Census Staff to Investigate Undercount Complaints

The U.S. Census Bureau has agreed to investigate the claims of 17% of the nation’s cities, counties and towns--including the city of Los Angeles--that the 1990 preliminary census missed thousands of housing units across the country.

In all, the bureau has accepted for review the challenges of 6,602 communities, including 128 in Southern California, while rejecting 983 challenges nationwide. Over the next week or so, census workers are expected to recanvass homes in many of these communities and will add inhabitants of houses they missed to the census roll.

The claims of inaccuracies surfaced last month when local governments across the country took issue with the Census Bureau’s preliminary population count.

Subsequently, cities and counties were given the opportunity to analyze the bureau’s preliminary tally--comparing the bureau’s list of households with local inventories.

Twenty of the nation’s largest cities reported discrepancies of more than 570,000 housing units. Los Angeles city officials reported that the census missed nearly 49,000 dwellings, or almost 6%.

Among the cities challenging the census in California are both slow- and fast-growing communities. Oakland, according to the latest census figures, grew 6% to 360,000 people, but officials there believe the count missed 500 houses and apartments. Cathedral City was the state’s fastest-growing city, jumping by 600% over the last decade. Local officials contend the Census Bureau may have missed 4,000 people, or 12% of the city’s population.

Of the 39,198 local governments nationwide, only one in four communities officially responded to the preliminary census figures and as many as a quarter of those said they accepted the bureau’s preliminary counts.

In Washington, census officials interpreted this as a sign that despite vociferous complaints from a number of large cities, including New York and Los Angeles, the vast majority of the nation’s towns and cities were satisfied with the census. Many legislators, however, have taken a different view.

“Barbara Bryant (director of the Census Bureau) argues that it’s a sign the census is going well because 80% of the jurisdictions did not complain,” said an aide to Rep. Thomas Sawyer, an Ohio Democrat who heads the congressional subcommittee on population and census. “Far from indicating that 80% were satisfied with the results, we believe that most jurisdictions lacked the time or the resources to mount a challenge.”

The Census Bureau’s preliminary population count was 245.8 million, short of the 250 million mark the bureau had estimated before the 1990 census began.

In both the House of Representatives and Senate, legislation has been introduced that would prohibit the Census Bureau from releasing official population figures until officials decide whether to revise the traditional head count by using a controversial statistical method. The technique, generally supported by big-city Democrats and opposed by suburban and small-town Republicans, would give relative weight to areas of the country that are thought to be routinely undercounted, such as inner cities with large black and other minority populations and rural communities.

A number of cities challenging the preliminary census results have decided to join New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dade County (Miami) in a lawsuit, originally filed in 1988, designed to force the bureau to use the so-called post-enumeration survey.