The ten-year census may feel a lot like 2020 at this point – something that happened in a year we’d all like to forget.
But last month, the Census Bureau released its best estimate of how accurate the census of everyone living in the United States actually was.
The good news? The census considers the total of 331,449,281 to be pretty accurate.
The bad news? The bureau believes that certain demographic groups have again been undercounted, with approximately 3% missing for African Americans, 5% for Hispanics or Latinos, and 6% for Alaskan Natives and reservation Native Americans.
“The census was a ‘D-‘ at best,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans. “And the reason it was a ‘D-‘ is that the significant under-representation of black and brown communities should be unacceptable in a modern democracy.”
This undercount affects political redistribution and the distribution of federal dollars. It can also wreak havoc on the local economy, a problem Morial knows firsthand. When he was mayor of New Orleans in the 1990s and early 2000s, he tried to lure more grocery stores into parts of the city that were considered food deserts.
“If a hardware store chain grocery store looks at a neighborhood and says, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if there are enough customers there,’ that leads to divestments,” Morial said.
There are many reasons for being outnumbered. Renters are harder to count than homeowners, and African Americans are disproportionately renters. A well-founded distrust of the federal government, which is rooted in centuries of racism, also contributes to this.
Add in a pandemic, natural disasters, and Trump administration intervention, and it’s no surprise that 2020 saw another undercount.
The problem is that undercounting in 2020 isn’t just a 2020 problem.
“The 10-year census is the basis for all the statistics we track, including unemployment, poverty, jobs, housing costs,” said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center, which collects socioeconomic data and analyzes data in southeast Louisiana.
The Census Bureau publishes the American Community Survey each year. The ACS is a more detailed data set that influences how more than $600 billion in public dollars is allocated across the country.
The bureau is making changes to make the American Community Survey more reliable and to compensate for the decade-long undercount. However, Plyer wishes to use local data, such as utility records, to improve these estimates.
“It’s something they’ve done in the past, they did it in the ’70s and ’80s, but because of cost, they cut back on that,” she said.
While African Americans were no worse outnumbered than in 2020, Latinos were outnumbered. The Trump administration’s efforts to include a citizenship question in the census did not help.
“People of color and minorities in particular were afraid to share their information with the government,” said C. LeRoy Cavazos-Reyna, vice president for government and international affairs at the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Cavazos-Reyna said the good news is that the private sector has a lot more data than it did 20 years ago to measure Latino communities, particularly as consumers.
But the bad news is that being outnumbered could still influence where potential employers decide to open a business. Cavazos-Reyna is particularly concerned about undercounting in cities on the US-Mexico border.
“By being outnumbered, many private sector companies could choose not to go to a community based on the availability of skilled labor there,” he said.
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