Mayor Michelle Wu announced Tuesday Boston will dispute the results of the national 2020 population count based on research from local demographers that suggests an undercount of nearly 7,000 college students, immigrants and people in correctional facilities.
Wu also announced Boston is seeking a review of the city’s count of people in “group quarters” — places like prisons, nursing homes, military barracks and dormitories where people stay in a shared living arrangement owned or managed by an organization providing housing or services for residents. The review will come through the Census Bureau’s Post Census Group Quarters Review program, a new post-census protocol allows local governments to request a group quarters recount.
The census placed Boston’s population at 675,647, up nearly 10 percent from 2010. But, according to the Boston Planning and Development Agency, the latest headcount count represents about 15,000 less people than recent census population estimates projected.
In a press release announcing the challenge, Wu pointed to one of the most important aspects of the national decennial headcount: funding.
“The count is the foundation to assess the needs of all our communities, ensuring that Boston received crucial federal resources, and it should reflect our full numbers,” Wu’s statement read.
Asked about the challenge’s likelihood of success on Boston Public Radio Tuesday, Wu would not comment.
City Councilor Liz Breadon, who recently inherited oversight of Boston’s redistricting process, represents the Allston-Brighton area known for housing local college students.
In a statement, she noted the pandemic influenced the count when quarantine restrictions were most severe and large swaths of the nation were locking down in 2020.
“I am particularly concerned by Allston’s reported 5.9 percent loss in total population and 40 percent decline in group quarters population, severely impacted by the early pandemic evacuation of the colleges and universities,” Breadon said. “I am appreciative of the administration’s formal submission of a challenge to our 2020 Census results through Census Bureau programs because we must set the record straight.”
In a press release, the Wu administration pointed to additional concerns with low response rates in about 30 census tracts, the Census Bureau’s virtual subdivisions that makeup a municipality.
“Some of these census tracts with lower response rates either have a large share of off-campus students or foreign-born residents,” the city press release said.
Other census tracts with lower response rates had larger shares of immigrant residents and “issues such as language barriers and government mistrust, in particular a citizenship question and prevalent anti-immigrant sentiment when count was administered, may have resulted in an undercount,” according to the statement.
The 2020 census also changed the way race was counted and processed, which led to an uptick in people classified as “some other race” and “two, or more races.”
Those categories, the administration said, don’t reflect actual demographic or cultural changes and potentially misclassified some of Boston’s uniquely diverse communities like Cape Verdeans, Brazilians and those of Middle Eastern or North African origin.
