Only a few feet of space–typically enough for a gangway–lies between the humble bungalows and small apartment buildings that line the streets of the tightly packed Little Village neighborhood.
But only people who are familiar with the mostly Hispanic enclave on Chicago’s Near Southwest Side know just how densely populated it really is.
Three families occupy some of the residences that appear from the street to be single-family homes, according to Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd), Little Village’s representative in the City Council.
And who could tell from the outside that a three-flat might contain four or five families?
Certainly not the bureaucratic minions of the Census Bureau, according to Munoz, who contends the people in his ward stand to be severely undercounted again when the government tallies the nation’s population in 2000.
“Canvassers go into working-class neighborhoods and sometimes, when they see a single-family home, don’t realize there is an apartment in the basement and an apartment in the attic,” Munoz said.
With a scheduled practice run for the $4 billion 2000 census less than a month away, the Republican-led Congress and the Clinton administration show no signs of ending their fight over how best to count the population.
Republicans generally are pushing for retention of the traditional approach to counting noses, including collection of mail-in questionnaires, telephone interviews and, in some cases, on-site visits by canvassers.
Democrats are seeking to supplement that method by adding a statistical sampling that would account for people such as minorities, the homeless, illegal immigrants, the illiterate and people simply opposed to providing personal information to the government, who experts say are undercounted.
Politics is at the heart of the dispute. The conventional wisdom is that a higher count of minorities would help Democrats while a lower count would help Republicans as they battle for House seats during reapportionment.
The accuracy of the upcoming census is of paramount importance to Chicago, not to mention the rest of the state, because population totals will help determine the amount of money that will flow from Washington to pay for everything from transportation infrastructure improvements to job-training programs.
The tally could have secondary effects on other important things, from Chicago’s image to the number and location of new businesses that decide to open in the city.
“If you don’t count a person, then you’re short-changed of some of the benefits that that person should have,” Mayor Richard Daley said Wednesday.
The fight between the administration and Congress has resulted in a federal lawsuit by GOP lawmakers seeking to block sampling. Congressional Republicans would like the Supreme Court to hear their claim that sampling is unconstitutional because the Constitution uses the words “actual enumeration.”
At a hearing on the issue Wednesday in Washington, Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee, cited recent reports by the General Accounting Office and the Commerce Department’s inspector general that found shortcomings in preparations to use sampling.
“What I’m worried about is that at the last minute some politician tries to manipulate your honest figures, your honest work,” he told officials from the Commerce Department, parent agency of the Census Bureau. “That’s happened before in other agencies.”
Pointing his remarks toward the Clinton administration, Rogers said: “You’re asking us to trust you. We did that, for example, on the Immigration (and Naturalization) Service. . . . We trusted you and (the INS) naturalized tens of thousands of felons.”
Rogers was referring to a scandal during the 1996 presidential election year when the INS naturalized many non-citizens without proper background checks in what Republicans alleged was an attempt to add potential Democrats to voter rolls.
Commerce Secretary William Daley, the administration’s point man on the issue, strongly supports sampling. At a recent meeting at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Daley urged the nation’s mayors to help build political support for it as his brother watched approvingly from the audience.
The respected National Academy of Sciences has concluded that scientific sampling would yield the most accurate and cost-effective count. But Rep. Dan Miller (R-Fla.), who is chairman of the House subcommittee on the census and who has a doctorate in statistics and marketing, has criticized sampling as a “grand experiment” requiring a “huge theoretical leap of faith.”
The Census Bureau believes it can count as many as 90 percent of the nation’s population using traditional methods. Those consist of mailing out and processing returned census forms, then sending out census takers who go door to door to follow up in cases where people fail to send in their forms.
It would then use statistical sampling to measure the remaining 10 percent of the population, those hardest to reach, which include minorities, the homeless and transients.
The 1990 census put Chicago’s population at 2,783,726, a total city officials contended was short by about 250,000.
Munoz estimated that his ward’s population, on paper just over 55,000, is at least 65,000.
“There are any number of federal program formulas that depend upon population counts, accurate population counts,” said Jay Michaud, deputy director of the city’s office in Washington. “Some will take into account minorities, some will take into account low-income people” to determine funding levels.
Chicago also shares in the motor fuel taxes collected by Springfield based on official population, and about $60 in state income taxes for every official resident comes back to city coffers, officials said.
The government’s suspected short count in 1990 cost Chicago’s treasury about $327 million in state and federal funding from 1991 through 1997, said John Karnuth, an assistant commissioner in the city’s Planning Department.
A diminished flow of state and federal money is not the only problem with Chicago’s low count, Karnuth asserted.
“There is a perception that people are leaving the city in droves,” hurting its image, he said. “It has had a terrible effect.”
Moreover, retail chains scouting for new locations typically study census data to help them make their decisions, and lack of complete demographic information can hurt the city’s chances of attracting them, officials said.
State House Minority Leader Lee Daniels (R-Elmhurst) is among local officials who favor the traditional approach to counting.
“When you extrapolate (population), it puts a lot of pressure on what the sample is,” said Mike Tristano, Daniels’ chief of staff. “Any small error in the sampling technique will cause a very large overcount.”
