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While preliminary findings by the consulting firm hired by Jersey City to challenge the 2010 Census count suggest a significant number of households were missed, there appears to be a significant challenge to the city’s efforts: few Census appeals are successful.

“During the last Census, we identified just over 1,100 jurisdictions out of 39,000 appeals that had errors, which is less than 3 percent,” 2010 Census media relations branch chief Michael Cook tells JCI, adding that the errors only resulted in a net population gain of 2,700 people.

The preliminary findings of Social Compact, the firm being paid $25,000 to help Jersey City challenge the 2010 results, say the count may have missed 19,000 housing units here. But city spokeswoman Jennifer Morrill says the city stands behind the firm, and notes that the 2,700 figure, as a net gain, is a bit misleading, and that individual municipalities may see much bigger changes. She points to Corcoran City, California, as an example of a municipality that through appeal proved the Census had undercounted their city by 6,377 — from 14,458 to the corrected figure of 20,835. 

Cook acknowledges that Morrill is correct, saying that population changes “could be significant for local jurisdictions.” But he stands by the fact that few Census challenges are even accepted, a trend he says is thus far playing out once again this year.

“We only have one challenge that has been changed this year out of the 62 challenges submitted so far,” he says. However, he adds that the Census expects many more appeals before the June 1, 2013 deadline. (The Census on average takes 180 days to rule on an appeal.)
 
The census does not actually undertake a full recount after an appeal is made, Cook explains. Rather, the government relies on documents presented by the city in question that demonstrate the existence of someone in a specific place. The Census only considers three areas in which an error could have been made: inaccurate reporting of borders of a municipality; “geocoding,” or the “placement of living quarters and associated population within the correct governmental unit boundaries and census tabulation blocks;” and “coverage,” which can result in “the addition or deletion of specific living quarters and persons associated with them identified during the census process, but erroneously included as duplicates or excluded due to processing errors.”

It’s the latter category that Social Compact seems to be focusing on.

“Unlike the Census, Social Compact works from the ground up using public and proprietary datasets to create a list of residential addresses. We also make adjustments to the occupancy rates and persons per household as suggested by consumption data from local utilities or other local survey data,” the firm says in a statement. “In this sense, Social Compact is more flexible to tailor its methodology to account for local variation in reliability and availability of data.”

According to the official Census count, which was announced in February, Jersey City’s population is 247,697, only a shade higher than the 240,055 it was in 2000′s Census. The city is hoping for a successful challenge to the numbers, since the Census is the spigot through which billions of dollars in federal money flows; Morrill told JCI in June that an accurate count would “bring millions of dollars to Jersey City over the next ten years.”

Photo: Jon Whiten