New York City Census Outreach Pays Off

A $40 million investment by NYC to coordinate with community groups to conduct census outreach appears to have paid off, as the city is in line to receive $1.8 billion more in federal funding, Crain’s New York reports.

It was the first time the city funded census outreach, Gothamist reports, and the work seems to have paid off, with the census showing that the city added 629,000 residents for a total population of 8.8 million.

The outreach focused on immigrant and marginalized communities that usually go undercounted; the city even discovered more than a quarter-million addresses it didn’t even know existed, Gothamist says. Peter Lobo, the city’s chief demographer, told Gothamist that he believed the outreach helped count an additional half-million people.

Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted in response to the news: “This number will ensure our city gets the federal resources we need to keep moving forward.”

OnlyFans Backs Off Ban on Sexually Explicit Content

Sex workers are cautiously responding to the news that OnlyFans has abruptly reversed its stance on banning adult content.

OnlyFans said last week that it would prohibit sexually explicit content on its platform, a change it blamed on credit-card companies and banks. On Wednesday, after severe backlash from creators, it reversed the change.

Vanity Fair writes that “the platform’s betrayal of sex workers reveals hard truths about the greater creator economy at large,” namely, that platforms still set the terms of work, whether it’s driving for Uber, creating art on Patreon, or sex work on OnlyFans.

For now, many of the sex workers who used OnlyFans as a means of income are returning to the platform, but cautiously. Creator Skylar Shark summed it up to BuzzFeed: “as a sex worker it becomes very hard to fully trust any site you work for at the end of the day.”

Iowa Awarded Tax Break to Company That Created One Job

The Iowa Economic Development Authority has awarded five new tax breaks to five companies, including to one that will create … one whole job, The Center Square reports.

The IEDA also awarded $17.1 million to another company that “is expected to create” two jobs.

In total, the organization is spending $50.4 million on companies that will together create 170 jobs.

John Mozena, president of an economic development transparency organization, told The Center Square that these results belie the idea that the tax breaks are needed to lure businesses to the state or keep them there.

“When you look at what these companies are said to be doing, there’s little to no chance that they’d be picking up and moving elsewhere if not for the subsidy. If you’re not changing a company’s plans with a tax break, then you’re just lighting taxpayer dollars on fire,” he told the outlet.

“How is [hiring one person] news, and how is that something that the taxpayers of Iowa need to be subsidizing?” he added. “Without the subsidy, would that company not be hiring that one guy?”