Pandemic may hurt homeless census

LAS VEGAS — The swanky, billion-dollar casinos of Las Vegas are bedecked with shining towers, neon signs and eye-popping extravagance. But directly beneath the glitter, hundreds of homeless people live out of sight, in the dark, in a network of stormwater tunnels running below the city.

When census takers tried in September to count the nation’s homeless for the 2020 census, safety concerns prevented them from venturing into the Las Vegas tunnels.

The tunnels offer just one example of the difficulty in counting the portion of the homeless population that does not stay in shelters. A half dozen census takers around the U.S. told the Associated Press that they experienced problems that could cause the homeless to be undercounted — a situation thatmay cost some communities political representation and federal money.

The count of the unsheltered homeless was originally scheduled for last spring, but the Census Bureau delayed it until late September because of concerns about the coronavirus. The bureau identified 33,000 homeless camps for census takers to visit.

The Government Accountability Office warned earlier this month that the delay in the homeless count could affect the quality of the census data.

In San Francisco, a census taker said supervisorswere confused aboutwhat to do andwhere to go. In Oklahoma City, many census takers did only a headcount without interviewing homeless people, so they missed gathering demographic information.

A census taker in Bakersfield, Calif., said a list of homeless sites they were given was outdated, and they were not allowed to interview people who appeared to be homeless if their locations were not on the list. Census takers were prevented from doing any counts in downtown St. Paul, Minn., because of racial injustice protests that were happening on the same night.

Rainy weather in Spokane, Wash., kept enumerators such as Joanne McCoy from doing their jobs.

“We didn’t get a good count at all. It should have beenmuch better,” said McCoy, a census supervisor.

The Census Bureau said in a statement that the unsheltered homeless count is designed with the safety of census takers and those being counted in mind.

The agency’s once-a-decade count helps determine $1.5 trillion in federal spending annually and how many congressional seats each state gets.