In April, the Census Bureau announced that the population of Charlottesville had dropped sharply, decreasing by 8.7% in just four years. A few months later, City Council challenged the Census Bureau on those figures and, yesterday, the feds admitted fault. In fact, there was a 1.6% increase of the population in that period, Sarah Barry reports in the Daily Progress. It appears that the calculation problem lay, as cvillenews.com commenters speculated, in the proper inclusion of UVa students, which is a perennial problem for census-takers.
So for those of us who said that the census may well be right and we, for one, welcome our new census overlords…we suck. And for those of you who got it right, don’t rub it in too much.
For the next census if it’s not a big increase in Charlottesville I’m calling shenanigans. Many new apartment and house have been built in the last five years and their not done building. Some people have even predicted a decrease in the percentage of the African American population because of gentrification but I am not so sure.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/sprawl/full2.htm
Here is a very interesting page about sprawl across the United States. The page ranks cities first accoriding to their population size and then out of those groups (1 million plus, 250,000 – 1 million, less then 250,000) it says what metro areas are sprawling the most. In the less then 250,000 people group can you guess what city ranked in the top 5??? Yours truly, Charlottesville, Virginia. Granted, this was done in 1999 but I think it gives you an idea of how things are going.