Census Gears Up for House-to-House Interviews : Survey: The bureau is facing its most daunting task. Director tells Congress $100 million more is needed to handle the added workload.

With a plea to Congress for more money and public assurances that it is back on track, the troubled 1990 Census has begun to gear up for its most daunting task--going door-to-door to some 37 million households and asking residents the same questions they could not or would not respond to by mail.

Barbara Bryant, the director of the Census Bureau, told a panel of skeptical members of Congress on Thursday that the bureau will need at least $100 million beyond its current budget to complete the house-to-house interviewing on time. But she said the job can be done despite the fact that census takers must visit about 15 million more homes this year than they did during the last census in 1980.

“We will go to anything that has a roof on it,” Bryant said.

Other census officials, in interviews here this week, acknowledged that gaining access to more than one-third of the nation’s front doors won’t be easy in a society where a growing number of rich people sequester themselves behind locked gates, where immigrant families hole up in garages and trailers and where soliciting information in some neighborhoods can be a life-endangering act.

“You don’t know what’s going to be tougher, getting by a doorman in a Park Avenue apartment building or persuading a gang member in Southeast Los Angeles to leave you alone,” said a census official who asked not to be named.

In Los Angeles, the bureau’s Jess Margarito said: “We have had meetings with members of the Crips and the Bloods to let them know what we are doing and to ask them not to disturb our people.”

When the census takers go house-to-house, beginning next week, they are likely to encounter hostility, apathy and a lot of empty houses, thanks to the busy lives of America’s growing number of two-career couples, say pollsters and survey experts who conduct such interviews on a regular basis.

“They can expect a lot of doors won’t be open because there’s no one behind them,” said Andy Kohut, president of Princeton Survey Research Associates.

Louis Harris, the noted New York-based pollster, said many market research firms have given up door-to-door work in favor of telephone interviews because of the expense and danger of intruding into unfamiliar neighborhoods.

The perils and pitfalls of trying to get 250 million Americans to answer census forms during one year has led some demographic experts to argue in favor of a system of sampling segments of the population.

To date, the bureau has received forms back from 63% of the nearly 100 million homes that were supposed to receive forms in the mail. The rate of response is 23% lower than it was in 1980 and 7% lower than the bureau had predicted. Bureau officials believed the response rate would be lower than 1980 because they suspected that the amount of unsolicited mail people now receive would cause many to throw out census forms without looking at them.

However, the disappointing level of response has caused a group of Democratic congressmen, including Mervyn M. Dymally of Compton and Vic Fazio of Sacramento, to accuse census officials of jeopardizing the success of the census and to request President Bush to intervene.

Critics argue that the bureau would have received a higher return if it had better identified the census forms as official government documents; had better assembled address lists, and had not sent out the forms in early April, when people were preoccupied with tax returns.

“The Census Bureau is presiding over a failure, so far,” Fazio said.

The congressmen joined Democratic Party Chairman Ron Brown in asking Bush to make a live statement on prime time television to draw people’s attention to the importance of achieving a complete count of the nation’s population. Nearly $40 billion in federal aid is distributed to local governments on the basis of population, age and income data supplied by the census. Moreover, 18 congressional seats--seven of them in California--could be reallocated as a result of population changes measured by the census.

Republicans have also expressed concern about the progress of the census, although their statements have been considerably more tempered.

This week, city officials in Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit and New York said that local surveys indicated that from 10% to 19% of local residents had not received their census forms.

Testifying before the House census subcommittee Thursday, Bryant said that post offices had not been able to deliver 3.1 million census forms, about 500,000 more undeliverable forms than the bureau had anticipated. But she maintained that there was no evidence, so far, that a disproportionate number of minority residents were being missed by the census.

“In actual fact, urban counts are not lacking more than other places,” Bryant said.

Drawing a comparison between well-known black and white neighborhoods in New York City, she said that “the Harlem response rate is better than the upper East Side.” And she said that many Latino neighborhoods “also are looking good.”

Moreover, the 64-year-old Bryant, whose manner is normally reminiscent of a patient if slightly put upon school principal, blamed some of the problems of the census on her critics. She said that the “negativity” of some city officials toward the bureau was “creating a very unfortunate aura” that might be causing some people not to participate in the census.

In some cities, including Los Angeles, the bureau is still scrambling to hire enough people, especially people who can speak foreign languages, to get the job done. And in Los Angeles and other cities where the census mailing missed buildings, streets and entire zip codes, officials are asking how census takers now will find those households.

“We remain convinced that we will have an accurate census,” Bryant said. “The only thing that has changed is that our workload of personal-visit follow-up will be larger than originally planned.”