With less than 6 months until Census Day, David Lombardo reports on the lack of plans for New York State to release appropriated funds to assist communities with complete count efforts in this article. Advocates, municipalities, and nonprofits continue to advocate to the administration for the funds to be released.
New York Law School seeks to boost Census Participation
Madina Toure, Politico
The New York Law School is launching a new institute that seeks to ensure that all communities are counted equitably in the upcoming 2020 Census as the decennial count faces roadblocks from the federal government.
The New York Census and Redistricting Institute will work with and inform public institutions, nonprofits and the public about laws and policies pertaining to the upcoming Census as well as city and state redistricting. Students will also be able to take advantage of research opportunities.
Anthony Crowell, the school’s dean and president, told POLITICO the school wants to ensure there is an analysis of how the barriers to participation can be confronted and overcome. He also wants to push forward "hard strategies" to hold federal Census workers who will be collecting the data accountable.
"We are obviously very concerned that there be an effective administration of this Census to ensure that every community is properly counted," he said, referring to challenges that occurred during the 2010 Census. "Here in New York City, in 2010, there were a number of concerns about whether there was an accurate count and what the barriers were to getting that accurate count and we want to make sure that there is a proper articulation of those barriers."
When he served as counselor to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Crowell said he helped lead the city's effort to engage residents with the Census. The school is partnering with Jeffrey Wice — a national census expert who has worked with state legislative leaders as well as congressional lawmakers — who will lead the institute, focusing on legal and policy efforts. Crowell will also manage the institute’s work, including its collaboration with the school’s Center for New York City Law as well as the Impact Center for Public Interest Law, foundations, nonprofits and local and state government offices.
The institute plans to make recommendations to state and local government officials on strategies to guarantee that residents are counted, teaming up with organizations carrying out Census outreach by offering technical guidance for their public engagement programs. They also plan to hold briefings for congressional, state and city lawmakers on how to efficiently measure "hard-to-count communities" that typically have low Census response rates.
Other initiatives include giving expertise on the upcoming redistricting process in which the state Legislature will appoint a new advisory redistricting commission for the first time and assess the processes municipalities use.
And they plan to look at public policy developments that have an impact on voting and elections city and statewide, including the ranked-choice voting system that New York City voters recently approved. The institute is also looking to provide access to cloud-based redistricting platforms in which students and the public can come up with model legislative districts.
The
mapping service at the City University of New York has a
"Census 2020 Hard to Count Map"
that shows specific hard-to-count communities. Wice said the group can determine what methods to employ to get more individuals to participate in the Census, such as through the clergy, bodegas, beauty salons or libraries. He also said they would look at other factors such as language barriers. And he acknowledged the fear that the citizenship question proposed by the Trump administration has caused even though it lost its attempt to have the question included.
"Even though there will not be a citizenship question on [the] 2020 Census form, a lot of damage was done by proposing the question and we've also got to overcome people's concerns — especially immigrant community concerns — over citizenship, over the confidentiality of the Census," Wice said.
In 2010, the response rate in Kings County was roughly 67 percent, according to the hard-to-count map. Wice said Brooklyn is the hardest-to-count county in the state and the second hardest to count in the United States. He has been working with the office of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to address the issue. "Nearly all of Brooklyn is hard to count, except for the downtown brownstone communities and some of the shoreline communities," he said. The response rate on Staten Island was 78.9 percent — a figure that is considered slightly better than the average. "The shoreline communities on the North Shore and the Eastern Shore of Staten Island are the hardest to count in that borough," Wice explained. "Most of the central part of Staten Island have better response rates."
Manhattan saw a response rate of 77.3 percent. The Bronx rate was 71.3 percent, while Queens had a 70 percent rate. Wice said southeast Queens has a very low response rate. He also said there are communities in the Bronx that are "very hard" to count, particularly in the northern Bronx, as well as parts of Manhattan, especially in East Harlem. He's been working with legislators to reach hard-to-count communities, the city's three library systems and community-based organizations. Wice hopes to train various local outreach networks on the best ways to take ownership of the Census at the community level.
"This is a new challenging Census — the first that's going to try to get at least two-thirds of the residents to respond online and then New York has unique challenges," he said. "With mistrust of government, lack of access to online computer capability and just a fear that government is being too intrusive when in fact the Census is here to help us both with funding formulas and to guarantee fair representation."
