Mayor Bloomberg challenges Brooklyn, Queens census results

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has submitted an official challenge to New York City’s 2010 census results to the U.S. Census Bureau, according to a letter released by the mayor’s office today. In the letter to Census Bureau director Robert Groves, Bloomberg states that the city believes housing units in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst as well as in Astoria and Jackson Heights were erroneously counted as vacant. Rather, Bloomberg writes, data shows those neighborhoods are growing and vibrant parts of the city.

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The city expects the official population count to increase by tens of thousands if a correction takes place, according to the letter. The letter also states that other areas of the city were miscounted, although far less substantially. The census data impacts how much money the city receives through Federal aid programs. Bloomberg and many other city officials had raised objections to the data when its results were first released in March. The census had found that Brooklyn’s population grew by just 1.6 percent, while Queens’ population only grew by 0.1 percent. — Miranda Neubauer