Detroit sues Census Bureau again, accuses feds of undercounting

Detroit — The city of Detroit filed another federal lawsuit Thursday against the U.S. Census Bureau and Commerce Department, accusing officials of undercounting residents, particularly Black and Hispanic citizens, through its "fundamentally flawed formula."

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, is the latest attempt by Mayor Mike Duggan's administration to challenge Census results that are used to draw congressional districts, determine state and federal representation and serve as a basis to allocate funding to states and localities.

The Census' April 2020 estimates counted 639,115 Detroiters and dropped nearly 3% to 620,376 in July 2022. It's a 15% decline from the 731,777 residents recorded in 2010. Estimates from 2023 release in May.

The city first challenged the Census Bureau in September 2022 on the previous two years of estimates. Thursday's lawsuit continues to allege that the Census Bureau is using one inflexible formula to estimate the population of all cities, based primarily on the number of housing units.

The most recent lawsuit disputes revised population numbers the Census Bureau provided to Detroit in February and continues to challenge the Bureau's methodology on counting rehabbed and demolished properties. Duggan has previously maintained that his push to demolish vacant, blighted homes has incorrectly led to a loss of population in Census calculations.

The formula, according to Detroit, ignores the "fundamental truth about population estimates in America: the nature of housing units in older urban cities is dramatically different than the nature of housing units in newer, more affluent areas. Counting all cities the same way is inherently discriminatory."

The formula assumes that every demolition of a vacant, uninhabitable structure represents the loss of a household, ignoring families who renovate an uninhabitable house. It also does not include new housing units in its estimates, according to Detroit's recent filing.

"The combined impact of these policies guarantees that poor and minority communities like Detroit will be undercounted in the Census Bureau’s annual estimate every year," according to the lawsuit.

The city believes tens of thousands of Detroiters were excluded from the Census' 2021 and 2022 estimates. In August, the city challenged the previous estimates.

On Feb. 26, the Census Bureau responded to Detroit's administrative challenge. The bureau adjusted its original estimates in response by increasing the city's population by 2,470 for 2021 and by 5,185 for 2022.

The city, however, feels that adjustment didn't go far enough. The increases are "still woefully understate Detroit's population," the city states in its most recent lawsuit.

The Census Bureau could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

In exhibits to the court, the city submitted housing unit data in seven categories, addressing both gains and losses. they included 1,172 new construction permits for new housing units in 2022 --158 more than the Bureau's estimate; Detroit Land Bank Authority compliances for 889 properties in 2021 and 1,481 in 2022; renovation permits from the city's building department, including 466 housing units rehabbed in 2021 and 531 units rehabbed in 2022; 6,771 new postal service addresses; and 10,890 new DTE residential unit customers.

Three years ago, Duggan and U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, announced that they would be challenging the census, arguing federal officials did not make a good-faith effort to accurately count the number of people during the pandemic and would gather evidence to prove whether that was true. At the time, the pair said they know by the number of DTE Energy utility bills that there are more than the estimated 640,000 residents living in the state's largest city.

At the city level, census data showed people are moving out of cities like Detroit, which shrank from 639,614 to 632,464, a decrease of more than 7,000 people from Census Day on April 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021.

Researchers in 2021 estimated that certain neighborhoods were undercounted by as much as 8.1% during the 2020 census, which would be an undercount of tens of thousands of people. Experts in the years since have expressed surprised by how much Wayne County and Detroit have continued to decline in population, arguing that faulty 2020 data was coloring counts since.

Detroit challenged the counts, but like most cities that mounted similar challenges, little to no changes were made.

Last year, Duggan called the Census Bureau a “complete national clown show,” criticizing the bureau for missing what he said were obvious signs the city was growing, including housing projects under construction across the city as well as an increase in the number of homes receiving mail as reported by the U.S. Postal Service.

"We knocked down 2,500 vacant houses and we had 2,000 rehabbed vacant houses. The Census Bureau took those to mean (6,000) families are leaving and didn't count the ones that stayed. The Census Bureau is going to officially declare population is growing in Detroit," Duggan said at the Detroit Policy Conference in January.

Speaking to reporters after the January event, Duggan added: "The Census Bureau understands you can't do annual estimates where you count the demolition of 2,500 vacant houses that led to a reduction of 6,000 people. I think we are convincing the Census Bureau that there was some real bias in the annual estimate and I'm optimistic they're going to fix it."

Duggan has previously asked the City Council if the city should take on the responsibility of demolishing blighted private-owned homes (he estimates about 5,000) with the remaining $250M Proposal N bond initiative voters approved in 2020. However, it could be calculated as even more of a loss of population, according to the Census methodology, he and council members worry.

The Detroit Land Bank, the largest landowner in the city, has demolished 24,000 homes and sold and rehabbed 16,000 homes. In 2022, Duggan said, more vacant homes were rehabbed than demolished. The city is selling 200 homes each month on buildingdetroit.org.

➥More: Michigan's population stopped declining, but not everywhere is growing evenly

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