Census Tract 119.04 in Hillsborough County constitutes a perfect rectangle in a densely populated section of West Tampa just north of Al Lopez Park. Two grocery stores — a Walmart Neighborhood Market and an El Oso Blanco Supermarket — anchor its southern border along Hillsborough Avenue, while Bill Currie Ford and other car dealerships dot the tract’s western boundary along Dale Mabry Highway. It’s bounded by North Himes Avenue to the east and West Lambright Street to the north.

It’s the group of aging apartment complexes tucked between the busy commercial thoroughfares, however, that is the real concern and challenge for the U.S. Census Bureau. Residents living in the Courtney Cove Apartments, Pinetree Apartments, Silver Lake Apartments and Coopers Pond Apartments are some of the toughest people in the state to count.

The Census Bureau defines a tract as “hard to count” if 73% or fewer residents return their Census questionnaires. In the 2010 Census, the mail-back rate for tract 119.04 was 52%, making it one of the worst-performing locales in the Sunshine State. (The average mail-back rate in Florida as a whole is about 80%).

The West Tampa community’s demographics provide some clues to the counting conundrum. Approximately 47% of the people living in tract 119.04 are Hispanic, 32% are African-American and 46% are renters — groups the Census Bureau identifies as less likely to participate in its survey. About 16% of households in the community have no home internet service or have dial-up only service, another predictor of poor participation.

The Tampa neighborhood is just one of many low performers in the state. Roughly 15% of Floridians — about 3 million people — live in hard-to-count communities.

Why should Floridians care about an undercount? The U.S. Constitution specifies that the results of the Census, conducted once every decade, determine how many seats each state gets in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. Florida picked up two seats after the last Census and is expected to gain two more following the 2020 count, which would break its tie with New York for the third-biggest congressional delegation.

That’s assuming all goes well. A large enough undercount could cause Florida to lose seats or not gain any — a scenario that could have been plausible had the Trump administration succeeded in including a citizenship question on the Census form. U.S. Senate seats are unaffected by the Census. Each state is represented by two senators regardless of population.

The head count also determines how hundreds of billions of federal dollars are divvied up among state and local governments. The U.S. government relies on the numbers in allocating funding for 132 programs, including everything from Medicaid to school breakfasts (Head Start) to Pell grants to food stamps to highway planning funds, to name a few.

When the head count is wrong, the flow of dollars suffers for quite some time. The 2000 Census, for instance, missed about 200,670 Floridians — and as Florida TaxWatch President and CEO Dominic Calabro points out, the counting errors were baked into allocations for a decade. “That equated to $225 million in lost federal grants and aid to Florida we were lawfully entitled to but didn’t get because we didn’t have a proper count. So over a 10-year period, we lost somewhere close to $3 billion,” Calabro says.

He fears that without better participation, Florida’s undercount in 2020 could grow to 300,000 — roughly the equivalent of not counting the city of Orlando — and cost the state billions in federal aid.

With such high stakes, here are six important things to keep in mind about the 2020 Census count in Florida.

1 How the Process Works

While April 1, 2020, is officially Census Day, the process of counting the country’s inhabitants is a months-long marathon, not a one-day sprint. In March 2020, Census postcards will begin arriving in mailboxes. Most people — 75% to 80% — will receive a notice instructing them to take the survey online, and about a quarter will get a paper survey.

Later in March, those who haven’t responded will get a reminder in the mail — and another one after that if they still don’t respond. In April, non-responders will receive a questionnaire in the mail, followed by an “it’s-not-too-late” postcard.

In May, the U.S. Census Bureau will start sending field workers known as enumerators out to knock on the doors of those who still haven’t replied. If no one opens the door, the enumerator will go next door to get a “proxy” report, or estimate, from a neighbor. If the neighbors don’t respond, Census workers make their own estimates of household inhabitants based on administrative records, such as IRS or Social Security data or demographic characteristics of the neighborhood. (Approximately 6 million people were “imputed” this way in the 2010 Census).

At the end of the day, the accuracy of the Census depends on how inclusion mistakes, or overcounts, stack up against those who didn’t respond and were missed by enumerators. In 2010, both numbers were pretty close, and the end number of 308.7 million people — with a net overcount of 0.01% — was lauded as highly accurate, according to Robert Santos, vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute. He says the 2020 count will boil down to the same factors. “The accuracy really depends on errors, and it depends on prediction.”

2 Historically Undercounted Groups and People

• Non-native English speakers and those who are “linguistically isolated”
• Large or “overcrowded” households
• Single-parent households
• People who are unemployed or homeless
• Those receiving public assistance (SSI, disability)
• Adults without a high school diploma
• People who didn’t participate in the previous Census
• People living in seasonal or campground areas or scattered mobile homes
• Those living in high-crime areas
• People living in neighborhoods with hidden housing units
• Grandparents raising grandchildren
• Communities with large populations of minorities
• Rural communities
• Immigrants
• Low-income households
• Renters
• Migrant workers
• LGBTQ individuals
• Young children

3 The Citizenship Question Is Gone But Not Forgotten

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question, which the Trump administration tried to insert, from appearing on the 2020 Census form. Proponents said it was needed to better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But such a question hasn’t appeared on the survey since 1950, and many feared it would deter millions of foreign-born people living in the U.S. from responding.

Although the question is dead, many believe the controversy will deter some from participating. Santos at the Urban Institute predicts that many Florida immigrants simply will not participate in the survey. “If they see anybody coming up their doorstep, they will turn off the lights and not answer. And when the enumerator knocks on the next-door neighbor’s house asking them if they know the people next door, no one’s going to answer there,” he says.

Other households with a mix of immigrants and non-immigrants may return the forms but may leave off information about foreign-born people “because they fear that information may be used against them,” Santos says. “I expect that there’s going to be a higher rate of non-participation than otherwise would have been there had we not gone through this year of turmoil.”

4 For the First Time, the Census Is Going Digital

In 2010, approximately 80,000 households were part of a pilot program and participated in the Census online. Next year, the whole survey is going digital. While the Census Bureau estimates its innovations will save taxpayers about $5.2 billion, not everyone is cheering. A July 16 Government Accountability Office report warns that the new technologies haven’t been properly tested and that the agency’s systems and data face “significant cyber-security risks.” As a 2019 report in Wired magazine noted, some of the potential threats are outside the bureau’s control. They include people responding on unsecured devices, fraudsters who pose as the Census Bureau in phishing attacks, fake websites pretending to be the Census Bureau and disinformation campaigns spread through social media.

5 The Census Is Confidential

By law, the federal government must keep responses to the Census survey confidential and use them only for statistical purposes — published Census statistics can’t reveal any information about particular individuals, households or businesses. Census Bureau employees also take a lifetime oath to protect the privacy and confidentiality of respondents’ data. They can face fines and jail time if they violate it.

It wasn’t always that way, though. From 1709 through 1879, Census records were unprotected, and U.S. marshals posted them in public places for anyone to inspect. The Census Act of 1879 put an end to that, and Congress codified the rules in 1954.

6 What’s at Stake

House seats and federal funding aren’t the only prizes at stake in the 2020 Census. Census data is used for redrawing election districts for Congress and the state Legislature, as well as the boundaries for school boards, city councils and other local government entities.

Non-profits also rely on the data for their grant-making decisions. Companies use Census data to make business decisions. “If Walmart wants to put in a store, they’re going to base it on population clusters in neighborhoods, and if some areas are undercounted, they’re not going to have the weight that they should,” Santos explains. “It’s the same for elementary schools or high schools or fire stations.”

Missing Kids

By analyzing birth records, death certificates and immigration data, the Census Bureau estimates it missed about 1 million children under age 5 nationwide — including about 90,000 kids in Florida — in the 2010 Census. And although undercounts of some groups have decreased in recent years, the undercounting of children has actually gone up. To get at the problem, the Census Bureau has updated wording on its 2020 forms. For instance, instead of asking about “everyone living or staying at this address,” the bureau asks about “… all adults, children, and babies living or staying at this address.”

 

Read more in Florida Trend's October issue.

Select from the following options:

* offer valid for new subscribers only