The U.S. Census has been an important tenant of American society since it was first taken in 1790. As mandated in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Census, conducted every 10 years, states that “representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States … according to their respective Numbers …. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years.” The latest 2010 Census was the 23rd such taken. The primary function of the Census was to accurately apportion the U.S. House of Representatives’ 435 congressional seats that proportionally represent the population of the country. The United States Census Bureau is mandated with conducting the Census.
Between the years 1940 and 2000, residents received a long-form version of the survey, and many of them found the Census too cumbersome and intrusive and therefore would not fill it out or fill out partially. This lead to decreased participation in the Census. In response, the Bureau established the American Community Survey to obtain the demographic, housing, social, and economic information that was originally on the long form. The survey was first fully implemented in 2005 and produced its first estimates for all population sizes in 2010, with data collected from January 2005 – December 2009.
The ACS is important for a number of reasons, most important in that it provides data on such topics as employment, income, and housing characteristics, which are used by many public/private organizations and nonprofits to allocate funding, learn about communities, and plan for demographic shifts that affect policies such as where housing is built. However, Republicans and Libertarians have been critical of the ACS, referring to its intrusiveness for asking questions that in their mind, supersede the simple enumeration mentioned in the Constitution. Former U.S. representative Ron Paul felt the ACS was constantly surveying people’s lives and, along with other representatives, stated that the law was in violation of the Right to Financial Privacy Act (passed in 1978, gives customers of financial institutions the right to some level of privacy from government searches). If Paul Gosar and Mike Lee have their way, the ACS may go the way of the dinosaur because of the information it provides.
Gosar, a U.S. representative from Arizona, and Lee, a U.S. senator from Utah, have introduced HR 482. The bill, termed the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017” would render the U.S. Housing and Urban and Development’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule moot. The language states that “No Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.” This bill stems to restrict access to open data that may be used to understand racial and economic disparities, and many organizations are alarmed at this aim to reduce open data. The National Equity Atlas posted an article explaining the need for open data broken down by race and ethnicity. Check it out here. The American Association of Geographers (AAG) states that this act “represents a direct attack on the ability of geographers and others to produce actionable and policy relevant research on racial disparities in this country.”
I believe this is an attack on open data, and more so a tacit disapproval to provide equal opportunity in housing and other means of living for all ethnicities. These men sound more like this author who believes the AFFH will “put a thug in your neighborhood.” This is a bill that should be struck down – the more data available, the more ability agencies have to make sound decisions. There is some local pushback. The state of California has pledged to continue using this data to inform decisions, and the city of Philadelphia plans to do the same on a local level if the federal bill is passed. I hope the situation does not come to that.
Leave a Reply