Upon further review, Boston’s population is growing. Maybe.
One of Boston’s storylines over the past few years has been the city’s shrinking population. According to United States Census Bureau estimates, the population shrank from 589,000 in 2000 to 559,000 in 2005. Today, Boston Globe reporters Michael Levenson and Yvonne Abraham reports that the Census has revised its estimate for Boston to 596,638 after the city provided the government agency with “new data demonstrating that thousands of new housing units had been built in the city in recent years.”
(Also according to the Globe reporters, “Mayor Thomas M. Menino hailed the new tally as a psychic boost for” Boston. A psychic boost? Is the Mayor one of my brother’s clients?)
That’s quite a revision, and it’ll be interesting to see if the American Community Survey for Boston will also be revised. Not to mention Suffolk County’s population estimate. The Census estimate and Community Surveys have shown some odd results as I pointed out last August. Among some of the oddities I mentioned was the fact that Boston’s group quarter population was larger than the county’s. Another strange thing was that the Communiy Survey showed surprisingly slow growth of the number of immigrants in the city. The Globe report suggests that many of the previously uncounted (or rather, unestimated) Bostonians in fact are immigrants.
As I wrote in yet another comment on population estimates last August: “Remember, it’s all estimates based on assumptions and measurements` that may or may not be correct.”
I’ll leave you with one more thing from last August: “[O]ne has to ask oneself why one is paying taxes to get such strange data?”
As I’m writing this the Census Bureau has yet to update Boston’s population data on its website.
(News of revised estimate via Universal Hub)
Here’s an interesting aside: Are the 37,000 newly estimated Bostonians enough to put Boston back in the top 5 of Nielsen markets? The Boston market is only a little over 11,000 household behind the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose market. Assuming that 94% of the 37,000 live in households (as opposed to group quarters), and assuming 2.31 people per household (the Boston average in the 2000 Census), the 37,000 should translate to 15,000 households.
Back for more: So the Census estimate was off by about 5% on Boston’s population. If the the agency is equally off on America’s population in general, it’s understimating it by 15 million people. Immigration restrictionists have long complained that the Census indeed consistently underestimates the number of people in America, especially the number of illegal aliens. The Census Bureau estimates there are 9 million illegal aliens in America, while other observers believe there are as many as 20 million. The Boston debacle sure as heck doesn’t help the Bureau’s case.
Is it mean-spirited to point out that the Bureau’s slogan is “Helping you make informed decisions”?
Actually, the more I’m thinking about this debacle, the more annoyed I get. Boston isn’t some backwater town that’s barely on the Bureau’s radar. Boston is home of one of the Bureau’s 12 regional offices. How can it possibly be that the underestimate of Boston’s population is because of faulty data rather than faulty methodology? And if the problem is the data, why are we to believe that the data for Boston was exceptionally bad? It’s time for Congress to grill the Bureau heads.
