Early Census Missed Many Homeless in L.A., Officials Say

Los Angeles city officials and homeless provider groups Thursday said there were so many problems with the homeless census that they were preparing an informal report to give the U.S. Census Bureau next week--along with a request for additional counting of places that were missed.

In San Diego, though, census authorities decided to conduct a recount almost immediately after reviewing what was clearly incomplete data from northern San Diego County concerning the area’s huge population of homeless Latino laborers.

Wendy Greuel, assistant to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, said that “everyone feels as though they did not count all the homeless. The plan now is to go to the census and bring them important data instead of simply saying, ‘Hey, it didn’t go right.’ ”

“We feel there were some areas where our procedures weren’t completely followed, so we have to go back and do some rework,” Michael J. Weiler, assistant regional manager with the Bureau of the Census, said in San Diego, explaining that the recount will likely be conducted within a week or so, after procedures have been reviewed.

There have been widespread indications that census takers--only a minority of whom displayed a command of Spanish, the dominant language among the migrants--undercounted the migrants and took only head counts when more extensive demographic questioning was called for.

“There’s no doubt that they missed a lot,” said Connie Saldana, coordinator of Hispanic Services for the North County Interfaith Council, a social service agency that works with migrants.

Only the selected areas where migrants reside and gather will be recounted, Weiler said, as counting in other areas went smoothly.

Census officials, while conceding some mistakes were made, nonetheless said the novel attempt Tuesday and Wednesday generally was a success nationwide.

Greuel said the census left out some of Los Angeles’ best-known homeless shelters like Covenant House, a homeless youth shelter in Hollywood, and L.A. Men’s Place, a downtown shelter for chronically mentally ill homeless men.

She said census officials informed the city that they plan to count such facilities along with the general U.S. population on April 1 because it has defined such facilities as “group homes”--even though they actually serve the homeless.

“The problem we are hearing is the homeless saying, ‘You know, I wanted to be counted and nobody counted me,’ ” Greuel said.

Similar to the complaint in San Diego County, an official of a homeless advocate’s agency said the city report also will include numerous examples of census takers capable of speaking only English who were assigned to heavily Latino neighborhoods.

“At La Placita (church and refugee center), there were no enumerators who spoke Spanish,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

Greuel said the report will include as many hard facts as possible, but that the city is also collecting anecdotes from people who were on the front lines.

For instance, she said: “We know of examples where the census takers arrived too late at shelters where people had been waiting to be interviewed but had gone to bed. They were counted but could not be interviewed, and that’s not acceptable.”

Stewart reported from Los Angeles; McDonell from San Diego County.