et in the U.S. to get a GPS coordinate for every housing unit, and we had already spent a good deal of money realigning all of our streets to GPS network. So the idea of this undertaking was to minimize what we call “geocoding” errors, to make sure the housing unit was in the right place, the right block, so that when people draw their lines there for redistricting, we have the people in the right place.
We also do a census in group quarters, not just housing units. Group quarters are places like prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, college dormitories, places where people live together but may not have a separate, like, kitchen. We have made a special effort this decade to identify the group quarters, and are about to start counting people in those group quarters.
We are mailing, for the first time, a bilingual questionnaire in – about 13 million households will get an English and Spanish questionnaire. We think that will improve response rates in the heavily Hispanic neighborhoods.
One other change we are making is for the first time we’re using a replacement questionnaire. I’ll go through the timing in a little bit, but we have found through research that sending replacement questionnaires to the people who haven’t responded, substantially increases the mail response, which then reduces the cost – overall cost of the census.
So we expect to – we’ve mailed questionnaires already. This was March 15th
to the 17th
. You should have gotten one. In our mail – what we call our mail out areas, about 20 million housing units got – households, got these questionnaires. We actually have to other operations. We have one operation in rural areas without good mailing addresses. In most of those areas, we will take a questionnaire and hang it on people’s doorknobs and ask them to mail it back, because we can’t mail to post office boxes and – or rural routes, but they can get mail picked up there. So we’ll hang it on their doorknobs, they’ll fill it out, put in their mailbox to be picked up and it will come back to us.
And there’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 po