot of estimating that goes in as well. It is troublesome, the under-counting.”
The census figures have a huge impact on the city’s future, both on the amount of representation that New York receives in Albany and in Washington and in the amount of aid that the city receives. The Census Bureau can revise their numbers between now and the 2020 census, but it will not affect the city’s representation.
