Huge Undercount of Homeless Charged
The nation’s first attempt to count its homeless people missed 60% to 70% of the transient population of downtown Los Angeles, according to a report released Friday.
The findings appeared to underscore the contention of city officials nationally that the census has undercounted the urban poor.
“We seriously call into question the accuracy or validity of the count, and strongly caution against using the 1990 census data for developing or implementing public policy,” the authors of the report wrote.
The report on the homeless census, prepared by the nonprofit Los Angeles Homeless Health Care Project, is one of five assessment efforts by groups around the country who received grants from the Census Bureau to monitor the homeless count. The Los Angeles report was the first to be released.
Meanwhile, city officials learned Friday that a federal judge in Brooklyn has refused to compel the Census Bureau to use results of its controversial post-census sampling technique to adjust the national count of poor people, minorities and immigrants. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by Los Angeles, the state of California, New York City, Chicago and others.
At a press conference Friday, Mayor Tom Bradley recommended a congressional hearing on the validity of the homeless count. Bradley also urged that the count “not be used in the allocation of resources to address the needs of the (homeless) population.”
In the first comprehensive effort to count the nation’s homeless, census workers fanned out through the nation on the night of March 20, surveying transients in Skid Row flophouses and rural campsites. The effort was criticized almost from the start for missing significant chunks of the transient population. No official results from the count have been released.
For Los Angeles and other big cities, a higher count of homeless people as well as other residents could mean hundreds of millions of dollars more in federal aid. “I don’t need to remind you it means megabucks for us,” Bradley said at the press conference.
Bradley was joined by Rep. Thomas C. Sawyer, an Ohio Democrat who chairs a House subcommittee on census and population. Sawyer said he shared Bradley’s concerns about the homeless count and said his committee will hold a hearing on the census in Los Angeles in August.
Bradley said he thought the Census Bureau was doing a good job overall, and he noted the bureau’s announcement earlier this week that it has received census information from 91% of the nation’s households and 83% of Los Angeles households.
Michael R. Cousineau, executive director of the organization that issued the report, said the March 21 homeless census failed because census takers “didn’t look in the right places,” because there weren’t enough census takers and because too few of them could communicate with the large number of Latino homeless people.
Cousineau’s group stationed 80 observers throughout downtown Los Angeles on the night of the homeless count. The monitoring effort focused on downtown because it contains the largest concentration of homeless people in Southern California.
John Reeder, the Census Bureau’s regional director for Southern California, indicated he was not ready to accept the report’s bleak assesment of the homeless count.
“We don’t know if the figures they put out are correct,” he said.
But Reeder repeated what the Census Bureau has said all along about the count.
“We said it would miss people, that it would be conservative,” he said. This was partly because census takers were told not to walk down dark alleys or go other places where they might be at risk, he said.
Los Angeles city officials insisted they did not come away empty handed from this week’s ruling in the complex court case, which involved the population sampling technique known as “the post-enumeration survey.”
In Brooklyn, U.S. District Judge Joseph M. McLaughlin said it was premature to order the federal government to use the survey to adjust the census--a technique city officials believe would help compensate for the Census Bureau’s traditional undercounting of minorities.
However, the judge’s decision did not rule out use of the post-enumeration survey. And officials in Los Angeles took heart from much of what McLaughlin said in his 31-page opinion. The judge said that he would look long and hard at any government decision not to use the results of the survey to correct the nationwide count. The survey is to be conducted next month.
“We are not characterizing this as a loss,” said Jessie Heinz, the assistant city attorney representing Los Angeles in the case. Heinz said the judge rejected a government claim that the post-enumeration survey might not be constitutional and put government officials “under a heavy burden” to justify any decision not to rely on the survey.
The survey, which has been tested in inner-city neighborhoods in St. Louis and Los Angeles, involves revisiting 150,000 households that filled out census forms last April and determining whether there were more or fewer people living there than listed.
Adjustments in the count will be made where necessary in each of the 150,000 households sampled during the survey. Then, the secretary of commerce, who presides over the Census Bureau, will decide next year whether the results of the sampling can be used as a basis for adjusting the nationwide census.
