e’s actually about one percent of the country we will do in the old-fashioned way. We will send somebody to somebody’s house, and knock on the door and ask them who lives there. We’ll – it’s called, you know, in-person enumeration.
We will have – I mentioned a total of about 134 million housing units. We have about 270,000 group quarters in the United States. It’s about 3.5 million square miles of land that’s covered, and every single bit of that land is covered somehow, nine million census blocks, which is our basic organizing geography. And to supervise the field work, we’ve actually opened 12 regional census centers, a separate office in Puerto Rico, and 494 local census offices. And at the peak, we’ll have about 1.4 million workers working on the census, not all of them enumerators. At peak we’ll be about 700,000 in May.
This is a challenging task because we don’t have the ability to delay the census. You know, if somebody is trying to launch – let’s take, example, the space shuttle. You’re trying to launch the space shuttle. You see there’s a leak. They say, “We got to postpone the launch. We will take it back in the hangar, fix the leak, and then we’ll launch it later.” We have a statutory deadline. We must report these numbers to the President by December 31st
, the total population in every state. So we can’t delay things.
We obviously have language challenges in the United States. We produced the form itself in six different languages, but we have language assistance guides in 60 languages. So that’s a challenge, just to reach people who don’t speak English as their primary language.
Not everybody mails the form back. If they mail it back, it costs us under a dollar per person to get a form mailed back and processed. If we have to visit them, I think the estimate was roughly $57 to get each one. And so you can see there is a tremendous desire to get these forms mailed back, because it saves the Census Bureau a lot of effort, and it saves the country a lot of money. We estimate for every one percentage point increase in the mail response rate we save about $85 million.
We do have challenges, what we call coverage challenges. Not everybody wants to be counted. We have to go to special lengths to try and catch those people. We have something starting next Monday, actually. We have – on Monday night, we have shelter evaluation. We’ll go to shelters and try and enumerate the people without a home at those shelters. On Tuesday night next week we’ll go to soup kitchens and mobile food vans and try and get those people. And then Wednesday night next week we’ll actually – between midnight and 6:00 a.m., go to places where the homeless might congregate and try and get them counted as well. So we do go to long – to substantial lengths to try and count everybody.
After we deliver the apportionment counts to the President by the end of December, we then have another statutory deadline. We have to report the population by block to all the states by the end of March, so they can begin their redistricting operations. The numbers at the end of December determine how many seats they’ll have in the House of Representatives. Well, there will be some states that gain seats, some states that lose seats. And even the states that don’t get a change, the people move around, so the districts are going to be of different size. So they all have to redistrict. All the states have to redistrict to get districts of the same size. I guess the exception are states that are so small they only get one seat. They don’t have to redistrict. It’s the whole state anyway.
Then we will proceed to release the remaining data products starting roughly next June through the end of September of 2013. These are basic tabulations that people are interested in.
I mentioned the 1.4 million temporary employees. We will recruit approximately 3.6 million people to fill those 1.4 million jobs. And we are – last I checked we were ahead of our target. We were about 109 percent of our target as we move up by – our target is this 3.6, two five million applicants by Apri