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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. One thing we haven't talked about yet on this show, as we've been consumed so much by the breaking Afghanistan news and the Cuomo resignation and Haiti, and COVID news, is the numbers that came out last week from the 2020 census. They are really interesting both in terms of who we are as a region and as a nation compared to 2010 and with the implications for redistricting, therefore who holds power in Congress and local governments.

One thing you probably know in general is if the United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, but some of the particulars are really interesting here. The percentage of people identifying as white was 58% in this census nationwide that compared to 69%, 20 years ago. The reason that'll keep shrinking, one reason, is that white people are having fewer babies than other groups, therefore, the average age of white Americans is older and they aren't being replaced as much when they die.

According to the New York Times write-up of the census, the median age of white Americans is 44. For Hispanics, it's 30. For people under 18, whites are now only right around 50%. There's that change growing up. Another reason for the statistical decline, according to The Times is that the census now allows people to choose mixed race as an option and that's the fastest-growing racial category as people intermarry and have kids together.

Big cities like New York and LA gain population, former industrial smaller cities like Detroit and Youngstown continue to shrink. Rural areas continue to lose people. As the country becomes older on average retirement destinations grew in size, says The Times. Phoenix replaced Philadelphia, for example, as the fifth biggest city.

Locally, here's one thing that might surprise you, New Jersey is now more diverse than New York. According to the northjersey.com write-up of the census, 55% of New Jerseyans identified as white, which is a lower percentage than in New York State. The three largest cities in the state, Newark, Jersey City, and Patterson each grew by around 10%. The Lakewood area grew by more than 40%.

In New York City, for all the talk of people leaving during the pandemic, the city's population had a record high last year of 8.8 million people. According to the Gothamist write-up of census numbers, one quirky reason, an asterisk you might say, is that the census count was so thorough that there were more than a quarter of a million addresses filing census forms more than in the past, that could account for half a million people right there who were missed in past census counts. Also, outreach to immigrants to get counted, including undocumented immigrants who often shy away from filling out census forms seems to have been very successful in the effort to get a full and accurate New York City count.

Long Island's population grew by 3% according to Newsday and the share of people of color surged from 31% to 40% of Long Islanders compared to a decade ago. Long Island isn't 1950s Levittown anymore, to be sure. We knew that, but even more so. Hamstead, Riverhead, and East Hampton saw some of the biggest total population gains. North of the city, Westchester County grew by around 6% and now has more than a million people according to loha.com.

Rockland county grew to around 338,000 people. Just for a little perspective on the region, Westchester is three times the size of Rockland in population. Westchester, Rockland and New York State overall are becoming more diverse, but are still majority white. Unlike, just as a footnote, California, which now has just 35% of people who identified as white and non-Hispanic, 39% of Californians identified as Hispanic on the census, according to the New York Times.

Again, one thing to remember, redistricting and its ugly cousin, gerrymandering, always follow the census. We'll talk about some of this now, especially as it pertains to New York City with Gothamist news editor, David Cruz. Hey, David, welcome back to the show.

David Cruz: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me on. I share your enthusiasm in breaking down all these numbers.

Brian Lehrer: It really paints a picture of who we are. Let me start with one step. The number of whites and Blacks in the city both went down compared to 2010 I see. Is that total whites and total Blacks less than 10 years ago, or just a decline in their percentages?

David Cruz: It's actually both. The white population and Black population both dropped from a percentage and numerical standpoint, but Black New Yorkers dropped the most by 4.5%, which translates to about 84,000 fewer Black New Yorkers in the city, which is definitely a lot more than the 0.1% population drop for whites, which really just amounted to a couple thousand less than in 2010.

Between Black and white New Yorkers, there's even a greater chasm now these days. There are more than 940,000 white New Yorkers than Black New Yorkers. That compares to 861,000 in 2010. To your point, yes, the city is more diverse, but there are these major gaps between these two races, which I feel have deepened.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have data on whether a lot of Black New Yorkers moved out of the city to other places, or whether it just represents a declining birth rate, or what accounts for that drop?

David Cruz: No one can essentially say 100%, what is accounting for this. Some experts that I've spoken to point to the affordability in New York City, whether or not Black New Yorkers can afford higher rent or whether or not people are actually retiring and moving on to different parts of the country. We have seen that sometimes, there's been increases in other parts of the country, but with respect to the Black population, others have also pointed out to the devastation brought by COVID-19, which was really devastating for Black communities.

Remember, the count had taken place during the height of the pandemic, or at least it was in the lead-up to it, so that should also be taken into account when compiling these numbers.

Brian Lehrer: The fastest growing population group by large, racial categories over the last decade in the city was Asian New Yorkers. Can you give us some of the numbers for them?

David Cruz: Asian New Yorkers, they jumped 33.6%. They went from just over a million in 2010 to about 1.3 million in 2020. A lot of the folks that I spoke to say that that had also been the result of a greater push to have Asians counted this time around in these concerted efforts by both the city and the community organizations to get more people counted. Some of the parts of the city had seen increases such as Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park.

What's interesting is that historically, Asian neighborhoods such as Chinatown and Manhattan, they saw a dip, which I thought was just interesting in and of itself. The fact that there are more Asians in New York City signals this push to have even greater representation on both the city and state and federal level in terms of having an Asian legislator represent them.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to that in a little more detail and the representation, redistricting implications of all this in a second. If you're just joining us as we talk about 2020 census results, our guest is David Cruz, editor at Gothamist. We can take some phone calls on this, listeners, at 646 435 7280, some census questions from you, if you have them or census redistricting, and therefore implications for political power from the census count questions. 646 435 7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer.

David, I mentioned in the intro the quirky asterisk on the overall growth number. The city planning department in its report noted that prior to the census count, they updated maps and they identified something like 250,000 more housing units than were in the previous records. Those units were mailed census forms, which I guess they weren't in 2010. That would presumably, since they wouldn't have to just self-report, increase the count. Those units could theoretically account for a large percentage of the 629,000 more people over the last decade. Couldn't they?

David Cruz: That's right. I think the Department of City Planning had a hunch that the US Census Bureau's address database was deficient, and so they had fanned out in advance of the count and they did find all these addresses. Now, what's interesting is that they found these addresses from very unorthodox places where people live such as basement units, or maybe, for example, one house can have multiple people living in there, and they don't necessarily have to be related. They could just have different units within that house. They counted those units separately as opposed to before where maybe just one house was just counted once and not, say, maybe five or six times, which I feel was an impressive feat considering they needed to double-check how many people were living in these units.

For me, I can only imagine just the effort that it took to actually get those numbers. I think you're right that that had actually helped offer a more accurate count than before.

Brian Lehrer: If they could only find 250,000 unoccupied units in the city, maybe we could do something to ease the rent crisis, but that's another show. Amit, in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Amit.

Amit: Hello, Brian. Thank you so much for having me on. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the census. I was proud to be the deputy director of the city's unprecedented $40 million census campaign, which we're very proud to say helped save an entire seat for the state of New York, congressional seat that is, and also helped get us to the census count that we are at.

The way we did that, just to talk about it for a second which has a huge set of implications for Black, brown and immigrant communities, is that for the first time in American history, and the mayor has to be given credit for this, we took $40 million and we put the lion's share of that money directly into 167 community-based organizations serving New Yorkers in more than 80 languages, with a focus on making sure that we were having New Yorkers who look and sound like New York City talking to their fellow New Yorkers about what the census is, the importance of completing the census, the implications not only politically, but also very much in people's everyday lives, the fact that we get nearly $1 billion a year in Title 1 funding that is all based on the census, the fact that there are 55 different federal programs, the funding for which is all based on the census.

New York State and New York city get billions and billions of dollars every single year, housing, healthcare, education, transportation, infrastructure, you name it. It was really in doing this in the middle of the pandemic under constant attack, nearly daily attacks from Donald Trump, which is how the city got to the census response that it did. What's notable here is not just that the city grew, which yes, I think we can all agree, that's relatively evident, but that actually our overall response was a lot stronger than it had been in decades past, which meant that people historically who were under-counted Black, brown, and immigrant communities, that were not counted in the census, were now finally being counted.

It's not as though that they appeared overnight between 2010 and 2020, it's that they were being counted in the census for the first time, and it was, precisely, the result of this community-based approach. I have to give an enormous shout-out to every single one of those, 167 organizations who, literally, the census started on the very day, March 12th, that the city went into lockdown as a result of COVID, and a large number of those organizations are social service organizations that pivoted immediately to doing things like providing emergency food.

There were lineups of anywhere from 500 to 600 to sometimes, 1,800 people, in places like Corona, the hardest-hit place in New York City, Richmond Hill, Ozone Park. These organizations sent their staff that we had helped fund out to those food lines to literally count people, many of whom were undocumented immigrants, many of whom did not speak English, while people are suffering and dying from COVID to make sure that they were counted in the census. Our own staff, we had a staff [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Amit, I have to jump in only because our time is short. We have the Mayor coming up in a few minutes but thank you for all of that. You put so much important meat on the bones of this story. Thank you for all that and thank you for your work on all of this.

David, let me pivot right out of Amit to the very interesting story you wrote on Gothamist about an issue in South Queens that stems from the robust count that Amit was just describing where South Asian residents are now trying to make sure that in the redistricting process, they're not divided into different assembly districts like they are now so that they can actually get some representation by being a majority population in a unified political district. Can you explain what's going on there?

David Cruz: Richmond Hill and the neighboring community, South Ozone Park, they consider themselves one community. That community though is split and what they call cracked, into seven different assembly districts. That is probably by far one of the more gerrymandered neighborhoods in the city. There is an effort underway to try and essentially reduce that number of assembly districts dividing up that neighborhood. The line of the thinking is if you have this neighborhood under one district, it can one, increase civic engagement, and then it can also just bring a little bit more attention to the people who live there.

There have been these redistricting listening sessions conducted by the Independent Redistricting Commission to essentially just ensure that that neighborhood stays intact because, for years, the neighborhood has been this nexus point for all these little different assembly districts. They feel that by breaking them up, you're diluting their power, and so they want to try and prevent that from happening.

I went actually to that community, and I spent about a couple hours over there. I spoke to a bunch of residents there, and not one of them, except maybe with one exception of the dozens of people that I spoke to, knew who their assembly leader was. I thought that was emblematic of the issue that we're facing here. Also what was interesting too, is that the way these districts were divided. On one hand, you can live on one part of the district. If you cross the street, you live in a different part of the district. The idea of coalescing around an issue becomes even more problematic. I decided to go to that neighborhood to take a look at what the implications are behind having a district that's essentially cracked.

Brian Lehrer: South Asians in South Queens is one example of a population who gets cracked, as the term is. What's another one in the city?

David Cruz: I did actually go in terms of just not necessarily from a race or ethnic standpoint, but just from having attention just to begin with. The Bedford Park section of the Bronx, there are three different Senate districts that cover that neighborhood. A couple of years ago [unintelligible 00:17:21] had been extensively covering the Bronx, there was a lot of overdevelopment taking place in that neighborhood. It's a small neighborhood, but it's divided into these three Senate districts. To get the attention of the Senate leaders was very tough for the neighbors over there who just wanted to enlist them to see how they can prevent overdevelopment from taking place in the neighborhood.

I spoke to one community leader, she's been there for decades, Barbara Stronczer, who tells me that if the neighborhood had been more intact, they felt they would have had a better fighting chance in beating back overdevelopment, but they tried and they just could not get the Senate leaders to really pay attention to it. The understanding was that it was just simply a small portion of these districts that they knew that by not paying attention to them, they would not really suffer politically.

Brian Lehrer: There are already articles at the national level about how control of the House of Representatives could lie with New York State's redistricting, and the maps being drawn in such a way that not only the one seat that the state is losing because we lost population relative to other states, we're losing one House seat, and it's likely to come from a GOP district upstate because that's where the population really declined.

The city increased and increased to 44%. That's another stat. That's interesting. 44% of all New York State residents live in New York City in the five boroughs. That's a higher percentage than before. It's not just the loss of one seat, but that other GOP districts can get divided up upstate so that they become bluer and therefore more competitive. Do you anticipate a lot of pressure on the New York State Legislature to intervene to create that outcome since it's such a democratic legislature?

David Cruz: Yes. There's a lot of speculation as to what the next year is going to look like in terms of how these lines will be shaped. Right now as it is, it is just speculation about people are playing. There's hypothesizing how the seats would look like, but we do know that the federal legislators may put pressure on the state legislators, who would then put pressure on the Independent Redistricting Commission to draw the lines in favor of Democrats. Of course, we won't know that yet until the actual maps come out and we'll begin to see how that turns out.

Yes, a lot of the action will take place in Upstate, and I'm saying Upstate, north of the Bronx, where a couple of GOP seats are being looked at in terms of whether or not they will just split them up in favor of having more of a democratic, heavy district. It'll be interesting to see what the pressure would look like, in next year.

Brian Lehrer: Even though, supposedly, we have a nonpartisan redistricting process in New York State to try to avoid partisan gerrymandering. Right?

David Cruz: Correct. The Independent Redistricting Commission was formed out of a 2014 constitutional amendment change but the issue here is that, one, there are Republican and Democratic appointees. Also, even if the group comes up with a map that they could all agree on, it still has to go to the state legislature, who does have technically final say in terms of approving or rejecting these maps.

If it turns out that these maps are submitted to them twice, they can just go ahead and just reject the maps altogether, and just start drawing up their own lines, which would besmirch the whole point of this Independent Redistricting Commission. All eyes are definitely on them. I think within the next few months, we'll see whether or not they will be truly independent.

Brian Lehrer: One of the things about that, when you look at a national picture, is that so many other red states don't have nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Their state legislatures are just carving things up, and this happened so much in 2010. It's one reason why the House of Representatives has an over-representation of Republicans compared to the number of people in the country as a whole who identify as Republicans. Red states have partisan redistricting. New York trying to be a good government model doesn't but that could wind up being unfair to Democrats at the national level.

Last thing, David, is there a public hearing process or an open-comments process for the public on districting right now?

David Cruz: Well, there was a listening session from the Independent Redistricting Commission that had ended last month, although they're going to start them up again after they submit the first draft of their maps on September 15. One can expect to see dates on when these hearings will actually take place. I'm still unclear whether or not there will be virtual or in-person. There'll definitely be a comment period for that.

Brian Lehrer: David Cruz, news editor for Gothamist, who's got a great article, at least one, on the census numbers in New York City and some of their implications. David, thanks for talking it through with us.

David Cruz: Thank you.

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