History > 2011 > USA > Demographics (I)

Economy Contributes

to Slowest Population Growth Rate

Since ’40s

December 21, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — The population of the United States grew this year at its slowest rate since the 1940s, the Census Bureau reported on Wednesday, as the gloomy economy continued to depress births and immigration fell to its lowest level since 1991.

The first measure of the American population in the new decade offered fresh evidence that the economic trouble that has plagued the country for the past several years continues to make its effects felt.

The population grew by 2.8 million people from April 2010 to July 2011, according to the bureau’s new estimates. The annual increase, about 0.7 percent when calculated for the year that ended in July 2011, was the smallest since 1945, when the population fell by 0.3 percent in the last year of World War II.

“The nation’s overall growth rate is now at its lowest point since before the baby boom,” the Census Bureau director, Robert M. Groves, said in a statement.

The sluggish pace puts the country “in a place we haven’t been in a very long time,” said William H. Frey, senior demographer at the Brookings Institution. “We don’t have that vibrancy that fuels the economy and people’s sense of mobility,” he said. “People are a bit aimless right now.”

Underlying the modest growth was an immigration level that was the lowest in 20 years. The net increase of immigrants to the United States for the year that ended in July was an estimated 703,000, the smallest since 1991, Mr. Frey said, when the immigrant wave that dates to the 1970s began to pick up pace. It peaked in 2001, when the net increase of immigrants was 1.2 million, and was still above 1 million in 2006. But it slowed substantially when the housing market collapsed, and the jobs associated with its boom that were popular among immigrants disappeared.

“Net immigration from Mexico is close to zero, and we haven’t seen that in at least 40 years,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “We are in a very different kind of immigration situation.”

Mr. Passel said that the bulk of the reduction in recent years had been among illegal immigrants, adding that apprehensions at the border are just 20 percent of what they were a decade ago. (The Census Bureau does not ask foreign-born residents their status, but Mr. Passel believes the count includes most people here illegally. )

A lagging birth rate also contributed. Births in the United States declined precipitously during the recession and its aftermath, down by 7.3 percent from 2007 to 2010, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. There were slightly over four million births in the year that ended in July, the lowest since 1999.

Economic trauma tends to depress births. In the Great Depression, the birth rate fell by a third, Mr. Johnson said. It is unclear whether the current dip means that births are being delayed or that they are foregone, as they were in the Depression, he said.

In a particularly striking measure of economic distress, birth rates among Hispanics, who are concentrated in states hardest hit by the economic downturn, like Florida and Arizona, declined by 17 percent from 2007 to 2010, Mr. Johnson said. That is compared with a 3.8 percent decline for whites and a 6.7 percent decline for blacks. Rates dropped most sharply among young Hispanics, down by 23 percent for women ages 20 to 24 between 2007 and 2010.

There were bright spots. Florida, which had watched as the decades of robust migration into the state reversed into net declines during the economic downturn, was starting to recover. After net losses of migrants in 2008 and 2009, the state had a net gain of 108,000 newcomers in the year ending in July, Mr. Frey said, the highest since 2006 and a signal that the worst may be behind it.

Neither Arizona nor Nevada, other fast-growing states during the last decade, was so lucky. Nevada’s rate of population gain in the year ending in July was about a quarter what it was in the middle of the decade, and Arizona’s was about half, Mr. Johnson said.

    Economy Contributes to Slowest Population Growth Rate Since ’40s, NYT, 21.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/economy-contributes-to-slowest-population-growth-rate-since-1940s.html

Minorities Lead Growth

in Biggest Cities

August 31, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — Minorities accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, according to a new report, as the country’s white population continued to stagnate, and in many places, decline.

Hispanics and Asians led population growth in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, growing by 41 percent and 43 percent respectively. The population of blacks grew by 12 percent, and the aging white population was largely flat, increasing by less than 1 percent.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution and the author of the report, also said the United States had reached a demographic milestone: About half of all recent births were to minority parents, a shift that will have broad policy implications in the years to come.

The country’s largest cities are changing the fastest, Dr. Frey said, and provide a snapshot of what the country might look like in the future. Hispanics were 20 percent of the population of large metropolitan areas — defined by the Census Bureau as cities and their suburbs — up from 15 percent in 2000, and 11 percent in 1990. Blacks, the second-largest minority group, accounted for 14 percent of the population of large cities in 2010, unchanged from 2000. Asians totaled 6 percent.

The population increases added 11 million Hispanics to the populations of the largest American cities, nearly 4 million Asians, and 3 million blacks, Dr. Frey said. The number of whites increased by just over 400,000.

“Where these large metro areas are now is where the rest of America is headed,” he said. “The old image of the white and black American population is obsolete.”

The non-Hispanic white population is aging, with the share of women in their childbearing years shrinking. Hispanics, by contrast, are much younger, with a relatively large part of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years.

In large metropolitan areas, the white population represented 57 percent of the total in 2010, down from 71 percent in 1990. Whites accounted for a bigger share in smaller cities, at 73 percent, and in rural areas, at 80 percent, Dr. Frey said.

In all, the white population shrank in 42 out of the top 100 cities. Leading the decline in the share of the white population was Las Vegas, where it fell to 48 percent of the total in 2010, from 60 percent in 2000.

    Minorities Lead Growth in Biggest Cities, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/us/31census.html

Numbers of Children of Whites Falling Fast

April 6, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — America’s population of white children, a majority now, will be in the minority during this decade, sooner than previously expected, according to a new report.

The Census Bureau had originally forecast that 2023 would be the tipping point for the minority population under the age of 18. But rapid growth among Latinos, Asians and people of more than one race has pushed it earlier, to 2019, according to William Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who wrote the report about the shift, which has far-reaching political and policy implications.

The single largest increase was among Hispanics, whose birthrates are far above those of non-Hispanic whites, largely because the white population is aging and proportionally has fewer women in their child-bearing years. The median age of whites is 41, compared with 27 for Hispanics, the report said.

As a result, America’s future will include a far more diverse young population, and a largely white older generation. The contrast raises important policy questions. Will the older generation pay for educating a younger generation that looks less like itself? And while the young population is a potential engine of growth for the economy, will it be a burden if it does not have access to adequate education?

The population of white children fell by 4.3 million, or about 10 percent, in the last decade, while the population of Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million, or about 38 percent, according to the report, which was based on 2010 Census numbers.

The number of African-American children also fell, down by 2 percent. Over all, minorities now make up 46.5 percent of the under-18 population.

Whites are now the minority of child populations in 10 states, double the number from the previous decade, according to the report, and in 35 cities, including Atlanta, Phoenix and Orlando, Fla. Vermont had the largest drop in its child population of any state.

The changes also have political implications. Though whites are still 63 percent of the population as a whole, that is down from 75.6 percent in 1990, and minorities, particularly Hispanics, who now outnumber blacks, are becoming an increasingly important part of the electorate.

Mr. Frey estimates that whites will slip into the minority by about 2041. The number of whites grew by just 1.2 percent in the population as a whole in the last decade, a fraction of the 43 percent growth among Latinos.

    Numbers of Children of Whites Falling Fast, NYT, 6.4.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/us/06census.html

Detroit Census Confirms a Desertion Like No Other

March 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Laying bare the country’s most startling example of modern urban collapse, census data on Tuesday showed that Detroit’s population had plunged by 25 percent over the last decade. It was dramatic testimony to the crumbling industrial base of the Midwest, black flight to the suburbs and the tenuous future of what was once a thriving metropolis.

It was the largest percentage drop in history for any American city with more than 100,000 residents, apart from the unique situation of New Orleans, where the population dropped by 29 percent after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College.

The number of people who vanished from Detroit — 237,500 — was bigger than the 140,000 who left New Orleans.

The loss in Detroit seemed to further demoralize some residents who said they already had little hope for the city’s future.

“Even if we had depressing issues before, the decline makes it so much harder to deal with,” said Samantha Howell, 32, who was getting gas on Tuesday on the city’s blighted East Side. “Yes, the city feels empty physically, empty of people, empty of ambition, drive. It feels empty.”

Detroit’s population fell to 713,777 in 2010, the lowest since 1910, when it was 466,000. In a shift that was unthinkable 20 years ago, Detroit is now smaller than Austin, Tex., Charlotte, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla.

“It’s a major city in free-fall,” said L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive of neighboring Oakland County, which was also hit by the implosion of the automobile industry but whose population rose by almost 1 percent, thanks to an influx of black residents. “Detroit’s tax base is eroding, its citizens are fleeing and its school system is in the hands of a financial manager.”

Nearly a century ago, the expansion of the auto industry fueled a growth spurt that made Detroit the fourth-largest city in the country by 1920, a place it held until 1950, when the population peaked at almost two million. By 2000, Detroit had fallen to 10th place.

Depending on final numbers from all cities, Detroit now may have dropped to 18th place, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

City officials, cognizant of the negative political and financial consequences of such a decline in population, said they intended to challenge the census. It probably missed tens of thousands of residents, they said.

“While we expected a decline in population, we are confident these figures will be revised,” Mayor David Bing said in a statement. He told reporters that if the city could account for a total of 750,000 people, it would meet a threshold for receiving more federal and state money.

Detroit is the only city in the United States where the population has climbed above one million but also fallen below one million, Mr. Beveridge said. And because of the magnitude of Detroit’s population drain, Michigan is the only state to register a net population loss since 2000. Michigan’s population fell by 0.6 percent while the nation’s as a whole grew by 9.7 percent.

The reasons for Detroit’s losses over the last decade include the travails of the auto industry and the collapse of the industrial-based economy.

“There’s been an erosion of the nation’s industrial base, and this is the most dramatic evidence of it,” Mr. Beveridge said.

But a major factor, too, has been the exodus of black residents to the suburbs, which followed the white flight that started in the 1960s. Detroit lost 185,393 black residents in the last decade.

“This is the biggest loss of blacks the city has shown, and that’s tied to the foreclosures in the city’s housing,” Mr. Frey said. Because of the Great Migration — when blacks flowed from the South to the North — and the loss of whites, he said, “Detroit has been the most segregated city in the country and it is still pretty segregated, but not as much.” At one point, the city was 83 percent black.

Many blacks moved to nearby suburbs, but census data shows that even those suburbs have barely held their own against population loss.

The staggering loss over the past decade surprised even demographers who track Detroit’s out-migration patterns.

“I never thought it would go this low,” said Kurt Metzger, an urban affairs expert and demographer who analyzes data about the city.

“This is the biggest percentage loss that Detroit has ever seen,” he said, noting that the city suffered a higher numerical loss, 300,000, from 1970 to 1980. Still, that accounted for only 20 percent of the population, which had been 1.5 million in 1970.

The question now is the degree to which the most recent census figures will discourage those who have invested in Detroit and continue to try to make a go of it.

“Obviously it’s going to be a blow,” Mr. Metzger said. “All of us are kind of shocked, but it means we have to work that much harder.”

With more than 20 percent of the lots in the 139-square-mile city vacant, the mayor is in the midst of a program to demolish 10,000 empty residential buildings. But for many, the city already seems hollowed out.

“You can just see the emptiness driving in,” said Joel Dellario, a student at the College for Creative Studies. “I’ve been in and out of this city my whole life, and it’s just really apparent.”


Jacob Smilovitz contributed reporting.

    Detroit Census Confirms a Desertion Like No Other, NYT, 22.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/us/23detroit.html

Hispanics Are Surging in Arizona

March 10, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — In Arizona, fervor against illegal immigration is so intense that politicians have pushed some of the nation’s toughest laws and citizen activists have patrolled the border themselves. But census data released Thursday show another side of the population story: Arizonans are increasingly becoming Hispanic.

Still, the increase in Hispanics, to just under 30 percent of the population last year from 25 percent in 2000, has been slower than some studies predicted. Tough economic times coupled with restrictions on illegal immigrant workers are probably responsible for driving many Hispanics away, analysts say.

“The Hispanic population has gone up, but it didn’t go up as much as people thought,” said Tom Rex, associate director of the Center for Competitiveness and Prosperity Research at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. “Or maybe it did go up and then dropped when those who got here couldn’t find jobs.”

Over all, Arizona’s population has boomed to 6.4 million from 5.1 million over the last decade, at a rate second only to Nevada’s, and much of the growth is a result of a 46 percent increase in the Hispanic population, said Bill Schooling, the state demographer.

Significant increases in Hispanics were reported across the state: in the Phoenix metropolitan area, where the bulk of the state’s residents live, as well as in the border counties of Yuma, Pima and Santa Cruz and in remote northwestern Mohave County, bordering California and Nevada, where the Hispanic population grew 72 percent.

The most popular names in the state reflect the diversity: Isabella, Sophia, Emma and Olivia are the most popular girls’ names in Arizona while Jacob, Anthony, Daniel, Alexander and Angel top the boy’s list.

“Without a doubt, wherever you turn, there are Latin people,” said Luis Lim, a political columnist for Prensa Hispana, the state’s largest Spanish-language publication.

The popular image of Arizona as a state of white retirees has always been a caricature, experts say. “We’re not an old, white person’s state,” Mr. Rex said. “Our age distribution is not all that different from the national average. It’s quite a mixed state, despite the legislation that is passed here.”

There may be demographic reasons for the conservative politics as well. Despite the size of the Hispanic population, nearly 40 percent of it is under age 18 and an untold number of others are not legally able to vote, meaning the numbers do not translate into political clout.

On top of that, Latino community activists here suspect that there was probably a significant undercount of the state’s Hispanic population, with many not participating to make a political point.

“They did not want to participate because they did not want the additional money that the state could get to be utilized by law enforcement and the persecution of people that are brown,” said Salvador Reza, a community activist.

    Hispanics Are Surging in Arizona, NYT, 10.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/us/11arizona.html

For California, a Slower-Growing Population

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Perhaps the legendary beaches here are losing their pull. California, once the very symbol of sun-drenched American growth, had a population increase of only 10 percent in the last decade, the slowest rise in the state’s history. And for the first time since California was became a state in 1850, it will not gain a Congressional seat.

The population of the most-populous state continued to shift eastward, with inland Southern California counties showing the most explosive growth, according to Census Bureau figures released Tuesday.

In Riverside County, the population grew by 42 percent, and in San Bernardino, a sprawling county just to the north, it is up 19 percent. The counties make up what is known as the Inland Empire, an area that has gone from orange groves to exurbia with a population in excess of four million — more than the city of Los Angeles.

The recent growth in the state has been largely fueled by Hispanics, who continued to increase in numbers, though at a slower rate than in the 1990s. The number of whites continued to decline. They now make up just 40 percent of the state, compared with 47 percent in 2000.

In Riverside County, for instance, Hispanics accounted for two-thirds of the population’s increase, and in San Bernardino nearly 50 percent of the county is now Hispanic. Throughout the central inland part of the state, Hispanics now make up more than 40 percent of the population. Many were most likely attracted by the promise of more affordable housing — the area is among the hardest hit in the foreclosure crisis.

California officials had overestimated the state’s population by roughly 1.2 million, primarily because they expected more people to move in and fewer to move out, said John Malson, the state’s acting chief demographer. But Mr. Malson saw little reason for gloom.

“For a state of our size to be increasing by 10 percent is a good thing,” he said.

The shift to the Inland Empire has happened steadily over decades, as farmland and open fields have been replaced with expansive malls and housing tracts. Despite the housing collapse of recent years, there was no sign of a declining population.

“The trends have been in motion for some time,” said Eric Avila, a professor of Chicano studies and urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. “San Francisco and Los Angeles are not the only places that are urban centers anymore. Among the Latino population there are many more places that have become a destination for immigrants and migrants from other parts of the state.”

The ethnic and racial shifts were even more significant among children. The number of white children in California dropped by 21 percent in the last decade, with a similar decline in the number of black children. Over all, the state’s population increase for children was half a percent, a factor in the more modest growth statewide.

Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said this was the biggest drop in census data so far for a white-child population in any state.

“It underscores how dramatic the change in the racial and ethnic makeup will be,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s not well appreciated how fast this change is coming in young people. “

Over all, California is becoming more stable, and the slower but steady growth will make it easier for state officials to plan and grapple with potentially crippling budgets, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California.

“I think immigrants may have gotten diverted to other states because of our housing prices,” Mr. Myers said. “And Texas has a better economy, so where would you move? The fact that there are no runaway massive changes here isn’t a bad thing.”

    For California, a Slower-Growing Population, NYT, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09california.html

Paying for Old Age

February 25, 2011
The New York Times
By HENRY T. C. HU and TERRANCE ODEAN

LIFE expectancy at birth for Americans is about 78. But many Americans will die well before then, while others, like Eunice Sanborn, who died in Texas last month, will live to be 114.

Anyone planning for retirement must answer an impossible question: How long will I live? If you overestimate your longevity, you might scrimp unnecessarily. If you underestimate, you might outlive your savings.

This is hardly a new problem — and yet not a single financial product offers a satisfactory solution to this risk.

We believe that a new product — a federally issued, inflation-adjusted annuity — would make it possible for people to deal with this problem, with the bonus of contributing to the public coffers. By doing good for individuals, the federal government could actually do well for itself.

The insurance industry sells an inflation-adjusted annuity that goes part of the way toward helping people cope with the possibility of outliving their savings. During your working years or at the time of retirement, you can pay a premium to an insurance company in exchange for the promise that the company will pay you a fixed annual income, adjusted for inflation, until you die.

But in a world in which A.I.G. had an excellent rating only days before it became a ward of the state, how can someone — particularly a young person — know for sure which insurance companies will be solvent half a century from now? Annuities aren’t federally guaranteed. The only backstops are state-based systems, and the current protection ceilings are sometimes modest. If an insurance company goes under, the retiree may end up with nothing close to what was promised.

The federal government can offer a product that solves that problem. Individuals would face no more risk of default than that associated with Treasury bills and other obligations backed by the United States.

Here’s how it would work. Initially, people who wanted to buy this insurance would enroll through one of the qualified retirement savings plans already offered to the public, like a 401(k) plan, and could choose this annuity option instead of, or in addition to, investments in stocks, bonds or mutual funds.

How much the payouts would be could be based on a variety of factors, including interest rates on government bonds; mortality tables that, among other things, take into account that healthier people are more likely to buy annuities; and administrative costs. This new product wouldn’t cost the government a penny. In fact, the Treasury would benefit. It is only an incremental move beyond issuing inflation-adjusted bonds, which the Treasury already does. By allowing the government to tap a new class of investors, the cost of government borrowing over all would probably drop.

Moreover, by expanding the government’s base of domestic investors, the plan would help address overreliance on foreign lenders, who now own close to half of all outstanding federal debt — nearly 10 times the proportion in 1970. True, the government would be on the hook if a technological breakthrough caused an unanticipated increase in life expectancy. But that’s a risk that the government is already bearing implicitly: that is, a drastic enough increase could threaten the solvency of private issuers of annuities as well as the many retirees who don’t have annuities, creating pressure for government bailouts of insurers or individuals. Taking on the risk explicitly and pricing the fair cost of this risk into the annuities is a far preferable route.

There is also the concern that government-issued annuities would crowd out private annuity sales. To the contrary: they could spur growth in private annuities. Since the inflation-adjusted monthly payments on such risk-free government annuities would be low, many retirees may choose to supplement them with riskier, higher-paying annuities.

Furthermore, insurance companies could be allowed to package the government-issued annuities with their own products, creating appealing combinations that mix safety and the potential for higher returns.

Our proposal is a winner for everyone. The Treasury could lower borrowing costs and diversify its investor base while acknowledging and budgeting for risk that it already bears. Individuals could eliminate the risk of living too long. By looking at the promised rate of return on the annuities, individuals will have a better sense of how much they need to save. The Eunice Sanborns of the world, as well as all taxpayers, would rest a little easier at night.

Henry T. C. Hu is a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Terrance Odean is a finance professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

    Paying for Old Age, NYT, 25.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/opinion/26Hu.html

Population Off Sharply in St. Louis and Birmingham

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

ST. LOUIS — They call this the Gateway to the West, but for the past six decades that gateway has more resembled an exit, as this city, once the nation’s fourth largest, has lost roughly half a million people.

Though recent estimates had given city officials reason to believe the downward trend had finally stalled, those hopes were dashed Thursday when the Census Bureau released new data showing that the city’s population had shrunk by 29,000 over the last decade — an 8.3 percent decline that brings the population to 319,000, its lowest level since 1870.

Census figures report a similar decline in Birmingham, Ala., which hemorrhaged 30,000 people since 2000, a loss of nearly 13 percent. The losses in St. Louis and Birmingham — as measured as a percentage of the population — are outstripped only by that in New Orleans, which had a 29 percent decline caused in part by Hurricane Katrina.

“This is absolutely bad news. We had thought, given many of the other positive trends, that 50 years of population losses had finally reversed direction,” Mayor Francis G. Slay of St. Louis wrote on his blog. “I believe that this will require an urgent and thorough rethinking of how we do almost everything.”

The losses in St. Louis are but the latest disappointing growth figures for Missouri, which is set to lose a Congressional seat after Census figures that showed, for the first time, larger growth in the West than in the Midwest.

Demographers said they had expected gentrification to buoy the city’s population, but instead St. Louis posted a decline of 14,000 white residents, compounded by a loss of 21,000 black residents. By contrast, St. Louis County, which rings the city, noted an increase in its black population of 39,000, though that gain was overshadowed by a loss of 84,000 whites, for an overall population loss.

“There seems to be some black suburbanization going on in some of these counties,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “Whites appear to be going further out.”

Meanwhile, the region experienced a greater dispersion of minorities, with many surrounding counties registering growth among Asians, blacks and Hispanics.

Census figures show a similar change has unfolded in Birmingham, a once-thriving town of steel mills whose flagship industries in recent decades have been health care and banking. With its population now at 212,237, the city counts only about 6,000 more residents than Montgomery, the state’s capital.

But while Birmingham has shrunk, its suburbs continue to undergo explosive growth. Neighboring Shelby County has grown by more than a third since 2000. While such growth may at one time have been attributable to white flight, it is no longer so simple. Shelby is still 80 percent white, but the county’s black population has doubled and its Hispanic population has grown by nearly 300 percent over the past decade.

“Cities are no longer the whole engine of the metropolitan area,” said Mr. Frey. “A lot of the jobs have gone to the suburbs, so you really have to look at the region as a whole.”

He added, “I wouldn’t look at it as doomsday.”

Susan Weber-Stoger contributed research.

    Population Off Sharply in St. Louis and Birmingham, NYT, 24.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25census.html

In a Graying Population, Business Opportunity

February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

IT’S not easy being gray.

For the first time ever, getting out of a car is no picnic. My back is hunched. And I’m holding on to handrails as I lurch upstairs.

I’m 45. But I feel decades older because I’m wearing an Age Gain Now Empathy System, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Agnes, they call it.

At first glance, it may look like a mere souped-up jumpsuit. A helmet, attached by cords to a pelvic harness, cramps my neck and spine. Yellow-paned goggles muddy my vision. Plastic bands, running from the harness to each arm, clip my wingspan. Compression knee bands discourage bending. Plastic shoes, with uneven Styrofoam pads for soles, throw off my center of gravity. Layers of surgical gloves make me all thumbs.

The age-empathy suit comes from the M.I.T. AgeLab, where researchers designed Agnes to help product designers and marketers better understand older adults and create innovative products for them. Many industries have traditionally shied away from openly marketing to people 65 and older, viewing them as an unfashionable demographic group that might doom their product with young and hip spenders. But now that Americans are living longer and more actively, a number of companies are recognizing the staying power of the mature market.

“Aging is a multidisciplinary phenomenon, and it requires new tools to look at,” Joseph F. Coughlin, director of AgeLab, tells me, encumbered and fatigued after trying to conduct a round of interviews while wearing Agnes. Viewed through yellow goggles, the bright colors of Professor Coughlin’s bow tie appear dim. “Agnes is one of those tools,” he says.

AgeLab, like a handful of other research centers at universities and companies around the country, develops technologies to help older adults maintain their health, independence and quality of life. Companies come here to understand their target audience or to have their products, policies and services studied.

Often, visitors learn hard truths at AgeLab: many older adults don’t like products, like big-button phones, that telegraph agedness. “The reality is such that you can’t build an old man’s product, because a young man won’t buy it and an old man won’t buy it,” Professor Coughlin says.

The idea is to help companies design and sell age-friendly products — with customizable font size, say, or sound speed — much the way they did with environmentally friendly products. That means offering enticing features and packaging to appeal to a certain demographic without alienating other consumer groups. Baked potato chips are just one example of products that appeal to everybody but skew toward older people. Toothpastes that promise whitening or gum health are another.

Researchers at AgeLab are studying the stress levels of older adults who operate a hands-free parallel-parking system developed by Ford Motor. Although this ultrasonic-assisted system may make backing up easier for older adults who can’t turn their necks to the same degree they once did, the car’s features — like blind-spot detection and a voice-activated audio system — are intended to appeal to all drivers who enjoy smart technology.

“With any luck, if I am successful,” Professor Coughlin says, “retailers won’t know they are putting things on the shelves for older adults.”

THE first of about 76 million baby boomers in the United States turned 65 in January. They are looking forward to a life expectancy that is higher than that of any previous generation.

The number of people 65 and older is expected to more than double worldwide, to about 1.5 billion by 2050 from 523 million last year, according to estimates from the United Nations. That means people 65 and over will soon outnumber children under 5 for the first time ever. As a consequence, many people may have to defer their retirement — or never entirely retire — in order to maintain sustainable incomes.

Many economists view such an exploding population of seventy- and eighty-somethings not as an asset, but as a looming budget crisis. After all, by one estimate, treating dementia worldwide already costs more than $600 billion annually.

“No other force is likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances and policy making,” analysts at Standard & Poor’s wrote in a recent report, “as the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”

The S.&P. analysis, called “Global Aging 2010,” warns that many countries are not prepared to cover the pension and health care costs of so many additional retirees; if those governments do not radically alter their age-related spending policies in the next few decades, the report said, national debts will grow to rival — or even more than double — gross domestic product.

But longevity-focused researchers including Professor Coughlin, whose blog is called Disruptive Demographics, are betting that baby boomers, unlike generations past, will not go gentle into the good night of long-term care. In fact, a few research groups at institutions like Oregon Health & Science University, M.I.T. and Stanford, along with foundations and the private sector, are devising policies and systems for an alternate scenario: older adults living independently at home for longer periods, whether that home is a private residence or a senior community.

Devices for I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up catastrophes, they say, represent the old business of old age. The new business of old age involves technologies and services that promote wellness, mobility, autonomy and social connectivity. These include wireless pillboxes that transmit information about patients’ medication use, as well as new financial services, like “Second Acts” from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, that help people plan for longer lives and second careers.

Together, those kinds of products and services are already a multibillion-dollar market, industry analysts say. And if such innovations prove to promote health and independence, delaying entry into long-term care, the potential savings to the health care system could be even greater.

That’s the upbeat message that Eric Dishman, the global director of health innovation at Intel, has been trying to get across to policy makers and industry executives for more than a decade. A charismatic health policy wonk, Mr. Dishman has held audiences at TedMed conferences spellbound with his lecture on the subject, in which he carts around an old-school rotary telephone, a prop dramatizing the need to connect older adults and technology.

In his office in Beaverton, Ore., he demonstrates some prototypes, like a social networking system for senior housing centers, that older Americans are already testing. Often, he says, field studies of his gadgets result in “success catastrophes” — the devices prove so popular that testers and their families are loath to return them. The people testing the social network devices, for example, asked for extra models for off-campus friends.

“There is an enormous market opportunity to deliver technology and services that allow for wellness and prevention and lifestyle enhancement,” he says. “Whichever countries or companies are at the forefront of that are going to own the category.”

Industry is beginning to hear his message. Last month, a group including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Aegon said it had formed the Global Coalition on Aging, to help governments and industries better handle the age boom. “Companies are starting to think about how they can be age friendly much the same way they have been thinking about how they could be environmentally friendly over the last couple of decades,” says Andy Sieg, the head of retirement services at Bank of America.

THE Mirabella, a new $130 million high-rise in the South Waterfront section of Portland, Ore., may be the greenest luxury retirement community in the nation.

The building has solar-heated hot water, a garage where valets stack cars in racks atop one another, sensors that turn off the lights when stairways are empty and platinum certification from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, the group that sets national benchmarks for sustainable building.

But never mind the free loaner Priuses in the garage. The Mirabella also aspires to be the grayest — by providing an opportunity to develop and test the latest home-health technology and design concepts for older adults.

The building’s architects, Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects, turned on its head the idea of putting retirees out to pasture. This urban high-rise, conveniently located next to Oregon Health and Science University, enables residents to stay as healthy, engaged and socially connected as possible, says Jeff Los, a principal in the firm.

“Historically, upscale senior housing has been a rural three-story entity spread over 30 acres,” he says. “This is a 30-story building on one acre with a streetcar stop at the front door.”

The developers, Pacific Retirement Services, bought land from the university with the idea of encouraging research next door, at the school’s Oregon Center for Aging & Technology, also known as Orcatech. As part of that project, the company spent nearly a half-million dollars to install fiber optic cables so that Mirabella residents could be encouraged to volunteer for a “living laboratory” program in which wireless motion sensors, installed in their apartments, track their mobility and, by extension, their health status in real time.

Older adults in other parts of the city are already participating in the program; researchers hope to prove that continually monitoring them can help predict and prevent problems like falls, or even social withdrawal, says Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a neurology professor who directs Orcatech.

And some residents may eventually want to modify the monitoring system so that they can download and make use of their own health data, Mr. Los says.

In fact, even before Mirabella opened last fall, residents asked for adjustments to the building. They demanded space in the garage for their kayaks, recalls Mr. Dishman, who serves on the building’s steering committee.

“Baby boomers are going to be very different seniors,” he says.

ABOUT 30 older adults in the greater Portland area have volunteered to participate in the Orcatech living laboratory program.

Dorothy Rutherford, 86, a petite redhead with a deadpan wit, is one of them. And she is a model for the kind of independent aging, abetted by technology, that the researchers hope to encourage.

Her bone-colored earrings — a gift from a dentist who made them from denture material — dangle as she gives me a tour of the equipment that researchers have installed in her apartment. Sensors that monitor the speed and frequency of her activity dot the ceilings and cling to furniture, appliances and doors.

“I have no worries about privacy whatsoever,” she declares, waving at the ceiling. “They are just sensors, not video cameras.”

A wireless smart pillbox reminds her to take her daily vitamins. A computer on which she plays specific word and number games tracks her daily scores.

But her favorite experiment so far involved an anthropomorphic robot from Vgo Communications, nicknamed Celia, that was equipped with a video screen. Mrs. Rutherford’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter in Wyoming could remotely operate Celia any time they wanted to follow her around for a video chat.

Mrs. Rutherford, a retired waitress, already uses Skype to talk to family members. But Skype is stationary, she says, while the robot conveniently wheels itself from room to room.

“When I saw Celia the robot, I thought there are all kinds of possibilities to get you set up at home,” she says. “Why would somebody go to a retirement community if they can figure out a way to keep people home longer?”

Even so, the pilot program is not inexpensive: it costs about $1,000 to set up each participant with a computer and $6 sensors, plus $2,600 a year for technical support, Internet access and home visits from researchers. Monitoring costs vary. (The robot, which is not a regular feature of the program and which participants tried for about a week each, costs $6,000 plus a monthly $100 service fee.)

The continuous monitoring of people like Mrs. Rutherford may point the way to more preventive health care — an alternative to the pattern of doctors seeing elderly patients on an infrequent basis, often treating them only after they have developed acute illnesses or had accidents. “What if there were thousands of homes around America that had these simple systems in place?” Dr. Kaye of Orcatech says about the monitoring system.

The idea is to determine whether changes in daily habits — like walking speed, posture, sleep, pill taking, computer game scores — can accurately predict things like cognitive decline or balance problems, allowing doctors to intervene before someone falls and, say, breaks a hip.

Intel and General Electric recently started a joint venture, Intel-GE Care Innovations, to develop technologies that help older adults stay independent. They are already marketing the Intel Health Guide, a home monitoring system that helps doctors remotely manage patients’ care.

There’s just one obstacle: the marketplace for age independence technology is in its infancy. Because of ageism, Mr. Dishman says, many retailers aren’t ready to make space for such products and many companies don’t even want to develop them.

“Life enhancement technology for boomers is a chicken-and-egg problem,” he says. Is “the market going to take the first plunge, or are companies going to create technologies without knowing whether we can sell it?”

He has been on a mission, he says, to have Congress put the issue on the national agenda; he’d also like to see the White House establish a commission on aging. The European Union, he points out, has already committed more than one billion euros to study technology and aging.

But so far, the officials he has met with have not taken up the cause, he says. In the laundry list of initiatives in his State of the Union address last month, President Obama pushed clean energy, not gray tech.

Mr. Dishman asks: “What do we need to do for aging and gray technology to have the same urgency and investment that global warming” and green technology have?

GRAMPA. Golden ager. Elderly person. Senior citizen.

Americans have come to associate agedness with frailty and disability rather than with institutional memory and expertise.

“People somehow assume that when we are young, we are vital,” says Ken Dychtwald, the C.E.O. of AgeWave, a research and consulting organization that focuses on population aging. “Then, when we pass 40, we are on a downward slope to death.”

For more than a quarter-century, Mr. Dychtwald, 60 and thus himself a baby boomer, has been trying to rebrand aging as a positive phenomenon. He’s coined a word — “middlescence” — to convey later life as a transformative stage, like adolescence, in which people have free time and an increased interest in trying new experiences. He also came up with an antidote to retirement: “rehirement.”

Now that the oldest baby boomers are turning 65, he says, their sheer numbers may attract industries that had earlier shied away. “If you are a Fortune 100 company, or an inventor in a garage, where are you going to find another demographic that is that large, that robust in spending power, that open to new possibilities, and that underserved?” he asks. “There’s nothing to rival it.”

In 2009, for example, baby-boomer households in the United States spent about $2.6 trillion, according to estimates from AgeWave based on a consumer expenditure survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But so far, he says, very few companies have applied creative intelligence to understanding older adults and developing game-changing technologies, services, experiences and even new careers for them.

Imagine a new real estate sector, he says, that caters to the former hippies among baby boomers who want to form retirement communities with friends by buying six-bedroom communal penthouses in Chicago or farms in Vermont. Or Internet cemeteries, he says, that would preserve video libraries of people’s lives for their descendants to enjoy.

“Rather than viewing maturity as an opportunity to sell people a golf membership or an arthritis medicine,” he says, “since a person who turns 60 has another 20 years, why not create educational programs whereby people can be motivated to go out, learn new skills and have an encore?”

AGNES, the age empathy suit developed by the M.I.T. AgeLab, is calibrated to simulate the dexterity, mobility, strength and balance of a 74-year-old. My empathy has clearly deepened after a few hours of road-testing it. But, sheepishly, I still want to shed the suit and its instant add-on decades.

Professor Coughlin started AgeLab in 1999 to address what he calls “the longevity paradox” — the idea that, while people in many developed countries now live several decades longer than those born a century ago, very few policy makers, institutions and industries are dedicated to helping people make those extra decades healthy and productive.

More than a decade later, with boomers starting to turn 65, experts like Professor Coughlin hope to make gray the new green. Their job would be easier if it were fun to wear Agnes.

    In a Graying Population, Business Opportunity, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06aging.html

In Census, Young Americans Increasingly Diverse

February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — Demographers sifting through new population counts released on Thursday by the Census Bureau say the data bring a pattern into sharper focus: Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift that demographers say creates a culture gap with far-reaching political and social consequences.

Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey and Louisiana all had declines in their populations of white residents ages 18 and under, according to the bureau’s first detailed report on the 2010 Census.

That drove declines in the overall white population for the decade in three of the four states. Only Virginia, whose northern suburbs have been growing fast, had a rise.

Growth in the number of white youths slowed sharply in the 1990s, up by just 1 percent in the decade, as the number of white women of childbearing age fell, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

More recently, it has dipped into a decline. The number of whites under the age of 20 fell by 6 percent between 2000 and 2008, Mr. Johnson said, citing countrywide census estimates.

Instead, growth has come from minorities, particularly Hispanics, as more Latino women enter their childbearing years. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics accounted for about 79 percent of the national population growth between 2000 and 2009, Mr. Johnson said.

The result has been a changed American landscape, with whites now a minority of the youth population in 10 states, including Arizona, where tensions over immigration have flared, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“This is a huge demographic transformation,” Mr. Frey said. “A cultural generation gap is emerging.”

The growing divide between a diverse young population and an aging white population raises some potentially tricky policy questions. Will older whites be willing to allocate money to educate a younger generation that looks less like their own children than ever before? How will a diverse young generation handle growing needs for aging whites?

The rapid change has infused political debates, and they have been noisiest in the states with the largest gaps.

Arizona is the leader, with whites accounting for just 42 percent of its young people, compared with 83 percent of its residents 65 and older, according to Mr. Frey. Over all, the state’s Hispanic population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2009, and is now a third of all residents. Nevada ranks second in the gap between aging whites and diverse youth, Mr. Frey said.

Declines in the youth population over all have occurred twice before in the last century, according to Mr. Frey. First in the 1930s, when the Depression gripped the country, dragging down the birth rate, and then in the 1970s and 1980s, as the baby boomers aged out of childhood and women delayed marriage and went to work.

The current decline is potentially more permanent, he said, because it is related to the aging of the white population, a reality that will not change anytime soon.

According to last year’s census estimates, of the 24 states that gained children in the last decade, whites contributed to the growth in just 8, Mr. Frey said. The highest was Utah, where their share was 43 percent.

Even in Virginia, a largely suburban state whose white adult population rose considerably over the decade, the young white population registered a decline.

In contrast, the number of mixed-race children doubled, Hispanic children doubled, and Asian children were up by more than two-thirds, according to Mr. Johnson.

“Living in the suburbs used to mean white family, two kids, a TV, a garage and a dog,” he said. “Now suburbia is a microcosm of America. It’s multiethnic and multiracial. It tells you where America is going.”

    In Census, Young Americans Increasingly Diverse, NYT, 4.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/us/05census.html

New Jersey’s Ethnic Makeup Shifts, and Population Drifts Southward

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

In the last decade, the number of white people in New Jersey declined as the number of Asians and Hispanics soared, and the population shifted southward — some of the many shifts with broad cultural and political implications that were revealed in 2010 census figures released on Thursday.

Newark, the state’s largest city, grew 1.3 percent, to more than 277,000 people, reversing five decades of contraction, and the second-largest, Jersey City, grew 3.1 percent, to more than 247,000. But populations declined in several of the largest and most heavily minority cities and towns, including Paterson, Trenton, Camden, Union City, East Orange, and Irvington.

In particular, the state’s most crowded areas saw something of a black exodus from 2000 to 2010; the total population dropped 11.2 percent in Irvington and 8 percent in East Orange, both places that are predominantly black. At the same time, the cities became much more heavily Hispanic.

Over all, the population of New Jersey grew 4.5 percent, to nearly 8.8 million people, but that was far behind the 9.7 percent national growth rate.

Growth was slowest in the state’s densely packed northeast, where most of the population resides. Essex County, which includes East Orange, Irvington and Newark, shrank 1.2 percent, to about 784,000 people, well below its peak of more than 932,000 in 1970. The state’s most populous county as recently as the 1980s, Essex slipped to third in 2010, behind Middlesex, which grew to almost 810,000 people. Bergen County, the most populous, grew 2.4 percent, to 905,000, and Passaic and Union Counties also grew by less than 3 percent.

The southern half of the state boomed by comparison — the populations of Gloucester and Ocean Counties each grew by 13 percent. Lakewood Township in Ocean County, with an expanding Orthodox Jewish population, had the fastest growth of any large municipality, soaring almost 54 percent in the decade, to nearly 93,000 people.

“In some of the more developed areas, you have towns that are pretty much built out, and a lot of empty-nesters,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Factors drawing people to South Jersey, he said, were more-affordable housing and construction of highways providing access to job centers.

The number of non-Hispanic white people living in the state fell by more than 300,000, to about 5.2 million, dropping from 66 percent of the population to 59.3 percent. The shift was even more pronounced among whites under 18, who by 2010 were just 51.6 percent of the state’s children.

“Those are pretty astounding changes,” said Tim Evans, research director at New Jersey Future, a research group. “It’s another sign that New Jersey is on a similar path to California, in terms of becoming majority-minority.”

The Asian population jumped 51 percent, to more than 700,000, or 8.2 percent of the total, while the number of Hispanics climbed 39 percent, to more than 1.5 million, or 17.7 percent. The black population changed little, at 1.1 million, or 12.8 percent.

The ethnic shifts could presage altered economic and political patterns, though financial and voting power can lag decades behind a rise in raw numbers.

In the United States House of Representatives, New Jersey has seven Democrats, representing mostly terrain in the northeast corner of the state, and six Republicans. But the state will lose one seat based on the census.

The census shows heavily Democratic and minority areas losing sway as the state embarks on the once-a-decade task of redrawing district lines for the Legislature and Congress, based on the numbers released on Thursday. Even before the figures were published, Republicans had high hopes of making gains in that process.

But the census also shows traditionally Republican and swing areas becoming more ethnically diverse, with fast-rising numbers of Hispanics, Asians and blacks. In Sussex and Warren Counties, in the northwest corner of the state, the minority population, while still small, nearly doubled.

“A lot of what we’re seeing is the continuing suburbanization of New Jersey, including significant minority suburbanization,” Mr. Hughes said.

One indicator of that suburbanization is that towns that had 20,000 to 50,000 people in 2000 had the fastest growth rate, 6.4 percent. Those with over 75,000 grew just 1.5 percent.

Asian population growth was heaviest in suburban Middlesex County, particularly in Edison, Piscataway, Woodbridge and East Brunswick. The number of Asians in the county jumped more than 50 percent, and by 2010 accounted for 21.3 percent of the population. In Edison, Asians reached 43.1 percent of the population, surpassing whites as the largest group.

In places that were already majority Hispanic in 2000, like Perth Amboy, Passaic, North Bergen and Paterson, their predominance increased markedly. Hispanics became a majority in Elizabeth and nearly did in New Brunswick; they overtook blacks as the largest group in Camden; and they passed whites as the largest group in Hackensack.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2011

A chart on Friday with an article about shifts in population in New Jersey reversed the legends for increases and decreases. The purple circles indicated areas where the population increased and the yellow ones showed areas where it decreased.

    New Jersey’s Ethnic Makeup Shifts, and Population Drifts Southward, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/nyregion/04jersey.html

Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — When Hurricane Katrina hit and the murky waters rushed through levee breaches, even the facts were drowned.

Official documents were destroyed, years of photographs were ruined, and a city’s ability to know itself was lost. Answers to basic questions like how many people lived here, where they lived and who they were could not be easily answered.

Now there finally are some numbers, and they show that the city is 29 percent smaller than a decade ago.

The Census Bureau reported on Thursday that 343,829 people were living in the city of New Orleans on April 1, 2010, four years and seven months after it was virtually emptied by the floodwaters that followed the hurricane.

The numbers portray a significantly smaller city than in the previous census, in 2000, though it should be said that New Orleans had been steadily shrinking even then. In 1990, it was the 24th-biggest city in the country, in 2000, the 31st, and now it has surely dropped from the top 50.

The latest figure is lower than estimates cited widely by many here in recent months. It is lower, by roughly 10,000, than the official census estimate in the summer of 2009.

“It’s not an unqualified good thing to have big numbers,” said Mark VanLandingham, a professor at Tulane University who has expressed frustration with frequent calls from local officials, sometimes successful, for the Census Bureau to raise the city’s population estimate. “It made it very difficult to figure out what was actually going on.”

The census findings reveal some other changes in the population, as well.

According to Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who analyzed the census results for The New York Times, the city has roughly 24,000 fewer white residents than it did 10 years ago, though the proportion of the white population has grown to 30 percent.

The city has 118,000 fewer black residents. New Orleans, once more than two-thirds black, is now less than 60 percent black.

There are 56,193 fewer children, a drop of nearly 44 percent.

The movements in the region can be seen with some clarity as well. St. Tammany Parish, a suburban refuge for many New Orleanians after the storm, grew by nearly a quarter. St. Bernard Parish, which is downriver from the city and was almost completely overwhelmed by the floodwaters, shrank by nearly half.

The Hispanic population of neighboring Jefferson Parish, home to many of those who came to fill the city’s ravenous appetite for construction labor, jumped by 65 percent.

Some may yet challenge these figures, arguing that the count overlooked people living in abandoned houses or moving in with one relative after another as they wait for rents to come down or houses to be rebuilt. There is no question such people exist in New Orleans; whether they were all counted is another matter.

Emily Arata, the deputy mayor for external affairs , said the city was not planning to challenge the numbers, in part because such challenges do not traditionally succeed but also because it was satisfied that the figure fell within 3 percent of the 2009 estimate.

The numbers have consequences, of course. Many of them will play out in the heated political battle to come in March when the State Legislature meets to discuss redistricting.

Louisiana has lost a Congressional seat, something that was possible even without the storm, given the state’s anemic population growth in the first five years of the decade. But while the loss itself may not be a result of the floodwaters, its effect will be.

With such a significant drop in New Orleans’s black population, will the state’s majority-minority Congressional district remain centered in the city? Will it snake upward from New Orleans, along the Mississippi to East Baton Rouge, now the largest parish in the state?

“The one thing that people need to realize about these numbers is that everything is on the table,” said Norby Chabert, a Democratic state senator from Houma, south of New Orleans. “The political assumptions that have been bedrock for however many years now are out the window.”

Far more is at stake than political representation.

Certain to be a contentious topic at the legislative session in March are the scores, if not hundreds, of laws on the Louisiana books that exempt New Orleans from a variety of state rules. These exemptions, which go back decades, coyly apply to any city in the state of more than 400,000 people, a description that no longer applies to New Orleans.

“There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” predicted Emile Bruneau, a former legislator who represented a district in New Orleans.

In an e-mail, James Perry, a former mayoral candidate and the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, called the city’s population figure “likely devastating,” and raised concerns that it could lead to drops in federal financing for housing, infrastructure and public health efforts, as the city is still steadily pushing forward in recovery.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying that “accurate census estimates in future years will ensure that city government and local nonprofit organizations will have the federal funds necessary to provide our growing population with important services.”

But he and officials like Ms. Arata emphasized that the city’s recovery should not be judged by census data but by the reforms under way now, many of which are addressing problems that have plagued the city for years. The mayor, in his statement, mentioned the overhaul of the city’s schools and the broad and ongoing redesign of its troubled criminal justice system. Indeed, as the census numbers were trickling out, the City Council was voting to build a new, and smaller, jail.

There are some who say it is premature, even wrong, to focus only on the 343,829 people who are here (compared with 484,674 in 2000). “I think it does point to that we have a problem with a large percentage of displaced people,” said Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, which is based at Tulane.

Dr. Hill described shortcomings in housing programs, particularly in initiatives meant to restore the city’s rentals, that disproportionately affected black residents. Such failings may have been a reason why so many former residents have not returned.

The 2010 census tracked people’s current locations, not their past homes nor future intentions. And indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to know how many of the New Orleanians of 2000 who are not here still want to return. It is not even known where they are. But nonprofit rebuilding groups say their waiting lists are long.


Matthew Ericson contributed reporting from New York.

    Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows, NYT, 3.2.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04census.html