2010 Census Mug - CC image from flickr

Ryan Avent takes note of some joyous holiday news for the District:

I always love looking through new population estimates from the Census Bureau. New numbers, estimated as of July 2009, have just come out, and it appears the District is just a few hundred people short of crossing the 600,000 threshold. From 2008 to 2009, the District was the fifth fastest growing state, in percentage terms.

The full dataset is available here.  DC’s estimate from July 2009 puts the population at 599,657.  This obviously puts the 600,000 number within reach for the 2010 Census.  However, crossing that threshold isn’t a given, as the methodology from the Census’s population estimates in the intervening years between each decennial census vary quite a bit from the forms everyone will be filling out in March of 2010.

With that in mind, it’s vital that DC achieve a complete and accurate count in 2010.  600,000 isn’t just a nice round number to pass, as it shows a real growth and reinvestment in both DC specifically and urban areas in general that’s taken place over the past few years.