The issue is not the census not trying to count people or people pretending that uncounted people are not there, it's people not wanting to be counted, which then shortchanges a neighborhood, including services relied upon by immigrants. as I remember it, the Census Bureau had an unsuccessful outreach effort to assure illegal immigrants that responding to the census would not compromise their status.
NYT
Invoking the Census Bureau’s own data and other evidence, New York City officials argued on Wednesday that the 2010 count had overlooked at least 50,000 residents of Brooklyn and Queens living in homes and apartments that the bureau incorrectly concluded were vacant.
If they had been counted, they would have pushed the city’s official population to more than 8.2 million, the Bloomberg administration said in submitting its formal challenge to the Census Bureau.
Though the city maintains that the bureau committed counting errors across the city, its challenge focuses on four neighborhoods, Astoria and Jackson Heights in Queens and Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, which the Bloomberg administration described as among New York’s most vibrant and where it said the undercount was the greatest.
The population count released by the Census Bureau in March said that the city had grown by 166,855 people, to 8,175,133, since 2000 — a rate of 2.1 percent, compared with 9.4 percent during the 1990s. City demographers maintain that while the recession and the aftermath of 9/11 slowed growth in the last decade, New York is now home to at least 8.3 million people.
While any adjustment would come too late to affect the reapportionment of Congressional districts based on the official census count, more than bragging rights are at stake. A higher count could mean more federal aid in categories apportioned by population and a bigger base from which subsequent annual population estimates issued by the Census Bureau are computed until the next census in 2020.
“I recognize that enumerating the population of New York City is a Herculean and unenviable challenge, given the city’s large, diverse and dense population, which lives primarily in difficult to count housing arrangements,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a letter to Robert M. Groves, the director of the Census Bureau.
But armed with detailed evidence from demographers in the city’s Planning Department, the mayor insisted that local census workers responsible for Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Astoria and Jackson Heights had “erroneously classified large numbers of housing units as vacant.”
“Numerous data sources cited in our submission refute the prevalence of widespread vacant housing units in those areas, which are and continue to be among our most stable, growing and vibrant neighborhoods,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote. “This disproportionate concentration of vacancy suggests that some aspect of the census enumeration went awry in these two offices, with likely processing errors that may have hindered the proper reporting, compilation, and tabulation of census results.”
The city unsuccessfully filed a formal challenge to the census count in 1990. Five years ago, city demographers persuaded the Census Bureau to raise its July 1, 2005, estimate by 160,000 — including 64,000 found by the Planning Department — to 8.2 million. The 2009 American Community Survey from the Census Bureau placed the population estimate at 8,391,881.
The census’s official 2010 count also seemed curious because while it found 166,000 more New Yorkers than in 2000, the number of homes and apartments in the city had increased since then by 170,000.
“Immediately, you’re suspicious,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division at the Planning Department.
By the official count, the population of Queens rose by only 1,343, or 0.1 percent, from 2000 to 2010; Brooklyn’s rose by 39,374, or 1.6 percent. Vacancies soared by 214 percent in southern Brooklyn and by 174 percent in northwestern Queens, well above the citywide average. City officials concluded that neither the bureau’s earlier American Community Survey nor its separate Housing and Vacancy Survey supported the 2010 count. Nor did the pace of new construction and foreclosures, and nor did average rents, which should have declined if more apartments were vacant.
The city’s claim of an undercount will be examined at the Census Bureau headquarters and could take months to resolve. If the claim is rejected, said Marc LaVorgna, a mayoral spokesman, all options, including legal action, “remain on the table.”
Since June, 48 localities have filed challenges under the bureau’s Count Question Resolution Program, which considers questions of misplaced boundaries and, in the case of New York City’s complaint, of coverage where housing units were excluded because of processing errors. Only one count has been adjusted so far, in Maharishi Vedic City, a community in southeastern Iowa founded by followers of the Transcendental Meditation movement, where the count was increased from 259 people to 1,294 to reflect misplaced housing
