22,000 Housing Units? Sounds Low.

CityRealty, as reported in DNA is estimating that 22,000 new apartments will be built in northern Brooklyn between now and 2019. Northern Brooklyn in this case means Red Hook to Bushwick, and everything in between. Their estimate only includes “large” developments of 20 units or more, so it is necessarily a low estimate.

A really low number – I can count over 11,000 housing units either under construction or soon to be so just along the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront. Close to 6,000 more housing units could potentially be built along this stretch, which runs from Walkabout Inlet/Division Avenue to Newtown Creek.

These numbers don’t even begin to count developments of any size east of Kent Avenue/West Street – this is just looking at the blocks fronting the waterfront and those two streets.

The city estimates that on average each dwelling unit equals 2.2 residents, so if you add these numbers to thousands of new units created during the last two housing booms (almost 19,000 units since 2000), Greenpoint/Williamsburg is looking at a population increase of over 50%.

Census Numbers Show Big Jump in Brooklyn Population

Brooklyn’s population took a huge jump from the 2010 “actual” numbers in the federal census to this year’s estimate by the same agency.

Borough pols said the increase is more evidence the agency botched the official count. If the numbers are right, it would mean the borough grew almost six times faster after the Census than in an average year from 2000 to 2010.

There really isn’t doubt that the 2010 numbers for Brooklyn are just plain wrong. The numbers for Greenpoint and Williamsburg show much lower growth than would be expected just by mashing up 2000 census numbers with the thousands of new housing created from 2001 on. The numbers are so suspect that it’s almost not even worth citing them in any meaningful analysis.

Demographic Shift as Minorities Move to Suburbs

The Times has two interesting articles based on the latest data dump from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The first article looks at local trends, and finds that

Metropolitan New York is being rapidly reshaped as blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants surge into the suburbs, while gentrification by whites is widening the income gap in neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn

Neither trend is particularly surprising if you’ve been paying attention. Inner suburbs, like Nassau County on Long Island or Fairfax County, Virginia, have been seeing large influxes of minorities – Asian and Hispanic in particular. Outer exburbs – Orange County, NY, for instance – have also been seeing large increases in minority population. This trend – and some of its implications – is explained much better in the Times’ second article, which focuses on national trends.

Locally, the Times picks up on the countervailing trend of gentrification by whites – again, no surprise to anyone who has lived in Williamsburg, Greenpoint or Bushwick (to name but three of many impacted Brooklyn neighborhoods). The accompanying maps show that the Hispanic population in Williamsburg has gone from 40% to 30% over the past decade. What it doesn’t say is how much of that shift is displacement and how much is a general increase in the non-Hispanic population while the Hispanic population remains flat or rises at a slower rate. I suspect it is some of both, but need to spend some time with the numbers behind the survey (this will also be illuminated much more clearly when the Census Bureau releases its 2010 numbers – what we are looking at right now is an annual sample survey, not a straight count of all bodies).