Bloomberg says census figures shortchange NYC
BY Adam Lisberg
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

Thursday, March 24th 2011, 1:20 PM

We wuz robbed!

New census figures claim there are fewer than 8.2 million New Yorkers in the city - which Mayor Bloomberg says is way too low.

"We don't quite understand the numbers," he said Thursday. "It just doesn't make any sense at all."

He said the Census Bureau counted 8.175 million New Yorkers in its once-in-a-decade count last year - which he estimates is 225,000 too low.

The numbers don't account for 170,000 new homes built in New York in the last decade, he said, and they improbably count just 1,300 new residents in Queens since 2000.

"There are not a lot of vacant homes in this city," the mayor said. "In Queens, common sense says we didn't go up by 1,000 people."

Most of the shortfall comes in outer borough neighborhoods full of immigrants, city officials said, such as Corona in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn.

"I'm flabbergasted by these numbers," said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. "I know they made a big, big mistake."

That could mean recent immigrants - possibly here illegally - didn't fill out their census forms, or that census takers were deterred when confronted with illegally-subdivided apartments.

Bloomberg said the count will shortchange New York because many state and federal aid programs are based on the city's population.

The census bureau's own 2009 estimate of the city's population count was 8,391,881 - but it was based on demographic formulas, not on an actual head count.

The last time the feds counted every New Yorker was the 2000 census, which tallied 8,008,278 people.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/201 ... z1HYaQiayB