See CENSUS on

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.

“New York was a big winner from the census,” said Andrew Reamer, a census expert at George Washington University’s GW Institute of

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 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 housing 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.

“THEY INVESTED A LOT OF MONEY IN THE COUNt AND NOW COMES THE BENEFItS”

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

Title I allocations

$150 MILLION

Community development block grants

SOURCE:Project on Government Oversight, GW Institute of Public Policy

$57 MILLION

Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act allocation

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

The city’s population is booming—but its housing stock is struggling to keep up with the pace

BY EDDIE SMALL

New 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-

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 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 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 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.” “OF COURSE WE’VE gOt tO CONTINUE FINDINg WAYS TO KEEP THE CITY ACCESSIBLE”

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.” ■

TOMNITZ began microbrewing in his dorm room at Boston College.

Local craft brewery joins the hard seltzer party

Five Boroughs Brewing’s long-term strategy lies in cultivating a diverse product mix

BY GABRIEL POBLETE

Back in 2011, before Five Boroughs Brewing became a bona de brewery servicing the tristate area, company co-founder Blake Tomnitz was trying his hand at microbrewing with his roommates in their Boston College dorm room. e college ended up con scating their equipment, and they appeared before a disciplinary board. ey were let o the hook with the understanding that microbrewing had no place on campus. But for Tomnitz, the experience laid the foundation for Five Boroughs, which he, the company’s CEO, o cially founded in 2017 with COO Kevin O’Donnell.

A citywide question

Tomnitz met O’Donnell while working on Wall Street, and the pair began visiting local breweries together. Bronx Brewery had just gotten started, and Brooklyn Brewery’s status had already been cemented. But Tomnitz and O’Donnell had a question in mind: What was the beer for all of New York City?

After not nding a straight answer, they decided to build something that represented all ve boroughs. Beginning in early 2015, they started brewing in the Bronx and then at a friend’s place in the Rockaways, carting around their equipment. As they scaled up, they looked for industrial real estate, eventually landing on their current 15,000-square-foot location in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Today Five Boroughs o ers an array of craft beers. At the core of the company’s guiding principles, Tomnitz said, is making good beer accessible and inclusive.

“We wanted to bring beer to the masses,” he said. “It didn’t matter if it was your rst craft beer or you’re a craft beer connoisseur.”

Five Boroughs o ers many of the varieties one would expect to nd when visiting a brewery, including a pilsner, a hoppy lager and several India pale ales including Gridlock Hazy and Tiny Juicy. But Tomnitz said that early on in the company’s trajectory, the team decided it would diversify its products with other beverages.

Tomnitz became familiar with the Samuel Adams brand while in college, describing it as the poster child for craft beer. He said he admired the brand’s model and noted that its parent company, Boston Beer, had other well-known alcoholic beverage brands under its umbrella, including Twisted tea, Angry Orchard hard cider and trendy Truly hard seltzer. ree months ago Five Boroughs joined in on the spiked seltzer frenzy by premiering Party Water. It’s available at the Five Boroughs taproom in Sunset Park as well as at grocery stores, restaurants, bars and bodegas across the area. It also can be shipped statewide. “With Party Water, we wanted something that was kind of scalable beyond the tristate area,” Tomnitz said. In terms of picking the name, he added, “We wanted something kind of fun and tongue-in-cheek, where it was almost like a literal expression of the product.”

Take one down, pass it around

In 2019 Five Boroughs sold 10,000 barrels of beer. Last year, amid the pandemic, Tomnitz said, that dropped to about 7,500 barrels. With things opening up again, the company is hoping to get to 12,000 barrels this year.

Five Boroughs’ biggest hurdle has been maneuvering through government red tape to obtain federal and state permits against a clock that started ticking the moment it signed its Sunset Park lease, Tomnitz said.

Additionally, coming to an agreement with distributors has been a signi cant challenge, he said, because those contracts are essentially for perpetuity.

“Aligning all these processes together— construction, federal approval, state approval and then distribution negotiation—that is quite an art form,” he said.

12K NUMBER of barrels of beer Five Boroughs is projecting to sell this year

Now, as Five Boroughs builds its brand, he said, it’s looking at other product areas including nonalcoholic beverages, ready-todrink cocktails and CBD-infused o erings. e necessity of a diverse product mix has been one of the team’s key takeaways from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We’re coming up on our four-year anniversary—which is pretty exciting, especially after the last year and a half,” Tomnitz said. “But we’re very fortunate.”

As Five Boroughs continues to explore ways to expand, Tomnitz recognizes how far the brand has come.

“I think to be able to look back and take something that was really kind of a side passion and hobby and be able to materialize that and turn it into something tangible,” he said, “it's still kind of a pinch-me moment.” ■

FOCAL POINTS

FOUNDED 2017 COMPANY LEADERSHIP Blake Tomnitz, co-founder and CEO; Kevin O’Donnell, co-founder and COO EMPLOYEES Around 25 BY THE NUMBERS The company sold 10,000 barrels of beer in 2019. Last year it sold between 7,000 and 8,000. GROWTH STRATEGY The company recently premiered Party Water, a hard seltzer line. Five Boroughs is eyeing other beverage offerings including ones infused with CBD. WEBSITE veboroughs.com