We Need To Get 45,454.54545454 More People Each Year For The Next 22 Years And The Feds Just Aren’t Making It Easy On Us

New federal guidelines may make it more difficult for New York City to outgrow itself by 2030*:

By counting all sorts of housing, including conversions of questionable legality, New York City reached eight million people for the first time in 2000 — but stricter counting rules for the 2010 Census could leave the city with a loss of population, according to a Queens College demographer.

With the permission of the U.S. Census Bureau, local enumerators in the 2000 Census counted types of housing not previously permitted, and now the federal agency is challenging some of New York City’s reported population.

Andrew Beveridge, professor and demographer at Queens College, suggests that New York City could possibly lose population in the 2010 Census under new and more stringent federal counting rules.

“While more people did live in New York City in 2000 than in 1990, a large share of the growth recorded by the 2000 Census — when the city reached 8 million for the first time — is due to the efforts of the Population Division of the Department of City Planning and its director Joseph Salvo,” Beveridge wrote in the Gotham Gazette.

“Indeed, perhaps half the growth can be attributed to their efforts to include formerly overlooked households in the census and make sure they were counted. Some of these households were never reached, so the data on them came from their neighbors, with the Census Bureau filling in some of the blanks,” Beveridge said.

“Now the Census Bureau headquarters in Washington is challenging the methods and approaches that led to New York City’s surprising growth. In effect, it claims, some of the households counted do not actually exist.”

*For more on 2030, see this and this.

You Can’t Go On Thinking Nothing’s Wrong

With his traffic congestion plan stalled, the mayor makes the unsexy decision to limit city employee parking perks, something that actually might help reduce traffic:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, taking aim at one of the most treasured perks of city employees, announced Thursday that he would reduce by 20 percent the number of parking permits issued to city employees.

The parking placards — given to police officers, teachers and a wide array of city agencies, including the Department for the Aging and the Tax Commission — have long been a source of frustration for drivers and residents in some parts of the city. Not only do those who have them use up parking spaces, but some employees have abused the privilege by double parking or parking illegally in places normally off-limits, like sidewalks and bus stops.

The city cannot even say for certain how many of the permits are in use, because they have been given out by multiple agencies with no central accounting. The city estimates it has distributed about 70,000 placards, but federal and state agencies have issued thousands of their own.

. . .

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler said the changes were meant to complement the mayor’s push for a congestion pricing plan, which aims to reduce traffic by charging drivers who take their cars into the busiest parts of Manhattan. That plan is being evaluated by a state commission that is studying traffic congestion in Manhattan. Mr. Skyler said a reduction in parking placards is also meant to ease a dearth of parking spaces in areas like Lower Manhattan, where a large number of government workers use the permits to park.

“We felt that 20 percent would be substantial enough to improve parking conditions for residents without impairing agencies’ abilities to operate,” Mr. Skyler said.

“We’re trying to find the right balance between city employees that have a job to do and city residents and people, either who work here or who are frequenting businesses here,” he said. “It’s New York City, and space is at a premium.”

Paul J. Browne, a Police Department spokesman, said the department has issued about 8,000 placards for use by officers on official business and an additional 6,000 placards to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and district attorneys offices in New York City. He was unable to say how many permits had been issued to police officers enabling them to park their private cars near precinct houses during their work shifts, but the number would appear to be in the thousands. He said that about 15,500 officers are assigned to precincts around the city.

Mr. Browne said that the department’s contracts with the police unions contain “general language that talks about making efforts to provide parking,” but still gave officials leeway to reduce the number of permits.

Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the agency had 183 placards for use on official business. But she said that the department itself had issued “tens of thousands” of permits to teachers and school staff members. Those permits allow department employees to park on the street in areas reserved for them during school hours.

So Is The One Million New People By 2030 Also A Matter Of “Art And Not Science”?

New York City — always cooking the books:

Jeffrey A. Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, the company that organizes the ball drop in coordination with the Times Square Alliance, estimated that Monday night’s crowd totaled at least one million people.

“I’ve been doing this now for 13 years,” he said. “I’m in the TV truck with our cameras. We can see people from 43rd Street to Central Park on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.” Monday’s crowd was swelled by the mild weather, he said.

Mr. Straus said that for many years the police shared its estimates with the organizers. The last time the police provided a number was Dec. 31, 2000, he said, when the estimate was also one million people.

Other estimates in recent years have been much lower. In most years in the late 1990s, newspaper accounts tended to cite figures of around 500,000.

That is fairly consistent with the numbers issued by the Police Department when it still provided crowd estimates. A chart printed in The New York Times in 1993 showed that from 1986 to 1991, police estimates of Times Square attendance on New Year’s Eve ranged from about 300,000 to about 600,000.

The one major exception was Dec. 31, 1999, for the countdown to 2000. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, said that the crowd was “pushing two million.”

That prompted an analysis by The Times, which found reason for skepticism.

The crowd is penned behind metal barriers on Broadway and Seventh Avenue on the blocks north of 42nd Street, with a lane about 10 feet wide kept clear on the street. That means there is a fair amount of open space.

The Times calculated the total surface area on Seventh Avenue and Broadway, including the street and sidewalk, from Central Park South to 34th Street (where many people in 1999 watched the ball drop on large television screens).

Using a measurement of two square feet per person, which has long been standard in estimating crowd sizes, the analysis determined that the total capacity of the viewing area that year was approximately 430,000 people. Adding some additional capacity to account for spillover onto side streets, the analysis determined that there was room for about 700,000 people — during what was certainly the most ballyhooed celebration in the history of the Times Square event.

This year’s crowd covered less area, however, than that throng. It extended from Central Park South only to 42nd Street, along Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Mr. Browne said, with some additional crowds in Central Park and along the side streets.

. . .

Mr. Straus, the event organizer, acknowledged that calculating the number of people packed into Times Square on New Year’s Eve can feel a little like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar.

“It’s an art, not a science,” he said. “And at the end of the day, does it really matter? It’s a lot of people.”

Backstory: Future Shock: One Miiilllllion People!

A-Rod The Slumlord

Sorry, A-Rod the “landlord caricature”:

Past a psychic’s storefront and coin laundry on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Tampa, Fla., a sign reading “We [heart] Our Residents” is planted beside manicured shrubs and an iron gate with a fresh coat at the entrance of Newport Riverside apartments.

The paint is camouflage for the mottled backside of the complex, where an exhausted appliance sits on a porch, cardboard is taped over broken window panes and missing spindles give rickety banisters the look of a snaggletooth smile.

Some residents here tell tales of roaches overtaking kitchen cabinets in a bumper-to-bumper crawl to the corn flakes, of carpets stained in the 1990s and quick-trigger evictions.

“My mom comes here and she ain’t no rich person, but she thinks I live in the projects,” said Miguel Ruiz as he sat on the second-floor landing of Building 2-A on a recent Sunday afternoon. “She’s scared to come over here, for real.”

As Ruiz spoke, he pulled a boy named Elijah from a gap in the railing that opened when yet another piece of the banister rattled loose and fell to the ground.

“See, stuff like that, with kids around, it’s messed up here,” Ruiz said, adding, “Honestly, I was raised in a ghetto and I was brought up a little better than this.”

This is one of six apartment complexes in the Tampa area, and one of at least 16 nationwide, that Rodriguez owns and operates as the chief executive of Newport Property Ventures.

An examination of his high-rolling corporate side, as well as a glossy A-Rod Family Foundation short on largess, reveals a portrait of Rodriguez as a player about to enter Yankee Take II solely for business purposes, primarily as a branding tool. He emerges as an obsessive pursuer of cold, hard numbers on and off the bases, with serially disingenuous nods to his ever-challenged image.

A-Rod isn’t exactly a slumlord — some renters interviewed at his other properties had milder complaints — but he has become a landlord caricature among dwellers who hold him accountable for, say, the stack of molding mattresses by the dumpster at Newport Villas on MacDill Avenue.

Spitzer The Ankle Byter . . .

Elliot Spitzer learns the hard way that executive experience is not at all like the “rollicking discussions” he once enjoyed as a youth around his parents’ dinner table. Less than a day — or if you believe the Sun, just hours — after details emerge about the governor’s proposed Amazon tax, he clumsily retreats:

In a second major policy reversal in less than a day, Governor Spitzer is backing down from a plan to require Amazon.com and other online retailers to charge state and local sales taxes on all purchases from New York.

Yesterday, just hours after The New York Sun reported on the new revenue collection scheme, the Spitzer administration announced that it was burying it for the time being — at least until after the Christmas shopping season. The move saved New York City shoppers from having to pay an additional 8.375% on many Amazon.com goods.

“Governor Spitzer believes that now is not the right time to be increasing sales taxes on New Yorkers,” Mr. Spitzer’s budget director, Paul Francis, said in a statement. “He has directed the Department of Tax and Finance to pull back its interpretation that would require some Internet retailers that do not collect sales tax to do so.”

The turnabout came just hours after Mr. Spitzer said he was dropping his plan to allow illegal immigrants in New York to obtain driver’s licenses.

In this latest instance, Mr. Spitzer wasted little time before pulling the plug on another controversial policy, aborting it before it threatened to snowball into a distraction for his administration.

And do you really believe this part?

Mr. Francis, in an interview, said the governor was unaware of the new tax policy, which the tax department quietly issued with a memorandum on Friday. It was supposed to go into effect next month, in time for the holiday shopping rush.

“The governor really wasn’t aware of this. My focus is to raise revenue, and the governor has a broader perspective,” Mr. Francis said. “It’s a big government, and in hindsight, we probably should have made sure he focused on it. It’s one of those things, so you live and learn.”

And a new political axiom is born: if there’s one thing the netroots hate, it’s taxing crap they buy on Amazon (and all for a lousy $100 million . . . that’s somehow using political capital wisely?).