A collision of circumstances threatens to throw off the census count, and while inaccuracy can damage the nation, it poses a special danger to New York. JDavidsonNYC reports
Census-worker training in Queens, March 13. Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images Less than 200 words into the Constitution, before any mention of the president, the Supreme Court, or freedom of speech, comes the instruction to count everyone living in the United States. The specifics are calamitously racist, since the text pointedly excludes “Indians not taxed” and calculates slaves as “three-fifths of all other persons,” a reckoning that helped prepare the way for the Civil War.
“This is a nationwide competition for resources,” says Julie Menin, the director of NYC Census 2020. The census defines how congressional districts are mapped, but it’s also a scramble for money. “For every New Yorker who doesn’t fill out the form, those resources go to other states, usually red states.” Federal tax dollars for transit, schools, sewers, housing, unemployment insurance, and so on — more than $1.5 trillion in all — are divided up by population.
Across the city, there are enormous variations in the rates at which even adjacent neighborhoods respond, and the factors are not always obvious. Public-housing projects and large apartment complexes like Stuyvesant Town have marshaled tenants with astounding efficiency. Areas with single-family houses have been more diffuse. Neighborhoods dominated by different immigrant groups sometimes react in nearly opposite ways.
The hostile climate makes in-person outreach that much more crucial. “Folks need to be able to communicate in person with people they trust, who look like them and speak the same dialect they do,” says Bagga. “As soon as you cross a street, you get a completely different response rate, which shows how diverse we are as a city, and it also shows some of the disparities that exist in New York. So this campaign is not just about getting the money, power, and respect we’re constitutionally owed.
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