HTEs: Who's Missing?

This map shows the 1990 census tracts for Travis County -- the tracts which will be used to report 2000 data haven't been finalized yet and don't really have any bearing on the counting itself. (There will be more tracts, for sure, as fringe areas get more heavily populated.)

The Census Bureau has a formula for determining "hard-to-enumerate" tracts -- those at the greatest risk of undercounting -- which factors in ethnicity, language isolation, home ownership, and income, along with the tract's mail-back response rate to the 1990 census. So most of Austin's HTE tracts are no big surprise: East and Southeast Austin, West Campus, St. John's. The city is also focusing on the growing Asian community in North Central Austin, around Lanier High School; on the increasingly Hispanic south central corridor, especially south of Ben White; and on the UT student-apartment complexes along Lake Austin.

In 1990, the city estimates, the census missed 35,000 Austinites, mostly from these HTE areas. This means that some east and southeast neighborhoods may have been undercounted by as much as 20% -- which is why the city and the Census Bureau are working so diligently on their "complete count" outreach effort.