Virus, other problems threaten to throw off 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. Half a 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 that may cost some communities political representation and federal money.
America Depasquale, who lived in the tunnels from May 2018 until she moved into a detox facility last month, said she never saw census takers visit the area underneath the Las Vegas Strip. Depasquale said she does not blame census takers for not attempting to enter the tunnels, but she said it might have helped if they had tried to go with community advocates who make frequent visits below.
“It takes somebody of a certain strength to go down there just regularly, “she said. “But I also find it kind of appalling that they wouldn’t go deeper and at least even try.”
The count of the unsheltered homeless originally was 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 given the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. People who may have answered the census questionnaire last spring but later became homeless may not be recorded as homeless and may be living in a different place, the watchdog agency said in a report.
“Because people who experience homelessness are more likely than people who are housed to be members of minority groups, especially African Americans and Native Americans, the undercount contributes, modestly, to the serious undercount of minorities and poor people,” said Beth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt University who researches homelessness. In San Francisco, a census taker said supervisors were confused about what to do and where to go. In Oklahoma City, many census takers did only a head count without interview
ing homeless people, so they missed gathering demographic information.
A census taker in Bakersfield 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, Minnesota, because of racial injustice protests that were happening on the same night.
Deanna Helm, a census taker who participated in the homeless count in Northern California, characterized it as “a farce.”
“We were just chasing our tails that night,” she said.
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.
“As in previous censuses, the primary goal, and noted in census taker instructions, is to first get a headcount of people experiencing homelessness,” the statement said. “We do not want
to create an unsafe environment for those living at the location or our census takers, so we may not conduct a full interview if it is unsafe to do so.”
The agency’s once-a- decade count helps determine $1.5 trillion in federal spending annually and how many congressional seats each state gets.
In Las Vegas, concerns about the homeless count were raised last October at a City Council meeting. Las Vegas, along with surrounding Clark County, has an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 people living on the streets. The homeless population could be larger because shelters are operating at reduced capacity because of pandemic restrictions, said then- City Manager Scott Adams.
“The bottom line is ... we could be undercounted by several thousand people in the city population,” Adams said. “Why is that important? It deals with apportionment for legislative seats, formula shares for federal funding, a whole range of issues.”