2020 census may have undercounted Detroit

The U.S. government may have missed counting tens of thousands of people in Detroit in the 2020 census, according to a report released last week by the University of Michigan.

The analysis was spurred by a 31,000 discrepancy between the decennial count and the Census Bureau’s 2019 population estimates, a single-year drop one of the report’s authors, Jeffery Morenoff, called “highly anomalous and frankly implausible.”

After census data was released, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan questioned the results, noting electric company records showed active contracts for more households than the census enumerated. The University of Michigan study analyzed 10 neighborhoods in the city, comparing census counts with U.S. Postal Service data from June 2020. The analysis found an 8.1 percent undercount of occupied residential units in the areas surveyed. If the rest of the city were similarly miscounted, the mistake would mean tens of thousands of residents were missed, the report said.

Decennial census data is used to determine a decade’s worth of congressional apportionment, redistricting and allocation of $1.5 trillion a year in funds.

At a news conference Thursday, Duggan called the magnitude of the discrepancy “almost beyond belief,” and said the city plans to appeal to the U.S. Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, and might sue in federal court.

“The U.S. government has inflicted an inequity of monumental proportion on the people of the city of Detroit. All we want as Detroiters is to be counted. They had one job. And they missed by a huge number.”