Tent cities pose challenges for US census

The quality of the US census may be undermined because of rising numbers of people living in garages, tents, basements and motels as the financial crisis deepens, key organizations working with the Census Bureau have warned. One in nine US homeowners with a mortgage was behind on home loan ­payments or in some stage of foreclosure by the end of last year and reports are growing of the desperate measures to which people are turning when they lose their homes. Almost 300,000 homes received foreclosure filings in February alone. There is little data on the rise in "non-traditional" housing, which is something the Census Bureau will generate for the first time as it seeks people out this year. The bureau has always sought to reach what it calls "hard to count" populations, which include the homeless and illegal immigrants. It hopes to use the same strategies this time, including sending surveyors to areas where there are no formal addresses and setting up walk-in centers for people to go and fill in their forms. But these special operations, which sit on top of the standard postal census, are expensive. The bureau says it is confident it has the resources it needs. This year's stimulus bill gave it enough money to hire 2,000 additional field partnership employees to help reach ­people who are hard to count. More than 140,000 census workers this week started fanning out across the country to canvass addresses, and by next year the bureau will employ more than 1m people to carry out the government's largest peacetime operation.