Storming over The Census

Demands for a recount

There's no way these figures are correct," fumed Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. "This just doesn't make any sense," protested Boston's Kevin White. New York's Mayor Edward Koch declared flatly: "We're certain that they are not accurate."

Similar pained cries were echoing loudly across the nation, as city halls everywhere began receiving the preliminary reports of the 1980 census. Cause of the anger: the mayors simply do not believe their cities have lost as many people in the past decade as the early numbers show. The census figures have Atlanta down from 497,000 to just 402,000; Boston down from 641,000 to 505,000; Baltimore down from 906,000 to 753,000. But the biggest loser is likely to be New York City: the new statistics indicate that it has about 800,000 fewer residents than its 1970 population of 7.9 million.* No early figures are yet available for Chicago and Los Angeles, the second and third largest U.S. cities.

Hoping to be able to refute the Census Bureau's findings, tentative as they are, municipal officials have begun their own head counts and are even taking the bureau to court. Two congressional subcommittees plan to convene joint hearings on the dispute this week.

The uproar reflects the high stakes involved in the decennial count. Population totals have long been important in the U.S. because they determine the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives and state legislatures. But with the burgeoning of federal programs like revenue sharing in the past decade, population now also affects the way more than $50 billion a year in federal funds are disbursed. If the preliminary figures hold, for example, New York City could lose four of its 18 congressional districts and $50 million annually in federal aid.

Census officials are not at all surprised by the commotion. Slip-ups are just about inevitable in an undertaking as gargantuan as this year's $1 billion effort to reach the nation's 86 million households and then process the answers contained on 120 million forms. It is to uncover major inaccuracies that the bureau decided to issue tentative findings this year. The disclosure is part of a new review process in which the early field counts, along with the maps of housing units used by census takers in making their tally, are being sent to the nation's 39,000 local jurisdictions. Municipal officials have two weeks to respond to these preliminary data. Where the numbers are contested, the bureau will recanvass the areas in question.

Several cities are taking their own census and concentrating especially on minority neighborhoods. Illegal aliens can be especially difficult to count; they often try to avoid the census takers, fearing that the data provided eventually could be used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport them. (In fact, census information remains confidential and is not made available to other agencies.)

Atlanta officials so far claim to have found 37,000 residents missed by the census. The federal head count was checked against information from such local sources as utility company and water bureau records, lists of tenants in municipal housing projects and address directories. City officials also tabulated prison inmates, nursing-home residents and day laborers waiting for jobs at hiring halls--all of whom, they charge, were ignored by census takers.

Boston is particularly upset with its loss of more than 130,000 people in the preliminary figures because it expects to register a gain of 3,000. Boston officials claim that the actual occupancy rate in the city's residential buildings is higher than the estimate used by the bureau and that there is an average of 2.5 people per Bostonian household, not the 2.4 assumed by the census statisticians.

Unlike other cities, Detroit is not basing its case against the census on specific omissions in the counting process. Instead, Detroit officials maintain that history demonstrates the Census Bureau has consistently undercounted the population in general, and inner-city blacks in particular. Detroit is suing the bureau to force it to adjust the final census results to compensate for an assumed undercount, and more than a dozen other cities are expected to file briefs supporting its case. When the suit is heard in mid-August in a Detroit federal district court, the Census Bureau is expected to maintain that federal law prohibits tampering with the census results.

Not all cities are displeased with the census. The San Diego total was within one-half of 1% of what was expected; Seattle's was within 5%. Though they have not yet received their preliminary data, Dallas and Houston expect no major problems; both have considerably increased in size over the past decade, and Houston (est. pop. 1.7 million) is among the nation's fastest growing cities. Census officials stress, moreover, that the re-canvassing under the review process is certain to increase totals in the cities that are submitting complaints.

Whether such increases will be big enough to satisfy beleaguered municipal leaders is another matter. Says a bureau official: "The trends are there and have been there for some time. We did not discover them. Cities, particularly in the Northeast, are losing population, and both the politicians and the public better get ready to face what that means."

*While New York City will certainly remain the largest U.S. metropolis, the 1980 census will probably drop it from third to fourth place among the world's cities, behind Mexico City (9 million), Tokyo (8.5 million) and London (7.2 million).

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