West Village Lags Behind NY State In Census Response

Gus Saltonstall
·2 min read

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Just over half of Manhattan's 1.6 million residents have responded to this year's census, netting the borough a much lower response rate than New York State and the United States in general, according to data collected by the Census Bureau.

Manhattan's response rate of 55.8 percent is lower than the state's 58.3 percent and the country's 62.8 percent response rate, according to Census Bureau data.

The response rate is even lower in the West Village.

Here are the response rates for five of the West Village's main census tracts:

  • 63rd Census Tract: 50.4 percent response rate

  • 65th Census Tract: 50.7 percent response rate

  • 67th Census Tract: 53 percent response rate

  • 71st Census Tract: 49.8 percent response rate

  • 73rd Census Tract: 52.5 percent response rate

"We are in the streets all over New York City in safe, socially distant activities in parks and playgrounds. And that hard work I think is really paying off because we've seen incredible self-response rates in the past couple of weeks in particular, three times the national average, but we really need all New Yorkers to participate," the city's Census Director Julie Menin said during Mayor Bill de Blasio's Wednesday press briefing.

Menin said Wednesday that filling out the census will have a direct effect on the city's ability to deal with emergencies by invoking the city's devastating coronavirus outbreak in the spring. If more New Yorkers had filled out the census in 2010 the city would have had more federal money for Medicaid and city health centers, Menin said.

The census, which is conducted every ten years, determines the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives and how to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for schools, roads and bridges, public transportation, hospitals and other critical services.

Some of Manhattan's wealthiest neighborhoods are responsible for the borough's low response rate, according to Census Burea data. Census tracts on the Tribeca and West Village waterfronts, along Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side and in the vicinity of Midtown's "Billionaire's Row" have some of the worst response rates in Manhattan.

New Yorkers can fill out the census online at 2020census.gov or over the phone by calling 844-330-2020. Click here for more information on the 2020 U.S. Census and why it matters. The bureau has pushed back the deadline for census submissions to Oct. 31 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The original deadline was set for July 31.

Patch's Brendan Krisel and Maya Kaufman contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on the West Village Patch