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GOP Senate Majority Repeals Census 2000


A cynic -- or maybe just a careful observer of politics -- might see the last half century of New York's history as one long and varied effort to make sure that the city has not gotten the political clout that it deserves. Starting in the 1950's, (and probably even before) the census routinely undercounted the population of New York. Finally, the 2000 census seems to have counted more accurately. Now, the New York State Senate is in effect repealing the results of the latest census.

The senators are doing this through their plan for redistricting. Though supposedly carried out with public input, incumbents and their staffs actually do the redistricting in old-fashioned backroom deals. The redistricting process, which is required to reflect the shifts in population within the state every ten years, is often compared to making sausage -- meaning, most people would rather not learn all the disgusting stuff that it is made of.

The 2000 census showed a marked increased in population downstate, and a decrease upstate. For almost a year afterward, all official redistricting plans kept the senate at a total of 61 seats, its current number. The problem,from the GOP majority's point of view, was that these plans put the senate at risk of switching over to a Democratic majority. One of the seats would have had to be moved from Republican-responsive upstate to Democrat-happy New York City, and one or two seats in Long Island would have had to change their borders to include someportion of the city.

So, the new plan put forward -- officially by the bi-partisan New York Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment, commonly known as LATFOR, but actually by the staffs of the senate and assembly majority party -- increasedthe senate's size to 62 seats. The new seat was created in New York City. This sounds fair, but, in fact, it represents a very cunning way to dilute New York City's power in the new Senate, and maintain GOP control.

Adding an extra seat meant that virtually all seats upstate and in Long Island remained about as they were in 1992 -- maintaining them, in other words, as Republican strongholds. This also made a few other dirty tricks possible, including destroying the secure senate district of Eric Schneiderman, making him face a primary by an Hispanic candidate in a now more heavily Hispanic district, and putting Noach Dear in a predominantly African-American district.

More egregiously, every single upstate district now has fewer than the average number of people in a district, which is called under populated, while every downstate district is now over populated. For Congressional redistricting, no such deviations are allowed; the plan must reflect the principle of one person, one vote. In other situations, courts generally accept a total deviation of 10 percent from the "ideal" population. The New York State Senate plan has a total deviation of 9.78 percent. Remember, these deviations are not random -- all the districts that have too few people are upstate, while all those that have too many are downstate. The spokesperson for Senator Dean Skelos, the head of the senate's redistricting task force, has defended the population deviations by telling the New York Times: "It's legal, what more do you want?" But this obvious dilution of New York City's political power may not be legal at all, in fact. A pending federal court case will decide this.

Aside from repealing the Census, the GOP majority did some very creative districting in Nassau and Suffolk County and in Westchester and the Bronx. In Nassau and Suffolk, the plan split the black and Hispanic areas into several districts, so that they would not influence the outcome of any election. If they had not done this, minorities would have had a reasonable chance ofelecting a candidate of their choice, but this could also have meant that some of Long Island's current nine GOP Senators would have been re-elected. In the Bronx and Westchester, the plan redrew Senator Velella's district, extending it further into Westchester, and reshaping it as a kind of warped donut (though it was givena more imaginative description in a previous article on redistricting in Gotham Gazette). This was done to corral all the available whites into his district. The hole in Vallela's donut is an African-American area in Mount Vernon and the Bronx attached by a corridor to another African-American area in the Bronx. Both of the standard ways of diluting minority voting strength,which I outlined in a previous column, are on display here -- "cracking" (splitting minorities across several districts) and "packing" (piling them into a just a few districts).

The 2000 census results seemed to mean that New York City would gain influence in the State Senate. Due to careful line drawing, the elusive power seems once again to have slipped away. New York City might well have to wait until the next census to receive its due from New York State politicians. And, if history is a guide, one can predict that every effort will be made to assure that this does not happen.

Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and provides expert testimony on a range of cases, including housing discrimination. The opinions expressed are his alone. 

Changing New York City


The latest data from Census 2000 paints a picture of changing New York City that is stunning, exciting and in some ways disturbing.

There are more foreign-born New Yorkers than at any time since 1910. New York is a better-educated city, but it is also a less English-speaking city. For the affluent and extremely affluent it is a substantially richer city; for the poor and middle ranks, it is a poorer city. Most workers in New York depend on public transit to get to work, and it takes them much more time to get to work than workers elsewhere. During the 1990s, the travel time for workers increased. For renters, it is a somewhat more expensive city to live in that it used to be, but for homeowners, the expense is astronomical. New York City has always been much different from the rest of the state and the nation. In the 1990s, it diverged even more.

Origin and Language

In 1980 about 24 percent of New Yorkers were foreign born (this category does not include Puerto Ricans or those born in other US territories that are not part of the 50 states and the District of Columbia). By 1990, foreign born had reached 28 percent, Now it is 36 percent. In 1910, New York City was 40 percent foreign born. If present trends continue the city may return to those levels before the end of the decade. Those born in Europe and North America account for a smaller fraction of all foreign born even though their total numbers increased, while those born in Asia, and especially Latin America and Africa, are up sharply. Indeed, those born in Latin America now account for 53 percent of the foreign born in the city. They now top 1.5 million, an increase of over 500,000. African-born more than doubled from 42,000 to 92,000. For Asia the growth was about 275,000, and they now account for about 24 percent of the foreign born.

The census also collects information on ancestry, which is a self-report of ethnic identity. The number of Arabs in New York City rose from about 52,000 to 71,000, while the number of Africans went from 53,000 to about 122,000. Most European ancestries declined, while those saying they were "American" went from about 157,000 to 238,000.

Those speaking a language other than English at home went from 40 percent to about 48 percent in the decade, and about one quarter of them report that they do not speak English very well. Despite this, the proportion of adults over 25 who graduated from high school went from 68 to 72 percent, while those with a college degree increased from 23 to 27 percent. Over 25 percent of the population that is from 21 to 64 years old report some disability, while 46 percent of those 65 or over report a disability. This is an increase from 29 percent, but the question is somewhat different than the one used in 1990.

Money and Housing

Some of the most stunning results concern money and housing. In the United States as a whole, median household income increased, while poverty declined slightly. Like most cities in a band beginning in Rhode Island and Connecticut and stretching down to Washington, DC, median income (the income earned by the household in the middle of income distribution) fell in New York City during the 1990s. In New York City it declined from $38,706 to $38,293. (All these figures are adjusted for inflation.) Information on what sort of families and households garnered higher income, and what sort garnered lower income is not yet available. For New York City, the results show that only Manhattan registered strong gains, with an increase from $41,872 to $47,050. All the other boroughs suffered declines. Those in poverty increased in New York City, also bucking a general national trend. However, when one examines those at the higher income brackets one finds that the rich did get richer in the 1990s. Those in Manhattan in the top 20 percent of the income distribution made at least $95,000 in 1990; now they make at least $119,000.

New York is an expensive city to live in. According to these new census results, the proportion of homeowners (about 400,000 of the roughly 3 million households in New York City) who pay more than 35 percent of their income for housing costs soared from about one fifth to well over one quarter during the 1990s. Who exactly is paying such a high proportion of their income to live in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn (counties with among the highest proportion in the United States) will be known later this summer.

For working New Yorkers, getting to work seems to be a particular hassle. New York City contains four of about 12 counties in the United States, where less than half of all workers get to work by automobile. Commuting rose about four minutes for the median worker, to 40 minutes. This means that many New Yorkers spend even more time getting to their job from their very expensive home.

Some point to New York City's rapid growth of immigrants and its decline in median income and link these two trends. Immigrants, they claim, just make less money. Though true in certain respects, it is also the case that other cities with rapidly growing immigrant populations, including Dallas and Houston, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago showed strong income gains (The exceptions were Miami and Los Angeles.) Indeed, looking carefully at the national figures, it seems that counties with high tech industry (Silicon Valley, the Washington State headquarters of Microsoft), with finance (Manhattan, San Francisco and Chicago), or with Casinos (Tunica, Mississippi) did well in the 1990s.

Figuring out the meaning of trends the recent census figures reveal will keep demographers busy for several years, and maybe until Census 2010 is released.

Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981. Since 1993 he has done demographic analyses and consulted for the New York Times. He has provided expert testimony in districting and redistricting, housing discrimination, and numerous other civil rights cases in the metropolitan area and elsewhere. The opinions expressed in Topics are his alone.

The Census Bureau's Bad Estimates


Last year, when the count from the 2000 U.S. Census revealed that there were eight million people living in New York City, many demographers were shocked. The number was almost 600,000 more than they had been led to expect. That is because the United States Census Bureau had been making really bad estimates of the city's population every year for the whole previous decade. The bureau had estimated a growth of about 10,000 in the city each year; the actual growth was closer to 60,000 a year.

This was not a trivial error. The estimates were used by federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development to determine how much federal funds the city would get. When the actual count from the 2000 census proved that the bureau's estimates had been way too low for way too long, it would have been reasonable to assume that an embarrassed bureau would take steps to make sure that the estimates for the next ten years (until the next actual count) would be more accurate.

That is not what has happened, if the first new estimates are any indication. The bureau still does not know how to estimate the population in New York City.

WHY AN ESTIMATE

In Canada and some other industrialized democracies a census -- an actual count of the nation's population -- occurs every five years. In the United States, it is every ten years. Yet, there is a staggering demand for data on population change that cannot wait a decade to be updated. So the U.S. Census Bureau developed a system that tries to estimate the population change by using a mathematical model or formula. The system the bureau developed uses births and deaths (recorded by state agencies), net domestic migration (estimated from people who change their income tax filing location) and net international migration (estimated from a variety of sources, including data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service on new "Green Card" holders). They also use information on the movement of Federal employees, including the armed forces. Using the official population count from the decennial Census, the bureau applies the formula to every county in the United States -- including the five counties that make up New York City.

A FLAWED SYSTEM

It is clear that the system has seriously flaws. The bureau has already acknowledged this by putting changes into place for the national estimates. And, the bureau's population division posted "revised estimates" of previous decade's growth in New York City, taking into account all the growth they missed during the 1990s. http://eire.census.gov/popest/data/counties.php

But then, as astonishing as this sounds, when they issued the estimates for the growth in the city after the 2000 Census, they went back to their old discredited figure -- 10,000 per year. They even declared that the borough of Queens is losing population. If anyone has recently driven around Queens, they know that this cannot be true.

And indeed, recent conversations with Joe Salvo, Director of Population at New York's City Planning Department and Warren Brown, of Cornell, who does demographic analysis for New York State, have convinced me that the census bureau's estimates are simply wrong. Queens did not lose population; New York City probably grew a lot more than the Census Bureau reported. Privately, some demographers at the bureau admit the figures never should have been released.

WRONG BUT OFFICIAL

Nevertheless, whether or not they are wrong, the new estimates are official, continuing to determine some federal funding, and used in calculating various statistics about the city, such as the rate of disease and the rate of crime.

To see just how implausible the estimates are, you can look at the accompanying chart, which presents the new estimates for 2001, the revised estimates for the 1990s, just issued, along with the old ones that came out year to year during that decade. Note how flat the original line was, compared to the line computed using Census count in 2000. Note that after 2000, the curve is once again flat. In short, the Census system is now estimating a growth rate for the 2000s even less than their much-too-low estimates for the 1990s.

In the 1990s, New York City and New York State sued because the census count itself was inaccurate. Only Fernando Ferrer is suing now because of an inaccurate estimate, and it is so far to no avail. It appears that with the current estimate system in place, the bureau will under estimate and under count New York City for years to come. This will cost us greatly in both lost pride and lost billions of dollars. The United States Census Bureau stil l seems unwilling to report New York City's real growth.

Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and provides expert testimony on a range of cases, including housing discrimination. The opinions expressed are his alone.

 

 



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