Uncounted, underfunded
Hampton Roads’ poorest cities could lose the most from people not being counted in this year’s census
Once every decade, government officials across the country take on the monumental task of counting every person living in the United States. The job is critically important — for one, population totals determine how much federal money is spent for each community’s roads, schools, housing and social programs.
In Hampton Roads, officials who oversee some of the region’s poorest places worry many people there have been left out of this year’s count. Along with complications from the COVID-19 pandemic, they blame a breakdown at the U.S. Census Bureau, which leads count efforts, in part, by hiring enumerators — temporary workers paid to knock on doors and make sure no one is missed.
“We were promised, repeatedly, by the federal government that the city of Portsmouth itself would have 750 people working as enumerators in the city. We ended up with around 200,” said Brian Swets, a city planning official who worked on the local government’s efforts to ensure a complete count. He noted those workers were paid less than the $21.50 per hour they had initially been promised.
“We didn’t have a sincere federal partner in this effort,” Swets said.
This could have serious financial ramifications. The George Washington Institute of Public Policy has estimated that Virginia could lose up to $2,000 for every person not counted, adding up to millions.
Swets said he consistently struggled to reach bureau officials, complicating efforts to count people in places where people typically don’t fill out their census form. There are many reasons residents don’t self-report — sometimes it’s because they don’t trust the government, other times it’s because they don’t have reliable access to the internet.
As a result, the bureau is reporting that only 66.1% of residents in Portsmouth have been counted — four percentage points lower than what this city of roughly 95,000 people tallied in 2010. The city’s reporting rate is the second-lowest
reported among localities in Hampton Roads this year, just above Norfolk’s 65%, whose completion rate was slightly higher in 2010. As of Oct. 4, the national average is 67%.
Total numbers have not yet been reported by the bureau, whose job is mandated by the U.S. Constitution.
Nationally, experts have long anticipated the worst undercount of Black and Latino residents in 30 years. Challenges threatening the 2020 census could put more than 4 million people at risk of being undercounted, according to a June 2019 report by the nonpartisan think tank Urban Institute.
“Norfolk has a significant number of hard-to-count communities, including the largest portion of public housing residents in the region,” city spokeswoman Lori Crouch wrote in an email, saying city officials were disappointed at President’s Donald Trump’s decision not to extend the Dec. 31 deadline to complete the count. Crouch said that decision means “thousands throughout Hampton Roads may be at risk of being ‘statistically invisible’ and underserved for the next 10 years.”
Portsmouth and Norfolk have the highest poverty rates in the region. About 20% of people in Norfolk live in poverty, while Portsmouth has a poverty rate of 17%.
On the Peninsula — where poverty rates are almost as high as those in Portsmouth and Norfolk — officials have raised similar concerns. In Newport News, officials said this year’s response rate lagged behind the previous census — the city’s final self-response rate was 68% in 2010, compared with 67% this year. The city expects the worst undercounts in the Southeast Community, where there is a higher rate of poverty and fewer homes with internet access.
At a Sept. 8 City Council work session, Newport News senior planner Toluwalase Ibikunle said she believed enumerators weren’ t adequately prepared.
“Ms. Ibikunle shared that a census worker had come to her home and questioned her nationality because of her name,” according to minutes from the meeting. “There were no questions on the census related to one’s nationality or citizenship, which could be another reason people may be reluctant to complete the census documentation. She did not believe there was ill intent, but she believed the census worker had not received sufficient training because of the rush.”
Latiesha Handie, who heads the Citizens’ Unity Commission in Hampton, said census takers also risked overcounting some people — some were visited by an enumerator after already filling out their census form online.
“That caused a little bit of confusion and concern,” Handie said. “There’s already an unspoken narrative of distrust with giving information, and so we had a lot of those instances where people were unsure of the legitimacy of what they either filled out online or of the person coming to their door.”
By contrast, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake — which have the region’s lowest rates of people living in poverty — reported the highest census response rates.
Those cities didn’t report any problems with this year’s count. Ronald Berkebile, who led local efforts for the city of Virginia Beach, said that while initially it was hard to communicate with the bureau, eventually the city found someone to “help us break through the bureaucracy.” The online form, he said, was easier for many Beach applicants to fill out than the paper version.
“This was just such a crazy decade that with COVID going on, it was just nuts trying to deal with this stuff,” Berkebile said. “We had actually put together a beautiful plan that was about 50 pages long about how we were going to execute it. Then the pandemic hit, and it all fell apart.”
He noted that the Census Bureau was “absolutely just bombarded with phone calls from all of us.”
But Norfolk’s Crouch said that while the pandemic complicated the count this year, there there were challenges before then because of confusion surrounding a proposed, then rejected citizenship question on the census, which instilled fear among undocumented residents. (The census still asked a version of that question on other forms, which created more confusion.) And because this is the first time the census form was available online, it posed a challenge for people without internet access or a computer.
To encourage people to fill out their form, Norfolk’s outreach efforts included bus wraps, census stickers on food donation boxes, literature distributed to Hispanic faith-based organizations and yard signs.
The census doesn’t just help determine how much money cities get from the federal government. Its population counts also determine how many representatives each state will have in Congress for the next 10 years. That number affects how many electoral votes a state gets for president.
And in the final months of the Trump administration’s time in power, it has continued pushing efforts to strip unauthorized immigrants from census totals used to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives. According to reporting by The New York Times, the president said in July that he planned to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.
From Portsmouth, Swets is concerned about reports of census takers being pressured to falsify data as the statistical agency cut corners and slashed standards. He pointed to puzzling data on the Census Bureau website showing an identical 99.9% “enumeration rate” — the rate at which attempts were made to contact people — for every state in the country.
“I don’t buy that number,” Swets said. “Homeless people make up more than (0.1%) of the population. This is saying they counted all of our homeless residents as well, which they definitely did not do.”
In the significantly wealthier cities of Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, 66% and 67% of respondents used the internet to submit their form, respectively. Those rates were 51% and 46% percent in Norfolk and Portsmouth, respectively. Portsmouth had the lowest internet response rate in the region. Virginia Beach had the highest.
“We have a very good relationship working with the Census Bureau,” Chesapeake spokesman Heath Covey said, adding that the city “worked very hard” to achieve the region’s highest response rate.
“We had a very strong complete count committee and very strong support all across the community.”