(Sent in by a reader who asks to remain anonymous…)

For a couple of months now I have been working as a census enumerator in a mixed upstate New York community. My experience verifies that lower income people have been undercounted in the past.

In the 2010 census some 140,000 enumerators are trying to count every dwelling place in the United States from Park Avenue to caves. With this effort, the U.S. Census Bureau hopes to create a master list of the dwellings of every person in the country.

Then there will be a followup special count of such structures as hospitals, nursing homes, college dorms, and the like. After that the bureau will send forms to every house on its newly updated mail list. Finally workers will visit all locations pinpointed by people like myself to conduct personal interviews with residents who failed to answer the mailed forms.

Basically the hand-held computers we use contain a list of all addresses in a given block, gleaned from the bureau’s existing master list made up of 2000 census data, as well as data collected in off-year counts. These addresses are coordinated with maps showing the physical location of every address.

From looking on the ground, the enumerator can presumably tell whether dwelling was canvassed in 2000. By excluding new construction that occurred between the census years, a picture of the problems with the 2000 census emerges…

For instance, I found an entire rundown neighborhood of attached dwellings, hidden in the woods, that was not included on my list. Residents confirmed that the units were there in 2000. Elsewhere I canvassed a trailer park of 30 units, but only 15 addresses were on my list. Again I was assured that all of the trailers were there a decade ago.

However, in two months of daily canvassing I found only a few mistakes in affluent neighborhoods.

This is not to accuse the census bureau of intentional under-counting in previous years. It is far more difficult to count dwellings in low income neighborhoods. They tend to be disorganized. Fewer dwellings are numbered, for instance, and some areas can be off-putting or perceived to be dangerous.

I work in mostly rural areas, interspersed with smaller towns of up to 10,000 residents. In organized suburban developments the houses are generally numbered. They often are not in rural areas (where I found much poverty).

Using the new mapping system I am supposed to confirm and map all dwellings already known to the Census Bureau, and map all dwellings that I see on the ground which do not appear in the existing maps and address lists. Our work is checked by samples taken by “quality” crews that follow on our heels.

Lots of problems crop up in an undertaking this large, but it appears to me that the bureau is trying hard this time to count everybody. Of course, the task is much, much harder in inner city neighborhoods, or places like, God forbid, New Orleans.

My guess is that the 2010 count will be more accurate than the 2000 census. The new map-spotting canvass using GPS technology is, however, confirming, at least in my region, that the poor were undercounted in the past.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at May 06, 2009 08:10 PM

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