Local officials of the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday defended the agency`s operations in Chicago and raised questions about the accuracy of city figures showing an undercount of 300,000 residents.
”I think we`ve done a great census in Chicago,” said Stanley Moore, director of the Census Bureau`s three-state Chicago region.
Moore`s comments came in an interview on the day that Chicago authorities filed a detailed challenge to the agency`s preliminary census figures for the city.
Those figures, released Aug. 29 and described by the bureau as incomplete, showed Chicago with only 2,725,979 people. That was significantly lower than the city`s estimate of 3,020,000 Chicagoans, or the bureau`s own estimate last year of 2,980,000.
Chicago authorities, in their challenge, asserted that 69,424 of Chicago`s 1,194,512 housing units weren`t included in the Census Bureau`s early numbers. That would mean that an estimated 189,528 Chicagoans had been overlooked, if each unit was occupied by a standard-size family of 2.73 people.
In addition, in a separate response filed last week, city officials asserted that the bureau had misclassified as vacant 41,122 homes and apartments, even though they had people living in them. If correct, that would mean another 112,263 people missed.
Chicago`s analysis of the preliminary data indicated that the Near North Side had the most uncounted homes and apartments: 10,466. Of those, 4,666 had been missed completely and 5,800 misclassified as vacant, according to the city.
Other neighborhoods with large numbers of uncounted units were West Town
(6,035), Near West Side (4,720), Lincoln Park (3,890), the Loop (3,839), Logan Square (3,357), Austin (3,318) and New City (3,141).
”The city has done everything in its power to show the Census Bureau where it undercounted Chicagoans,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in a statement released Thursday by his office. ”It`s now the Census Bureau`s job to go out and count these people during their final canvass stage and not short-change the people of the city of Chicago.”
But Moore contended that it`s unfair to say the bureau missed tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of thousands of people.
The preliminary population figures were based on the findings of the census through the early or middle part of July, Moore said, and don`t include people found in later operations, including a recanvass of much of the city and the enumeration of military personnel and vacationers.
In fact, Chicago`s challenge to the preliminary figures is part of a major census operation called local review, in which local officials are given early data so they can spot places and people that the bureau may have overlooked.
”That (population) number`s going to go up,” he said. ”There`ll be a significant increase in the number.”
During September, officials in cities, suburbs and small towns throughout the nation have been studying local preliminary figures and filing challenges of those numbers with the bureau. On Wednesday, for example, New York City authorities said their analysis showed that the early numbers didn`t include 254,534 housing units, or 8 percent of the more than 3 million homes in the city.
”The city is doing what it`s supposed to be doing by challenging us,”
Moore said. ”What we`re saying is that we didn`t miss 69,000 units.”
Moore pointed to five blocks that were spot-checked by a Tribune reporter last week. A door-to-door examination of the blocks by the reporter found that the bureau`s preliminary numbers included fewer than half of the homes actually there.
However, more up-to-date census data for four of those blocks include even more units-47-than the 1,573 found by the Tribune, Moore said. Complete data on the fifth block wasn`t yet available, he said.
In addition, the city`s figures, particularly those on vacant units, are prone to significant error, Moore said, because they rely on utility records. ”It`s a starting point for trying to get a handle on how many units there are,” said Roy Ellis, Moore`s top aide. ”But utility-based data is not reliable.”
Ellis said the bureau did a spot-check of 10 census tracts where the city had indicated a large number of occupied units misclassified as vacant. ”The actual number of vacant units was considerably more in almost every case than the city reported to us,” he said.
