Recession fingered in lower LI census numbers

Lower-than-expected 2010 Census population numbers for Long Island and New York City are recession-related, the Long Island Regional Planning Council was told Tuesday.

The official census counts were about 2 percent below the Census Bureau's own estimates, but research by the council's chief planner found that's largely due to a rise in housing vacancies and a dip in immigration.

Seth Forman said the housing vacancy rate on Long Island has increased slightly since 2000, creating 17,000 additional vacant units in Suffolk and slightly more than 9,000 in Nassau.

That would cause a loss of roughly 38,500 people, Forman said, assuming that half of the people moving out leave the area. His analysis used a median household size of almost three people.

Another factor, he said, was foreclosure filings in the two counties, which rose from 6,534 in 2006 to a high of 13,646 in 2009, before declining slightly in 2010 to 13,105.

Forman's research indicates that the recession also slowed the pace of immigration, particularly among undocumented immigrants, whom he described as "highly mobile" -- leaving areas when jobs dry up.

Using data from the Department of Homeland Security, Forman said Long Island's "unauthorized population" declined by an estimated 10,583 people between 2007 and 2009.

"The conclusion to be drawn," he wrote in his analysis, "is that the economic downturn of 2007 to 2010 greatly reduced the ability of the most reliable population estimates to capture the rapid and steep population movements among 'hard to count' populations."

The bureau's 2009 population estimates for Long Island wound up being 1.5 percent higher than the 2,832,882 population counted by the 2010 Census. For New York City, the population estimate was 2.7 percent higher than the census count of 8,175,133.

The numbers are important because the distribution of federal and state aid is affected in part by municipalities' population numbers. New York City has challenged its census numbers as being too low.