Thread: With New York Help, Census Finds 64,000 New Yorkers

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/nyreg ... mbers.html

October 4, 2005
With New York Help, Census Finds 64,000 New Yorkers
By SAM ROBERTS
It's the 64,000-person question, or America's biggest missing persons case: How and where in New York City did Joseph J. Salvo discover as many people as live in all of Santa Fe, N.M., when the Census Bureau couldn't find them?

Last week, the bureau officially listed the city's population at 8,168,338, another record high, thanks to two years of sleuthing by Dr. Salvo, the director of the population division of the Department of City Planning, and his colleagues in other branches of city government.

What that means is that between April 2000 and July 2004, the number of New Yorkers grew by a total of 160,060, or 2 percent, including people found by the Census Bureau itself and another 64,259 discovered directly with Dr. Salvo's help.

The revisions have also propelled Dr. Salvo's name into the lexicon of American demography. John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center, called it "the Salvo effect."

Prof. Robert Smith of Baruch College defined it as meticulously helping the Census Bureau find people who it might not even suspect exist. "The census only looks for people it thinks are there," he said.

More than bragging rights are at stake. As a result of the higher official population figures, the Bloomberg administration estimates that between 2004 and 2010 an additional $36 million in federal housing assistance will flow to New York State, with most of that going to the city.

Census Bureau officials collegially thanked Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Dr. Salvo last week. "Your involvement in the challenge process contributes to the improved accuracy of our estimates," Louisa Miller, acting chief of the population division, wrote.

For the revised 2000 census, the city was credited by the census with finding 150,000 houses or apartments, which are home to as many as 350,000 people.

"They would have fallen through the cracks," Dr. Salvo said.

He said that last spring when the Census Bureau released the latest figures for July 1, 2004, he suspected they were too low.

"Those estimates were just counterintuitive to me as a demographer and counterintuitive to people who live in the city of New York and see the housing going up everywhere," he said.

The census typically reaches its population estimates by monitoring births, deaths and migration. But city planners researched telephone company and utility records, property tax bills, building permits and other sources. "We thought about using water metering, too, but it's tough to quantify," Dr. Salvo said. "We also thought about cable TV hookups."

The Bloomberg administration has succeeded in rezoning pockets of the city from commercial to residential use. This year, 20,857 new housing permits were issued by the city through August. If they continue to be issued at that rate, the total for the year, about 31,000, will be the highest since 1972.

"We have a housing boom and that housing is being occupied," Dr. Salvo said. His methods did not use statistical sampling, but instead uncovered housing units and people that the census had missed.

Since 2000, the Census Bureau identified a 4.4 percent population growth in Staten Island and a 2.5 percent increase in the Bronx, but only 1 percent in Manhattan and negligible growth in Brooklyn and Queens for a total citywide population of 8,104,079.

Using its housing formula, the city proved to the Census Bureau's satisfaction that, in fact, Manhattan's population grew by 3.5 percent, or about 28,000, since 2000 and that Brooklyn and Queens each grew by more than 1 percent, or 23,000 and 13,000, respectively.

"In Manhattan, we determined not only had the census missed new units, but also conversions," Dr. Salvo said.

Planners found about 5,000 people in apartments there that had been converted from commercial to residential use, conversions that are harder to prove in Brooklyn and Queens because a higher proportion of them are believed to be illegal or, as Dr. Salvo puts it, informal.

According to the Census Bureau's original estimates, 643,000 more people moved out of the city than moved in from elsewhere in the United States between 2000 and 2004, a loss that was offset, in part, by a gain of 431,000 through immigration from abroad and from people relocating from Puerto Rico. Largely because of higher birthrates among immigrants, more births than deaths added nearly 278,000 New Yorkers between 2000 and 2004.

In a city as large and dynamic as New York, pinning down a reasonably precise population number is a tall order, and Mr. Salvo suspects that even his survey missed tens of thousands of residents. How many does he think there really are? "It's probably approaching 8.2 million," he said.

I didn't realize there were that many rocks in New York.