Hacker News Reader

Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

New York lost a congressional seat by falling 89 residents short. Given that the response window fell during the peak COVID crisis for NYC, it's hard to imagine it didn't have a negative impact on response rate.

View on HN

I think there is a case for the opposite trend as well - anecdotally I and many others I know moved from NY to another state after responding to the census as a resident of NY. From what I observed (and when I responded) most of the census outreach in NYC was early in 2020 before the pandemic really hit. USPS published some data using change of address information that shows NY lost a good number of residents during 2020, how many of those responded to the census before or after they moved is a toss up though. No conclusion, just adding some context.

Even in California when we saw folks moving away I had a census worker on foot knocking door to door trying to ask about who lived in the various apartments - and at the time I know a lot of folks had moved away even if temporarily.

Yeah this is such a cluster. Makes you think that maybe we should not be doing point in time counts every ten years. That can have a huge impact on entire generations of people. American Community Surveys run far more often, showing that we can potentially change our ways.

It's also astounding that this is the standard method when Apple/Google/Facebook/AT&T/Verizon could trivially give an instantaneous and probably more accurate count.

None of those companies are likely to uniformly count all of the things that the Census purports to do, such as race/ethnicity and housing status.

Sure, but (ignoring the Constitutional decennial mandate, which also requires Census subjects to be defined 3 years before the actual counting [0]) what's a cost-effective alternative? The budget for the 2020 Census was $7+ billion [1].

And while the ACS annual surveys are considered accurate, what would be the right period for changing Congressional seat counts? It obviously can't be annual (since House terms are every 2 years).

[0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/abo...

[1] https://www.census.gov/about/budget.html

Weren’t many places affected by the pandemic and not just NYC? I guess you could argue given their raw numbers it affected them more.

NY was certainly hit harder earlier than other states, and during the census window.

Households received their census cards March 12-20 and "Census Day" -- when there was a big marketing push to get folks to respond -- was April 1. That was right when NYC was getting slammed, which happened before the rest of the country. Census workers then sent folks physically out to try and reach non-responding households, but that's super hard to do.

> That was right when NYC was getting slammed, which happened before the rest of the country.

Except California, but, mostly, yes.

AOC could lose her district and opt to run against Schumer instead of staying in the House. Payback for AOC beating another incumbent Democrat that ends in her beating Schumer for US Senate.

That is the most interesting thing that could happen at least.

I see 89 residents and immediately think less of COVID and more of the Trump administration's effort to scare certain demographics off. The results were tainted by an administration that acted in bad faith.

Well, the absolute easiest way to gain 89 residents would have been to let the YIMBYs build one more highrise in Brooklyn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com