[pesto]

Originally Posted by Crawford

They lost their challenge because there are only three procedural challenges, and the Census said the NYC challenge didn't fit any of the three.

Again, the Census never claimed that the NYC challenge was wrong, but rather that it wouldn't even be considered because it was outside the scope of challenge.

Basically, NYC claimed that the Census missed a ton of units in immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, and ended up listing these neighborhoods as heavily vacant. The Census basically said that you could only challenge based on procedural mistakes, and NYC didn't provide sufficient evidence.

So, of course, we see the Census is wrong, because the next year, there's a huge population jump with the 2011 estimates. NYC didn't really grow that fast in one year, but the Census-derived decennial base was clearly far too low (unless you really think some NYC neighborhoods are growing faster than Sunbelt sprawlburbs).

The craziest thing is that the neighborhoods that were listed as having the highest vacancy rates in the 2010 Census (immigrant areas in Outer Boroughs) are listed as having the lowest vacancy rates in NYC in the NYC Housing & Vacancy Survey, which is a survey conducted every three years and mostly funded from the U.S. Census!

So the Census decennial results show these areas with highest vacancy, and the Census Housing & Vacancy results show these areas with lowest vacancy. So why the crazy difference? Decennial Census can only use actual confirmed visits, which are tough in immigrant neighborhooods full of undocumented and non-English speaking. Housing & Vacancy survey uses sampling methodology, so there's some measure of imputation.

The bigger problem is that the Census decennial methodology is plain wrong. In short, you will never get an accurate count of folks who don't want to be accurately counted, which is why immigrant and minority heavy cities will continue to be screwed until the methodology changes.

Undoubtedly true. There are districts in Stockton where the population is counted as a couple of hundred but reality is maybe 5 or 10 times that amount ("empty" houses are filled at about 10 each, largely Philippino and Vietnamese). Same is true all over the Central Valley, Bay Area. Makes for a good return on investment while waiting for the market to strengthen.

In LA an "empty" house was found to be used for illegals to stay in when not working, and was occupied at least part of the time by dozens of people.