For Florida, the country’s third most populous state with over 21 million inhabitants, the 2020 census listed 15,000 neighborhood blocks with a total of 200,000 residents but no occupied homes. The scale of changes becomes clearer when viewed through a wider lens. “I explain to them that there is no method to fix this, that this is not a mistake in the traditional sense,” Guthrie said. Eric Guthrie, a senior demographer at the Minnesota State Population Center, said he contacted half a dozen city administrators from across the state who were concerned about the potential impacts on state and federal funds. The unreliable data created a headache for city managers and small community planners, who worried that it might not be applicable to decision-making.
Sullivan County property records show nearly a dozen homes whose residents have ties to the Vizhnitzer Hasidic community. According to Hillsborough County spokesman Todd Pratt, two county employees live there while keeping the park safe.Īnd in a Hasidic Jewish enclave located in Lake Kiamesha, New York, 81 people were registered as residents, but the census says there are no officially occupied houses. In another case, the census doesn’t list anyone living in Flatwoods Conservation Park outside of Tampa, even though it says it’s a home occupied by humans. Forty-eight of the block’s residents are Black, according to the census, but it’s hard to know for sure given the varying whims of privacy. In reality, nearly two dozen houses occupy the car-lined streets, some more than a century old. What is certain is that the method can produce strange, contradictory and inaccurate results at the smallest geographic levels, such as neighborhood blocks.įor example, the official 2020 census results say 54 people live in Stephenson’s census block in downtown Milwaukee, but there are also no occupied homes. Harvard University researchers found that the method makes it more difficult to create political districts with equal populations and can lead to fewer majority-minority districts.įor its part, the Census Bureau argues that the data is as good as in past censuses and that low-level inaccuracies do not pose a large-scale problem. By law, census answers are required to be confidential.īut some city officials and demographers think this is far from reality and could cause errors in the data used for plotting political districts and distributing federal funds.Īt least one analysis suggests that divergent privacy can penalize minority communities by omitting racially and ethnically mixed areas. Bureau officials say protecting privacy is essential in an era of increasingly complex data mining as technological innovations magnify the threat of “redefining” people through the use of powerful computers to match census information with other public databases.
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