CENSUS FROM PAGE 1
These calculations are approximate and would change if Congress were to cut spending or change funding formulas. Albany has considerable discretion in distributing federal grants to cities. But considering how New York struggles to balance its $100 billion budget while tax collections from hotels, office buildings and other formerly reliable sources are under pressure, the census-fueled federal funding amounts to trillions of pennies from heaven.
The Plan “New York was a big winner from the census,” said Andrew Reamer, a census expert at George Washington University’s GW Institute of
when the White House made no secret of its desire to undercount urban populations. “New York City has been on the front lines of the resistance against the Trump administration, and ensuring every New Yorker gets counted is central to that fight,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said, when introducing his plan to leave no child or adult behind. “No matter how hard the federal government tries to silence our diverse voices, we still stand up and be counted.” It had been understood for years that New York’s population was higher than reported. Barbara Denham, an economist who closely tracks real estate development, said that about a decade ago she sent the city a file showing more than 8,000 apartments were built on the Upper West Side between 2000 and 2010. But the census showed fewer than 200. “It was absurd,” said Denham, who works at Oxford Economics. This time, after examining property-tax records and other sources, the city submitted 143,000 addresses from newly constructed buildings to the U.S. Census Bureau. The city shared 122,000 previously unknown addresses, and 99.9% were accepted. Altogether, 7% of New York’s hous-
“THEY INVESTED A LOT OF MONEY IN THE COUNT AND NOW COMES THE BENEFITS” Public Policy. “They invested a lot of money in the count and now comes the benefits.” The trip to bountiful began in January 2020, when the city allocated $40 million to count residents. It enlisted the help of 160 community organizations to find them at a time
WHAT’S AT STAKE? CONGRESS SETS A BUDGET EVERY YEAR, but how the money gets divided up is determined in many cases by census data. In 2016 the state of New York received $73 billion worth of federal grants based on the 2010 census. About half was for Medicaid and the rest distributed across more than 50 other programs, including Title I allocations to educate poor children, providing food and rental assistance for urban and rural residents, and training workers for jobs. Below are some examples of federal assistance sent to New York City in 2017. Now that the city has counted more people, it stands to collect a bigger piece of the pie.
$779 MILLION $150 MILLION $57 MILLION Title I allocations
Community development block grants
Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act allocation
SOURCE:Project on Government Oversight, GW Institute of Public Policy
ing stock was reported to the Census Bureau for the first time. The city estimates this legwork, combined with media campaigns, resulted in counting 500,000 residents who otherwise might have been missed.
The Payoff With a population now at 8.8 million, the city is in line for higher federal allocations for scores of programs, including affordable housing, Medicare prescription-drug coverage and highway construction. Ultimately, that money cycles into neighborhoods and goes to pharmacies, landlords and contractors.
But the big-ticket item is always Medicaid. Because New York is a prosperous state, the federal government reimburses it for only half its Medicaid costs, which clocked in at $35 billion in 2016. Reimbursement rates are determined by dividing per capita income over population, and it’s unlikely even an 8% jump in population is sufficient to lower New York’s per capita income enough to compel Uncle Sam to kick in more. The city, however, does stand to collect additional funding for preventive health block grants, maternal and child health block grants, and food stamps. “Overall, if you have a greater
population, at least some of the funding is going to increase,” said Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at City University of New York’s School of Public Health. The one bit of unfortunate news is that every additional dollar for New Yorkers is one less dollar for residents of a place that didn’t try as hard to count its people. Reamer said Texas committed no resources to census outreach and he’s heard from city officials there who are “freaking out” because their region’s slice of the pie will shrink. “If you undercount your people, you lose share,” Reamer said. “This is a zero-sum game.” ■
REAL ESTATE
BY EDDIE SMALL
N
ew York City isn’t dead, but some say its housing market remains lifeless. Despite the city defying predictions of its decline and adding more than half a million people since 2010, the number of housing units added in the five boroughs has not kept up with population growth. The city grew by about 630,000 from 2010 to 2020, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census. But the number of housing units in the five boroughs increased by only 206,000 during that same period, according to figures from the Department of City Planning. Although the population increase was widely viewed as a positive, multiple real estate groups cit-
Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said in a statement. “The widening gap between the city’s population growth and new housing units demonstrates the urgent need for state and city elected officials to address this serious problem by focusing on housing policies that leverage the power of public- and private-sector collaboration and are driven by data rather than ideology.”
The wrong direction New York was already dealing with a housing shortage before 2010, and things have been moving in the wrong direction since then, said Jolie Milstein, president and CEO of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing. Although the number of empty apartments in the city went up during the pandemic, demand for affordable units specifically has consistently outpaced supply, she said. “We have to do better,” Milstein said. “We know from the extremely low or nonexistent vacancy rates in affordable housing and how oversubscribed the lotteries are for any new unit that comes online that we have to do better.” Department of City Planning spokeswoman Melissa Grace did not dispute the need for more affordable housing but defended the
“OF COURSE WE’VE GOT TO CONTINUE FINDING WAYS TO KEEP THE CITY ACCESSIBLE” ed the discrepancy between the two figures as proof that the city needs to focus more on growing its housing supply. “There can no longer be any serious debate about whether New York City needs to rapidly and significantly increase the production of new housing, especially below-market-rate housing,” Jim
pace at which the city has been producing housing in recent years. “New York City’s population is breaking records, and our housing production has reached levels we haven’t seen since the 1960s,” she said in a statement, “but we need to continue producing housing—and especially affordable housing— across all of our neighborhoods if we are going to continue to make America’s biggest city fairer and more equitable.” Aaron Carr, founder and executive director of Housing Rights Initiative, a nonprofit housing watchdog group, emphasized that producing more housing is essential to a growing metropolis. “Although the market won’t be able to provide affordable housing for low-income and working-class families on its own, which is why we need ample social housing and rental assistance, it’s still important for construction to keep pace with population growth to ensure that our housing crisis doesn’t turn into a housing apocalypse,” he said. Mayor Bill de Blasio has made building and preserving affordable housing one of the central goals of his administration. The city constructed and maintained 28,310 affordable housing units during fiscal 2021 and remains on track to build and preserve 200,000 units by the end of his administration and 300,000 by 2026, officials announced in late July. More housing units should come
BLOOMBERG
The city’s population is booming—but its housing stock is struggling to keep up with the pace
online soon, in part because of rezonings the city has completed or is on pace to complete before the end of the year, the administration said. Officials are trying to push through a rezoning in Gowanus that could bring roughly 8,000 apartments to the neighborhood and a rezoning in SoHo that could bring roughly 3,500 apartments to the neighborhood, although both have faced strong community opposition. The de Blasio administration has fulfilled “the most ambitious housing plan ever made,” City Hall spokesman Mitch Schwartz said. “As the city continues to grow, of course we’ve got to continue finding ways to keep it accessible. That’s what building a recovery for
all of us is all about.”
Still a draw The city’s population increase in the past decade demonstrates that people still want to live in New York, but the lower housing numbers could make it hard for them to fulfill that desire, said Lou Coletti, president of the Building and Trades Employers’ Association. “It’s encouraging that the city continues to grow in population," he said. "I think that’s a great sign for the future, showing that people want to live here. As to the lagging housing numbers, that’s very disconcerting because it’s obviously one of the most important factors in getting people to stay here.” ■
22 | CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS | August 23, 2021
P022_CN_20210823.indd 22
8/20/21 4:31 PM
