{"id":3900,"date":"2020-09-06T09:16:28","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T13:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/?p=3900"},"modified":"2020-09-14T11:31:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T15:31:43","slug":"half-of-hamtramck-didnt-complete-the-census-and-thats-a-big-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/half-of-hamtramck-didnt-complete-the-census-and-thats-a-big-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Half of Hamtramck didn\u2019t complete the Census, and that\u2019s a big problem."},"content":{"rendered":"

By Simon Albaugh<\/p>\n

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. \u2013 The Census workers were announced at a City Council Meeting held over Zoom. The City Manager, following the agenda like a script, showed off the Census 2020 shirts that all the Councilmembers received. Then she began her announcement to the 14 or so in attendance:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Census workers will be going door-to-door to collect Census information,\u201d said Kathleen Angerer, City Manager of Hamtramck. \u201cThey\u2019re starting [mid-August] and will be continuing to do that throughout the city until the last day, or until we have 100%. So please make sure your friends, family, your neighbors know that answering the door for the Census workers is something we need to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the announcement on Aug. 11, the city has seen an increase in self-responses of just a little over 1% – that\u2019s up to 57.3%, from its 56.2% in August.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a little bit to celebrate in that. In Detroit, the self-response rate is just 49.6%. But that good feeling won\u2019t last long when we remember that the self-response rate for the rest of Michigan is 70.2%. So Hamtramck is falling behind quite a bit from the rest of the state.<\/p>\n

In order to understand these numbers, we need to remember a few things: that this is only the rate of response for people who did the census on their own, that this number doesn\u2019t account for houses that will be empty throughout the year, and that Hamtramck is pretty darn complicated to count. It\u2019s no surprise that countries all over the world are struggling with things like this for their Censuses.<\/p>\n

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Hard to Count in Hamtramck<\/p>\n

In 2019, the United Nations published a document<\/a> detailing the hard-to-count populations of a country\u2019s census, and different tactics for making sure that they\u2019re represented. There are four factors that determine how difficult a certain group, city or population is to count. Hamtramck can ultimately be defined by three of those:<\/p>\n