City officials announced an $8 million media and advertising campaign today intended to persuade New Yorkers to fill out their 2020 Census form.
The announcement was made at a pep rally-style launch event featuring Mayor Bill de Blasio and others, as the city leaders confront what they fear could be a historic undercount of immigrants and communities of color in the Trump era.
“Brothers and sisters, this is not meant to be a fair fight,” said de Blasio, speaking to hundreds of members of community, labor and civic activists at NYU’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. “The way Washington set it up was to try to defeat you. To try to deny you. To try to ignore you. But they didn’t count on your power, they didn’t count on your energy and on your activism.”
The $8 million initiative includes $3 million for community and ethnic media, which will be blanketed in ads beginning next month in at least 16 languages. The city has previously announced an unprecedented $40 million in census outreach funding, which includes $19 million allocated to a total of 157 community-based organizations. These include groups like Women for Afghan Women, the United Sherpa Association, Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, as well as the Hispanic Federation and Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
The event included members of these organizations as well as representatives of faith groups, labor organizations and city libraries. All are trying to drive home a point that failing to fill out a census form will ultimately be damaging to New York and its residents.
Lurie Daniel Favors, General Counsel at the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, told the crowd they had to spread the importance of the census “out into our communities, out into your neighborhoods, into your blocks, into your hair salons, your churches, your mosques, your temples, every space where you have influence and where you have friends and family and people that you care about.”
De Blasio and other NY officials have continued to warn that an undercount could result in fewer congressional seats for New York (the state currently has 27, down from 45 in the 1940s) as well as significantly reduced federal funding.
“If we are undercounted they will not take millions of dollars away from your community,” de Blasio said. “They will take billions of dollars away from you, your family, your neighborhood, your city. That’s what is at stake here.”
Julie Menin, the city’s census director, said the goal was to remind New Yorkers of the absolute confidentiality of the census, as well as the fact that response rates corresponded to funding for a wide array of programs, including health care, Head Start, Medicaid and seniors centers.
The city’s response rate in 2010, she said, was 61.9 percent, 14 points lower than the national average.
“Look, we’re New Yorkers, we’re in a nationwide competition, let’s be clear. We can and must do better than that.”
However, others are bracing for a dropoff in census participation. Joe Salvo, the city’s chief demographer, has said that the census could miss 400,000 to 500,000 residents, especially in immigrant, Orthodox Jewish, and African-American communities. The worst census on record for the city, he said, was in 1990, when approximately 250,000 New Yorkers went uncounted.
Although federal funding equations are notoriously complex, by one rule of thumb, a single person represents $2,700 in potential federal funding. By that measure, if 400,000 New Yorkers refuse to engage with the census, that's more than one billion dollars in lost funding for New York City.
The 2020 Census is the first that will attempt to reach people online. Recipients will be able to complete a census form, whether digitally or on paper, beginning March 12th.
However, in a new report released by the city, “NYC Census 2020: Our Plan to Ensure a Complete Count,” city officials point to wide disparities in internet access across the five boroughs.
“Across the five boroughs, 29 percent of households—917,239 in total—lack broadband access. For those households, lack of internet access places an additional burden of time and energy in self-responding because those residents will either have to travel to a nearby assistance center or request a mail-in survey to complete the census.”
Additionally, the report notes that a “general distrust of government” pervades many communities, as well as a “climate of fear brought on through the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census”—which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer—and concern that information obtained by the Census Bureau will be shared with other government agencies.
