Getting creative with the count
As census deadline nears, communities trying to encourage participation
Troy From an elementary school student bringing her mother to fill out her 2020 census form to a maintenance worker pausing to ask how to complete his form, these were the small victories volunteers chalked up Monday as they tried to increase response rates.
The city ’s North Central neighborhood is a hard-to-count area with high poverty rates, a population that frequently turns over and a large number of minority residents. Its 38.2 percent rate for households completing the decennial census questionnaire is the lowest for all of Rensselaer County’s census tracts.
The Rensselaer County Complete Count Committee held a two-day street mural project on Sixth Avenue between Douw Street and Ingalls Avenue that included federal enumerators equipped to assist residents in answering the census form as the Oct. 31 deadline is less than three weeks away. At stake is ensuring an accurate count to obtain federal and state aid.
“We’re trying to focus our efforts where the participation rate is the lowest,” said Leslie Cheu, co-chair of the complete count committee and executive director of the Troy Savings Bank Charitable Foundation.
It’s easy to lose track of neighborhoods like North Central in Troy, Arbor Hill and West Hill in Albany and Mont Pleasant in Schenectady — which all have low self-response rates for residents answering the census questionnaire on their own.
Of these urban areas, North Central’s 38.2 selfresponse rate for households is the best: Albany has census tracts at 36.3 percent along Central Avenue adjoining West Hill, 35 percent in part of Arbor Hill and 33.7 percent in West Hill. In Schenectady, the tracts in Mont Pleasant are at 33.3 percent and 35.1 percent. Only the rural Saratoga County towns of Edinburg at 31.1 percent and Day at 21.5 percent have lower rates, but that is considered to be due to the tradition of enumerators going door to door in past counts.
Albany continues to promote the census on social media, connecting with residents at schools and using the police department’s Neighborhood Engagement Unit to speak to residents on their beat, said David Galin, chief of staff for Mayor Kathy Sheehan.
By comparison, the national self-response rate is 66.8 percent of households and the New York rate is 63.9 percent.
The U.S. Census Bureau is reporting that 99.9 percent of all households have been enumerated. That’s the bureau’s term for visiting households that did not complete the
census forms on their own.
“When housing units are ‘enumerated’ via doorto-door visits, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people were counted or were counted accurately,” according to a recent review by Hard To Count 2020 at the CUNY Center for Urban Research. That’s why local complete count committees are still at work with the goal of increasing self-response rates to ensure as accurate a census as possible.
A variety of national, state and local organizations battled President Donald Trump’s administration to keep Oct. 31 as the deadline for completing the census, as originally set in response to
the coronavirus pandemic disrupting the count.
“It’s so important for people to complete the census forms. In the last few weeks, it’s now more critical to make sure census takers are counting everybody,” said Mark Castiglione, executive director of the Capital District Regional Planning Commission, which relies on the census data for depicting how the region is doing.
Kendra Farstad, the artist coordinating the street mural project for the Arts Center of the Capital Region, described getting people to respond is a “tough job,” but the murals are educating residents about the census.