Jonathan, others—

Usually each November, FSCPE state participants are asked to review and comment on minor-civil-division-level housing stock changes (units permitted, demolitions if known, etc).  We take this seriously here, and have found the State Demographer staff and Census Bureau staff to be receptive to our review and data submissions during the 2009 estimates cycle, and prior years.

FSCPE state participants learned last November that Census Bureau had decided to depart from their usual annual estimates methodology – there were no housing stock changes for us to review.  Rodger Johnson at the Bureau basically said: We’re doing trend extrapolation for 2011 estimates cycle. 

I’m not sure if this was because the CB staff considered the CY 2010 building permits data to be disappointing (?) – or some other reason.  Whatever the case, this led to what Jonathan and Patty observe: within any county, most places in the county have the same growth rate.

I think they’d do well bringing back the minor-civil-division-level housing stock changes in the 2012 estimates cycle.

I just wanted to chime in with this discussion. In my region (Little Rock AR MSA) it’s clear that the city estimates are heavily driven by census county estimates. The estimates for the largest five cities in our central county all show 0.9% growth 2010-2011. This is absurd; these five cities varied in the 2000-2010 interval between outright decline in one case and 63 percent growth in another. The building permits and all other local evidence suggests that they are not all growing at 0.9 percent in unison.

Therefore I express my agreement that there’s something very wrong with the place/MCD estimates released  on July 1. Since these estimates are fundamentally misleading, they are worse than nothing at all.

Jonathan Lupton

That is a crucial question that needs to be answered.