Material sourced from NYT piece By Tim McKeough April 27, 2021
Mr. Salvo, riding the No. 4 train to the Bronx, where he still lives, was the city’s chief decipherer and interpreter of the 2000 census. Credit | Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Salvo knows the city better than almost anybody, these are some of his thoughts on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, what comes next, and the impact immigration will have on shaping NYC’s future.
“I lived through the 1970s in the city. New York City was in the throes of a major crisis. The city was broke. There were a lot of people who were down on the city and a tremendous loss of population. From 7.9 million people it went all the way down to 7.1 million people in the course of a single decade. At the same time, 800,000 immigrants came to the city. It was true that New York City was in terrible shape, but it also offered a lot of opportunities. The city rose up and prospered, largely on the backs of immigrants. So we have been in this cycle before.
Judging from how the city came back from the abysmal 1970s and built itself back up in the ’80s and ’90s, it will happen again. The city will rise. It will rise through the power of immigration.”
“The average doesn’t exist,” Mr. Salvo said when asked in 2010 about the typical New Yorker. “New York would be the epitome of that statement.” Credit | Suzanne Chillo/The New York Times
“What do you think the city should do to support a recovery?
”The questions we are looking at today are access to housing, equity and fairness, and those issues need to be tackled head on. Those issues are now on the front burner. Housing is something to watch. People are living in overcrowded housing situations, and I think that’s one of the reasons the crisis was so bad.”
What’s the best bet for a recovery?
”What we pray will happen is that the city will come back with a ferocity we have never seen in food, beverage, entertainment and hotels. All of that is going to come back. And hopefully the immigrant population will prosper because of that. That’s the key.””
Mr. Salvo has long championed the decennial census. “The Census Bureau,” he said in 2018, “creates reality.” Credit | Gaia Squarci for The New York Times
Joseph Salvo worked to make sure hundreds of thousands of New York City addresses were added to the Census Bureau’s address list. And he was brought in as an expert witness in the legal challenge to the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census in 2019. Here, he explains why the census is so important:
“The New York attorney general realized they needed someone in court to show the damage that could be done, if there was a citizenship question. I ended up live, in court, with a map. “Look at this map. If the census doesn’t get a good response, look at the damage that gets done.” That is a major point in my career because the outcome was favorable. I feel like I was defending my father and the people that came before, and after me.
And the address list for New York City is the best it could ever be. That’s my pride and joy. Being able to get the city its fair share of representation.
How can the next chief demographer help New York City to bounce back, and perhaps help counter xenophobia and racism?
”Our job is interpretation, making people understand the facts. If people understand the facts and if people understand the diversity with facts, maybe we will replace the hostility. I think 98 percent of it is driven by fear of change. I would like to think that most New Yorkers, real New Yorkers, look at change and they learn to accept it. This is what it means to live in a dynamic city.””
Related posts:
