WASHINGTON – New York, Detroit and Miami are among cities where officials said they intend to challenge the 2010 U.S. census count, citing variations from previous population estimates that could cost the municipalities money and prestige.
With the appeals process beginning Thursday, the cities want to hold onto their share of the $400 billion in federal funds doled out each year to states and cities based on census data. Also at stake is their ability to market themselves as growing urban centers.
“If a local government population is undercounted, it will have an enormous impact on the funds it will receive for various programs,” ranging from community development block grants to police, said Larry Jones, assistant executive director of the Washington-based U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The Census Bureau counted 713,777 people in Detroit, a 21.6 percent deviation from the bureau’s 2009 estimate of 910,921. New York, where 8,175,133 residents were counted, had 216,748 fewer people than the 2009 bureau estimate, the largest numerical deviation.
The census pegged Miami’s population at 399,457 in 2010, 8 percent under its 2009 population estimate of 433,136. Houston intends to challenge the census count of 2,099,451 — 158,475 less than the bureau’s 2009 estimate, said Suzy Hartgrove, a spokeswoman for the Planning and Development Department. Cincinnati, where the 2009 estimate of 333,012 was 10.8 percent higher than the 2010 count of 296,943, will also file a challenge, Mayor Mark Mallory said.
$3,000 Per Person
In New York, federal aid formulas may amount to more than $3,000 per person, according to a Brookings Institution study. In Detroit, a drop below 750,000 would make it ineligible to enact its own income tax, according to state law.
Cities have until June 1, 2013, to appeal the population counts. The challenges won’t affect congressional apportionment, which is also set by the census, according to the bureau.
Most of the challenges are unlikely to succeed, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“When a lot of these cities have a census count that comes in below what the estimates were, it’s usually the estimates that are wrong, not the census,” said Frey. “The census is meant to be a complete count, so often people are disappointed. But there are undercounts.”
The bureau received almost 1,200 challenges in 2000, of which 841 resulted in changes, said Stacy Gimbel Vidal, a spokeswoman, in an email. The changes added only about 2,700 people nationwide, Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, said in a March 24 speech at the National Press Club.
Not ‘Reality’
Cities and counties that challenged the 2000 census used housing unit data, including building permits, certificates of occupancy and utility records, to increase their estimates, said Greg Harper, a census bureau demographer. The bureau assumed the same vacancy rate as in the 2000 census, he said.
“In some cities, there was a pretty big increase in the vacancy rate,” he said in a phone interview from Washington. The estimate in 2009 “wasn’t always representing reality.”
In New York, city demographer Joseph Salvo said the 2010 canvass mistakenly determined that about 82,000 apartments were vacant in two densely populated areas in northern Queens and southern Brooklyn that have experienced an influx of Asian, Caribbean and Latin-American immigrants in the past 10 years.
The bureau found a 322 percent vacancy-rate increase in Census Tract 148 in the heart of southwest Brooklyn’s Dyker Heights, long dominated by Italian-Americans.
Impossible
Salvo said that’s impossible. The streets of the neighborhood don’t show signs of neglect or abandonment.
“These areas do not have high rates of foreclosure, nor did they see increases in new construction that could account for the large number of vacant units as the 2010 census reported,” Salvo said. “We believe instead that in these two areas something happened to cause census operations to break down.”
Andrew Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who has studied population counts for more than 20 years, rejected the city’s view, saying officials failed to see the impact the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the recession had on immigration and housing vacancies.
‘Like a Rock’
“Immigration patterns have dropped like a rock,” Beveridge said. “We have foreclosures, people moving to find work. I don’t see why New York officials assume that the demographic trends that have affected every place else haven’t had an effect upon New York.”
Detroit officials aren’t questioning that the city lost a sizeable part of residents.
“We don’t doubt we’ve lost population and increased the number of vacant units,” said Dan Lijana, a spokesman for Mayor Dave Bing. “But we also think the census may have counted as vacant, units with squatters inside. And whole neighborhoods where Hispanics, Iraqi expatriates and other Middle Eastern immigrants are wary of authorities and more likely to avoid census-takers.”
John Baran, a city demographer, singled out Census Tract 5172 in downtown Detroit where a jail in which the census found 1,868 inmates in 2000, reported just 489 last year. The jail’s capacity is about 1,400, and there’s “no apparent reason” why it would be as low as reported by the census, he said.
The disparity between the city’s counted population and its estimated total rests largely on an increase in the vacancy rate to 22.8 percent in 2010 from 10.3 percent in 2000, said Harper, the bureau demographer.
“It’s really not surprising when you understand that this is part of a national trend,” Harper said. “We see it in Atlanta, Miami, in most cities we have seen these increases in vacant housing.”
