Census Accuracy Is a Stubborn, Costly Problem

Despite aggressive outreach by community groups and cities, about 20 neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, from Van Nuys to South-Central to Long Beach, had paltry rates of participation in the 2000 census.

While 67% of all Americans returned census forms last year, 46 Los Angeles County tracts had response rates of 50% or less. About half of those tracts also had low response rates in the 1990 census.

The city of Los Angeles, which contains 35 of those weak-response tracts, spent $1.7 million to bolster census participation. Officials believe those tracts are a key reason for a suspected--and costly--undercount of Los Angeles.

Official census figures often undercount big cities, and the federal government has in some past censuses released an adjusted count. The Bush administration has said no such adjustment will be made to Census 2000. Los Angeles city officials estimate that 76,000 people were missed, which will result in a loss of at least $184 million in state and federal funding during the next decade.

A separate PricewaterhouseCoopers study estimates that Los Angeles County will lose out on $636 million in federal funding during the next 10 years because of an undercount, the largest loss for any U.S. county.

The residents least likely to mail in Census 2000 forms were more likely to be transient, have minimal education and poor English skills, and occupy the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

“Some areas in Los Angeles I know we targeted for our outreach, and we were successful,” said Amadis Velez, state political redistricting coordinator for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “But it’s unfortunate that some areas with the highest immigrant populations we were unable to reach.”

About half of the Los Angeles County tracts with low response rates are dominated by a university, airport, rail yard, significant business or other feature that can explain the level of participation. In many other tracts with poor response rates, the causes were believed to be language barriers, transiency or poor education.

Ralph Lee, regional director for the Census Bureau, said his agency’s community partnership programs, a national ad campaign, and the hiring of local bilingual workers could not make a significant dent in some areas.

“Response rates typically go down in multi-unit building areas” and other high-density neighborhoods, he said.

Several low-response tracts represent a racial palette that is more heavily Latino and Asian, with city blocks from Boyle Heights to Wilmington crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with apartments.

There are exceptions, such as a tract directly east of Van Nuys Airport with several tree-shaded blocks anchored with homes from the 1950s and 1960s. Bounded by Haskell and Valjean avenues, it is vintage Valley suburbia, with parents of many ethnicities walking children to school.

Even a stretch of Malibu, where the median home price is $3.6 million, had a low-response neighborhood that includes the exclusive beachfront Malibu Colony, a haven for celebrities.

In Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, one low-response tract has five residential buildings, some of them high-rises, tucked between Alameda and San Pedro streets. Four are home to seniors, disabled or low-income residents, and one is a market-rate condominium complex. The area teems with Japanese shops and restaurants, and the Higashi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple is on 3rd Street.

“I’m sure language was a problem,” said Ayako Hagihara, a community organizer with the Little Tokyo Service Center. “They felt it was too much trouble, one extra step to request [the census form] in Japanese, or they didn’t feel it was important or that they were affected by the census.”

This tract’s scant 38% response rate disappointed Hagihara, who helped pass out fliers and met with residents to drum up census awareness. The Little Tokyo center’s social service programs and a community development corporation need the area’s true population reflected in census data to justify applications for new affordable housing and other government-funded activities, she said.

In some parts of Los Angeles, the pre-census legwork paid off.

MALDEF launched aggressive door-to-door and school campaigns in 1999 targeting low-response neighborhoods from the 1990 census. Other advocacy groups, the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District spearheaded similar projects.

In heavily Latino Pacoima and Arleta, many neighborhoods mailed in their Census 2000 forms at rates of 60% or greater. A decade ago, those same census tracts had dismal 35% to 38% return rates, according to Census Bureau data.

Los Angeles joined more than a dozen cities, including New York, Inglewood and San Francisco, to sue the federal government to release adjusted census numbers. The suit is on appeal after a federal judge in April dismissed it.

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Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this story.