From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:
So it looks like we’ve pretty much all been counted by the U.S. Census. Guess which state has shown the biggest growth in residents? The answer is below. But how would you like to be the hapless census taker who had to file an official report about being bit by a duck? The mind boggles….
NEARLY ALL U.S. HOUSEHOLDS REACHED, CENSUS REPORTS by Sam Roberts
As of Tuesday, 98 percent of the 47 million households that had failed to return their census questionnaires had been contacted by a census worker.
And despite fears of hostility toward the federal government, rates of incidents involving census workers have been relatively few. Since April, in the course of knocking on 47 million doors an average of two times, the bureau has logged 430 on-the-job incidents against enumerators, including 13 cases where shots were fired (one man was killed in Baltimore) and 139 cases in which a weapon was pulled. Ten workers were robbed, one was bitten by a duck and another by a rooster.
“I don’t see a pattern,” said Robert Groves, the Census Bureau director. “The assaults are not all ideological, but there is a group where the respondents articulated a hatred of the federal government.”
Meanwhile, in a preview of 2010 census results, data released Tuesday revealed that Texas accounted for much of the nation’s urban growth in the year ending July 1, 2009.
Four Texas cities — San Antonio, Fort Worth, Houston and Austin — were among the nine cities in the nation with the biggest numerical gains in population during the year beginning July 1, 2008. Over the period since 2005, Houston has led every other American city in growth and, with three other Texas cities, accounted for four of the six cities in the country with the greatest population gains.
Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas, grew by 6.2 percent to 102,000 since 2008, the fastest rate of any city with more than 100,000 people in the country. Since the start of the decade, Frisco expanded from 33,000 people, an average annual growth rate of 204 percent, also the nation’s highest.
You can check out some other preliminary stats here.
