Activist Urges Homeless to Boycott Census
Less than a month before the start of the 1990 Census, Mitch Snyder, perhaps the nation’s best-known advocate for the homeless, is urging homeless people to boycott the census, arguing that the counting process will vastly understate the number of people without homes and play into the hands of politicians seeking to minimize the problem.
“We are convinced that the Administration understands, just as we do, that it is impossible to locate and count more than a small fraction of America’s homeless,” Snyder wrote in a recent letter advocating a boycott by the homeless. “Their (the Administration’s) intent is to prove that the problem of affordable housing isn’t as serious as every indicator, including our own experiences and our senses, tells us that it is.”
Snyder, who heads the Washington-based Community for Creative Non-Violence, said he sent out copies of the call for a boycott to homeless shelters and advocacy groups across the country.
He wrote that his organization has already burned census forms it received, and spokesmen for other groups across the country--among them Gateway Communities, a homeless outreach program in Stamford, Conn., and Justice House, a shelter in Roanoke, Va.--said in interviews Tuesday that they will take similar actions. David Hayward of Justice House, which feeds and houses 80 people, said it will bar entry to census workers on March 20, the day homeless people are to be counted.
The 1990 Census will be the first to try to quantify the problem of homelessness since it came to be viewed as a national crisis. Many in government had hoped that the census would put to rest a decade-long debate over just how many people lack permanent housing. Up to now, estimates have ranged from 250,000 to 2 million.
To do the job, the Census Bureau will rely on 15,000 people, many of whom have yet to be hired, who will be trained for one day--the day before they are expected to go into some of the meanest streets and some of the most remote countryside and prevail upon desperate people to answer a series of questions. Those people will be asked their name, age, sex and marital status.
Cynthia Taeuber, a homeless specialist for the Census Bureau in Washington, said Snyder’s letter reflected “a minority viewpoint” among advocates for the homeless. She expressed hope that the bureau will receive widespread assistance from shelters, missions and other social service providers on March 20.
“We’re working with groups trying to convince them to help us,” she said.
However, Mary Ellen Hombs, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said this week that the question of whether to cooperate with the census has been hotly debated for the last year, and she said she anticipates “a passive approach to non-cooperation” from some organizations affiliated with the national coalition. The coalition, which is urging its members to cooperate with the census, has affiliates in 43 states, including California.
Scott Mather, the chairman of the California Homeless Coalition, the largest group of its kind in the state, said the coalition has decided to sponsor a voter registration drive the day the homeless count is taken.
“Instead of boycotting the census, we hope to turn the occasion into a positive one for the homeless,” Mather said.
Mather is among many people who work with homeless people in California and elsewhere who believe that the census count of the homeless will fall far short of accuracy. Some Southern California advocates for the homeless said that, for a variety of reasons, they have turned down Census Bureau requests for assistance.
“Many (homeless people) live in a great deal of isolation, and it’s hard to believe that the typical census enumerator is going to know where to find them,” said the Rev. Rafael Martinez, director of the North County Chaplaincy, which works with Latino migrants living in shanties and hillside dugouts, known as spider holes, in northern San Diego County. “Even if these people can be found by a census-taker, why should they trust some stranger who has come to interrogate them when every time that has happened in the past it has led to something detrimental?”
Martinez said he turned down a request by census workers to take them to to homeless encampments.
“It’s as if we have nothing to do but squire them around gratis, when the government has millions of dollars to train them,” Martinez said. “I suggested that they (the Census Bureau) subcontract with local agencies to train their people. The response was negative. Now, I just don’t have the time to help them out.”
Alice Callaghan, the director of a Skid Row service center in Los Angeles, said she refused a request to use members of her staff to train census workers. “With a staff of three, we can barely answer the phones. . . . We wish them (the Census Bureau officials) the best, but there’s really not a whole lot we can do.”
The concern over counting homeless people reflects a nagging pessimism about the census and, particularly, its capacity to count poor people, minorities and immigrants. A test census by the bureau in East Los Angeles in 1986 was found to have omitted 16% of the mostly Latino population, a follow-up study by a team of USC researchers revealed.
In 1980, the census missed 5% of the city’s entire population, according to widely accepted estimates. A repeat performance would deprive the city of about $110 million in state and federal aid that is distributed on the basis of population, the city’s Community Development Department estimates.
But the difficulties in obtaining accurate counts are not all of the Census Bureau’s making. In California, a report by a state legislative committee monitoring the census said that 37% of cities and counties in the state took advantage of an opportunity to review the completeness of Census Bureau address lists.
“Obviously, some cities could care less about the census,” said Adrian Dove, an assistant regional manager for the Census Bureau’s California operations.
The lists tell the bureau where to send census questionnaires, a process that begins in late March. In Los Angeles, a city that did conduct a review, officials reported that the Census Bureau’s address inventory failed to include 55,000 homes, about 4% of the city’s dwellings. In San Diego and Imperial counties, where local reviews were also conducted, nearly 75,000 households were found to be missing from the Census Bureau’s address lists.
Moreover, local reviews have noted error rates of 2% to 20% on the maps that census-takers will use when they go out in the spring to count people who failed to send in census forms.
Census officials said the maps will be corrected but, regarding the incomplete addresses, they said there is time only to update those lists where there are five or more households missing on a block.
The Census Bureau has always hedged its bets when it comes to counting homeless people.
“We have never said we will count all of the homeless,” Taeuber said Tuesday. Moreover, census officials cannot promise that the count, incomplete as it may be, will not become fodder for politicians who would downplay the plight of the homeless.
“The census can’t police the use of its data, but we do provide information that spells out the limitations and problems of the data,” Taeuber said.
“This (the homeless count) is going to be a conservative estimate,” said Don Conway of the Census Bureau’s San Diego office.
Part of the challenge faced by the Census Bureau is that, once again, many local governments that were asked to identify where homeless people seek refuge failed to respond.
According to Steve Alnwick, a Census Bureau geographer in Los Angeles, nearly 600 governmental units throughout the state were asked to provide the Census Bureau with the addresses of shelters, cheap hotels and outdoor locations favored by homeless people. Alnwick said his office received about 300 replies.
But in cities that cooperated with the Census Bureau, there is a lack of confidence in the information that has been provided.
The city of Los Angeles has spent close to $1 million informing people about the census and helping the Census Bureau prepare for the task of counting more than 3 million people. Part of that effort involved asking city police and fire personnel to note places where homeless people congregate.
Greg Lipton, an analyst with the Community Development Department, said that since September the city has mapped “hundreds” of locations frequented by 5,000 to 6,000 homeless people. But Lipton said the maps still are woefully inadequate because they fail to include certain locations, such as beaches and canyons, used by homeless people but “not normally patrolled by the police.”
City officials and advocates for the homeless who are cooperating with the census hope to attract many homeless people on the day of the counting by opening shelters that usually operate only during cold weather.
And amid all the pessimism that surrounds the counting of homeless people, there is the hope that the census will at least provide a reliable estimate of one segment of the homeless population.
“For the first time, we have a chance of getting a fairly accurate count of people living in shelters. That’s, of course, if they let the census takers in,” said Kim Hopper, a research scientists on the board of the national Coalition for the Homeless.
