NYC files for correction to 2010 census count

New York City isn’t down for the count.

Mayor Bloomberg filed a formal challenge Wednesday of the 2010 Census results, which counted 8.175 million people in the Big Apple, more than 216,700 fewer than was estimated in 2009.

The mayor blames faulty Census-taking that he says mistakenly marked housing units as vacant in the Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Astoria and Jackson Heights sections of Queens – nabes known for their active immigrant populations.

“It is our expectation that the city’s population could increase by tens of thousands of New Yorkers if the errors from those two Census offices alone were corrected,” Bloomberg wrote in a letter to Census Bureau Director Robert Groves.

According to census figures, Queens in the past decade grew by less than 1 percent, while Brooklyn grew by 1.6 percent.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) warned that the city could lose out on valuable federal funding if its population isn’t properly accounted for.

The Census Bureau through its official “Count Question Resolution Program” must review related documentation and correct figures determined to be wrong.