We Need To Get 45,454.54545454 More People Each Year For The Next 22 Years And The Feds Just Aren’t Making It Easy On Us

New federal guidelines may make it more difficult for New York City to outgrow itself by 2030*:

By counting all sorts of housing, including conversions of questionable legality, New York City reached eight million people for the first time in 2000 — but stricter counting rules for the 2010 Census could leave the city with a loss of population, according to a Queens College demographer.

With the permission of the U.S. Census Bureau, local enumerators in the 2000 Census counted types of housing not previously permitted, and now the federal agency is challenging some of New York City’s reported population.

Andrew Beveridge, professor and demographer at Queens College, suggests that New York City could possibly lose population in the 2010 Census under new and more stringent federal counting rules.

“While more people did live in New York City in 2000 than in 1990, a large share of the growth recorded by the 2000 Census — when the city reached 8 million for the first time — is due to the efforts of the Population Division of the Department of City Planning and its director Joseph Salvo,” Beveridge wrote in the Gotham Gazette.

“Indeed, perhaps half the growth can be attributed to their efforts to include formerly overlooked households in the census and make sure they were counted. Some of these households were never reached, so the data on them came from their neighbors, with the Census Bureau filling in some of the blanks,” Beveridge said.

“Now the Census Bureau headquarters in Washington is challenging the methods and approaches that led to New York City’s surprising growth. In effect, it claims, some of the households counted do not actually exist.”

*For more on 2030, see this and this.