Vacant units may be census ‘processing issue’

The 2010 Census reported a surge in vacant apartments in southern Brooklyn and Queens, but officials now say the increase may be due to errors in the count. Tony Farthing, the New York regional director of the U.S. Census Bureau, said at a City Council hearing that the vacancies may be due to “more of a processing issue and not so much the population count,” Crain’s reported. The city is mounting a challenge to the 2010 Census, hoping to increase the city’s total population by around 80,000 more than official tally of 8.175 million. Their investigation will concentrate on a number of unexplained vacant apartments in southern Brooklyn and Queens. “What got us alarmed is huge increases of 66 percent in Brooklyn and 59 percent in Queens,” Joseph Salvo, director of the Department of City Planning’s Population Division, told the council’s community development committee at the hearing. “We’re looking at all the possible reasons that might explain this and we can’t find one in our data.” [Crain’s]