Census rank puzzles officials

Some officials question the
survey’s accuracy.

By DAVID SKOLNICK

CITY HALL REPORTER

YOUNGSTOWN — Local officials are scratching their heads at the U.S. Census Bureau’s placement of Youngstown as having one of the lowest median household incomes among midsize cities in the country.

They question the census estimate.

“I’m not so sure those numbers are accurate,” said Bill D’Avignon, the city’s Community Development Agency director.

While noting that the bureau does good and accurate work, Reid Dulberger, the Regional Chamber’s executive vice president, said the agency isn’t perfect and could be mistaken about Youngstown.

“They’re not infallible,” he said of the bureau.

The census estimate for 2006, released Tuesday, has Youngstown with a $21,850 median household income. That’s the lowest in the nation among cities with populations between 65,000 and 249,999. It’s also lower than any city with a population of at least 250,000.

The 2006 census number is a large decline from the previous year’s estimate of $26,516. Youngstown wasn’t in the bottom 10 in this category in 2005.

Can’t explain it

The bureau doesn’t have an explanation for Youngstown’s decline, said Ed Welniak, its chief of income surveys branch. Neither do local officials, who question the accuracy of the bureau’s estimate.

The bureau’s estimate comes with a very large margin of error. While the agency lists Youngstown as No. 1 among midsize cities, it’s somewhere in the top seven.

The margin of error on Youngstown’s median household income is 9.4 percent.

Most reliable surveys and studies have margins of error between 3 percent and 4 percent, D’Avignon said.

“This is two or three times what the margin of error should be, and it could be inaccurate,” he said.

The census estimates show Youngstown with 30.5 percent of its population below the poverty level, significantly higher than the national level of 12.3 percent.

D’Avignon acknowledges Youngstown has a large number of people with low incomes. But he said nothing of significance happened between 2005 and 2006 to make the city’s median household income drop by nearly 18 percent from year to year.

“Some other economic indicators have leveled off,” he said. “Why this hit bottom, I don’t know.”

Drop in unemployment

The city’s unemployment rate in 2006 declined from the previous year.

It was 8 percent last year and 8.4 percent in 2005, according to Ohio Department of Job and Family Services’ statistics. It continues to drop and is at 7.7 percent as of last month. (Youngstown had the highest unemployment rate of the 20 most populated communities in Ohio in 2005 and 2006.)

JFS officials didn’t have specific figures for Youngstown, but noted that the region that takes in Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio and Mercer County in Pennsylvania lost 1,900 jobs between 2005 and 2006, including 900 in the manufacturing field.

Typically the center city of a metropolitan area, Youngstown in this case, is most impacted when a region loses jobs, said Larry Less, a JFS labor economist.

The Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley sees a steady increase in need each year, but nothing to indicate that poverty is growing at an alarming rate in the city, said Rev. David L. Sherrard, the Youngstown-based agency’s executive director.

“There’s nothing off the charts here,” he said.

Possible factors

Data for the census report is based on samplings of areas with errors possibly occurring from how respondents interpret questions and the willingness of people to accurately answer questions, among other issues, according to the bureau.

“Had it remained stagnant or shown a little improvement, we wouldn’t have been surprised,” said Dulberger, who, in addition to his chamber position is the interim president of the Youngstown Central Area Community Improvement Corp., a downtown property redevelopment agency.

“But to see it drop that much doesn’t compute,” he added.

The city’s economic base is experiencing growth, Dulberger said.

“The trend we see for the city is it’s getting better,” he said. “We see the city growing. To look at [the census] statistics, they don’t make sense.”

A glaring error by the bureau specifically related to Youngstown occurred two years ago. In June 2005, the bureau estimated the city’s 2004 population at 77,713. The bureau’s population figure for Youngstown in 2004 was changed to 83,906 in June 2006.

skolnick@vindy.com