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| Photo Credit: AP. |
DETROIT (AP) — Detroit sued the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday over population estimates from last year that show it lost an additional 7,100 residents, opening another front against the agency in a battle over how the city’s people have been counted in the past two years.
Mayor Mike
Duggan told reporters that the city wants the Census Bureau to reveal how it
produced its population loss estimates for Detroit. Duggan claimed the bureau
was going against its own policy by refusing to divulge to Detroit the way the
estimates for the city were calculated and not allowing challenges this year.
The lawsuit
appears to be the first litigation to challenge population results since the
release of 2020 census data, which traditionally has formed the foundation of the
annual population estimates.
The Census
Bureau’s refusal this year to consider evidence that the 2021 population
estimates were wrong perpetuates racial inequality and threatens the city’s
reputation, Detroit said in its lawsuit.
“The Bureau’s failure to consider evidence of
its inaccurate 2021 estimate costs the City and its residents millions of
dollars of funding to which they are entitled while threatening the City’s
historic turnaround by advancing the narrative that Detroit is losing
population,” the lawsuit said.
The Census
Bureau didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The bureau
two years ago temporarily suspended its program allowing local governments to
challenge their population estimates so more resources could be devoted to the
execution of the once-a-decade census. The program isn’t expected to resume
until next year.
Detroit’s
lawsuit follows the city’s appeal of the 2020 census data that showed Detroit
with 639,111 residents, while estimates from 2019 put the city’s population at
670,052 residents.
Undercounts
from the census and population estimates could cost Detroit tens of millions of
dollars in federal funding over the next decade. Over the past decade or so,
the city has received around $3.5 billion in annual federal funding tied to
census figures.
“We have
absolutely no idea what formula they could have possibly used,” Duggan said
Tuesday. “We don’t know what formula they used because they won’t tell us.”
Duggan said
14 new apartment buildings opened in Detroit last year. DTE Energy has said
7,544 new utility accounts have been added, while the Detroit Water and
Sewerage Department said new service has been added to 6,964 housing units, he
added.
The U.S.
Postal Service also has said it is delivering mail to 4,475 more residences in
the city, according to Duggan.
“It’s now
clear the data coming out of the U.S. Census Bureau is completely divorced from
reality,” he said. “We’re drawing a line in the sand, and we’re going to try to
force accuracy out of these guys one way or the other. ”
“I think
what the formula would show — it would show the error in their calculations,
but if we get a formula that turns out they’re right, we’ll admit they’re
right,” Duggan added.
Because of
delays in releasing the 2020 census numbers, the Census Bureau broke with
tradition and didn’t rely only on census figures for creating the foundation of
its 2021 estimates of the U.S. population. Instead, statisticians “blended” the
2020 census numbers with other data sets to form the base of the annual
population estimates used to help distribute $1.5 trillion in federal funding
each year and measure annual population change through 2030.
Detroit is
among several large cities to file a challenge of their figures from the 2020
census, following a national head count in which the Census Bureau acknowledged
that a higher percentage of African Americans and Hispanics were undercounted
than the previous decade. About 77% of Detroit’s residents are African
American, and Hispanics make up almost 8% of the population.
Leaders of
Michigan’s largest city, which is more than three-quarters Black, had
questioned the results of the 2020 census since December 2021, when they
released a report suggesting that more than 8% of the occupied homes in 10
Detroit neighborhoods may have been undercounted.
Duggan has
said in a letter to the Census Bureau that insufficient resources and not
enough census takers were devoted to the count in Detroit, resulting in an
undercount of unoccupied homes that could amount to tens of thousands of
residents being overlooked.
Schneider
reported from Orlando, Florida.