2005-03-03 - 10:06 p.m.
We�re looking at secondary data and census data in my Market Research class now and this anecdote came up, so I thought I�d share it here. I used to work for a real estate developer in Boston. My first position with them was coordinating operations at a luxury high-rise apartment complex that we�d built on a brownfield site in Cambridge, MA. (If you know the area, it�s the buildings you see on your right as you take the Green Line to Lechmere.) Often this entailed me yelling at non-performing vendors. Operations management is often the art of getting people to do what you have already paid them to do.
Anyway for Census 2000, enumerators kept trying to wander in to knock on people�s doors and count them. This was a high-end building and tenants paid a lot of rent for (among other services) a security desk in front. I kept getting reports from the guards there that some Census-taker had tried to sneak through the keycard-access door past them. Hmm. We really didn�t need this.
Now, many tenants had thrown out the Census forms they got in the mail, either because they weren�t citizens and figured it didn�t apply to them or because they just felt they didn�t have time. But the Census wanted to at least count who lived in the building and we kept turning enumerators away as unwanted busybodies (most tenants were away at jobs and school when they came anyway). Somehow they got wind of the fact that we had a lot of foreign tenants (mostly oil money � Saudis and Venezuelans and such) and decided it must be a Latino building, so they started sending Spanish-speakers with a riff about �please, we are just trying to collect the information� that they presumably give to suspicious illegal aliens. Sigh.
When the twelfth annoying enumerator was turned away I called the local Census office myself. �Please,� I pleaded, �stop the madness. I can tell you exactly who lives here. I will give you a list of their names. Just stop this insane parade.� They insisted they wanted to go around knocking on doors. We just want to collect the information. I offered to let them set up a desk in the lobby. The lobby is public space. Apartment hallways are private space. No dice.
Their office was in an industrial park right near us, so I went down there in the flesh with my tenant roster. It was a temporary-seeming, ramshackle operation, almost frightening in its fool�s-quest aesthetic. Most furniture was made of cardboard, down to the desks. A lot of people were wandering around seemingly in a daze. I�m told that the labor hired by the Census lowers the unemployment rate by half a percent. Well here they were in this office, the otherwise-unemployable.
I eventually negotiated my way through numerous people up to the Chief Head Regional Counter (or whatever) and struck an agreement where they stopped sending creepy people to try and wander the halls and we told them who lived there. For my assistance, they gave me a T-shirt which has become one of my favorites. It�s so corny, it�s cool: �Census 2000 � How America knows what America needs!�
And yet, for all the fly-by-night nature of things, they manage to pull it together. The Census is probably the most impressive data-collection feat anywhere. The American census is the most transparent and accessible count of any country. I mean, go to their website now.
As a curious coda, I myself was not counted. My roommate, who was paying rent that month but preparing to move and mostly staying with his girlfriend, threw out the mail form. An enumerator came by when I was at work and left a note saying to call him, which I didn�t of course. Young, urban professionals are indeed apparently an undercounted group you wouldn�t expect because they tend to move around a lot.
But cooperate in 2010. It�s how America knows what America needs.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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