Who knew Cleveland was so hip to civic participation?
A story from The New Republic shows evidence that Clevelanders are totally down with the Census, or at least readily willing to participate and withhold judgment and scorn or physical violence for the census workers showing up at their doors.
The Census Bureau just released the final, official tally of Census 2010 participation rates across the country. While the overall national rate came to 74 percent—matching the rate from a decade ago and heralded as “a significant achievement in a time of declining survey participation worldwide”—response rates varied greatly in different parts of the country.As I noted last November, certain metro areas were home to more “hard to count” populations than others. And, as I noted at the end of March, the Midwest and rural areas were leading the pack in terms of their participation rates early on.
Now it’s time to check the final score. Using county-level participation rate data from Census, I calculated average participation rates for metropolitan areas across the U.S.
So who's number one?
That would be Milwaukee, but Cleveland's solidly in the top ten with over 80% participate rates.
(Rest of the top ten: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Madison, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Indianapolis, Detroit, Ogden, and Youngstown.)
