Canoga Park: A New Approach
Advertisements asking Canoga Park residents if they have participated in the census run up and down Sherman Way. In a time of self-isolation, Christian Rubio has never seen these ads, though he had seen ones on social media. Having parents who only speak Spanish, Rubio took it upon himself to fill out the census for his family. His reason for doing so was not because his parents asked him to or the advertising, but because of a phone call.
“I see ads for it every 10 minutes on the TV and on YouTube,” Rubio said. “It wasn’t until I got a voice mail asking me if I’m going to participate in the census that I really took it seriously. I thought I was going to get fined or something, and my family couldn’t fill it out so I had to do it.”
Canoga Park has historically been a low response area, with it having only a 65% response rate for the 2010 census according to the 2020 Census Hard to Count map. This time, census workers and community leaders in the area wanted to improve these numbers and mapped out a plan to get everyone to participate in the count. Unfortunately, most of what they prepared for involved physical interaction and due to COVID-19, they had to rethink their approach.
“Our main approach was to go door to door, especially in the apartment buildings on Roscoe, those are usually under counted because they don’t seem to receive the form in the mail,” said Thelma Gutierrez, who works for the census in the Canoga Park area.
Patricia Ramos, a census media supervisor, said that their more hands-on approach had to be scrapped and now must rely on advertising.
“What we wanted to do was have teams on the ground go through the neighborhood and into public parks to try and spread awareness of the census,” Ramos said. “Now we have shifted our focus into ads around the area, it’s important we get everyone counted especially during this pandemic.”
A good amount of these advertisements posted around the area are in Spanish, as they have considered the large Spanish speaking population, which according to census data from Censusreporter.org, is more than half. But a language barrier might not be the main problem for these low response rates.
“I don’t think a language barrier will be a problem for Spanish speaking residents as we have a Spanish speaking option, as well as other languages online,” said Gutierrez. “Places like Canoga Park which have high immigrant populations are usually low counted because immigrants are afraid to partake in the census. They think that the government wants to target them if they do the census, which is not true, all the counted numbers go into a vault and are not used to spy on communities.”
Other residents believe the online option couldn’t have come at a better time and are happy that census workers wont come to their house.
“Doing it online is so much easier than having to mail it, and especially right now I don’t know if I want to go out to mail it back,” Elizabeth Keels, a longtime Canoga Park resident said. “Besides the whole pandemic, I’m happy that they won’t come to my house this time. I don’t like having them come around to my house asking me if I’ve done it or not.”
As of May 10, 2020 Canoga Park has a response rate of 56%, and hopes to raise that number through the coming month.
