TROY – Capital Roots is the frontline community organization that government officials want working in hard-to-count neighborhoods like North Central, but then the coronavirus pandemic knocked out the non-profit’s careful plans for the 2020 Census.

Due to social distancing requirements to keep its employees and patrons safe, Capital Roots Executive Director Amy Klein said the regional provider has had to pull back to concentrate on its core mission of providing fresh, healthy food to support local communities.

“The kind of census work that needs to be done to reach hard-to-count individuals is very personal work. Because of the coronavirus ... it makes it very hard to do the very personal census work,” Klein said Tuesday.

Capital Roots sits squarely in North Central, the poorest of the city’s neighborhoods, where it was invested in getting a higher turnout. Obstacles that had to be overcome included distrust of the government, a lack of computer access to complete census forms and no personal investment in filling out the forms. As of Tuesday, just 18.8 percent of North Central’s neighborhoods had filed their forms, according to census reporting data. That’s about a third lower than the citywide return rate of 28.2 percent.

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The low response for the hard-knock neighborhoods in Troy also is occurring in Albany and Schenectady. The rates are lower in the Albany census tract that includes portions of Arbor Hill, Sheridan Hollow and West Hills, with a response rate of 15 percent, where the citywide return is 29.4 percent. And in Hamilton Hill, there’s a 16.4 response rate compared to the Schenectady-wide return of 29 percent.

The Capital Region’s overall return rates are strengthened by the suburban towns. The counties of Albany at 36.9 percent, Rensselaer at 34.7 percent, Saratoga at 37.4 and Schenectady at 37.9 percent all outpace the state rate of 31.1 percent. Albany, Saratoga and Schenectady also are beating the national census form completion rate of 36.2 percent as of Tuesday.

Wednesday, April 1, is Census Day, the 24th time the nation has conducted the count since the first one in 1790. It’s also being conducted under the threat of COVID-19 that’s shut down businesses and social life around the nation.

“It’s going to be an interesting challenge. For people, the census is not high as a topic right now,” said Mark Castiglione, executive director of the Capital District Regional Planning Commission.

The face-to-face operations that local governments were relying on to reach out through schools, churches, libraries, local events and organizations like Capital Roots are shut down. Castiglione said combined with the move to doing it online, the census has barriers that will have to be overcome. Some strategy is going to have to be devised before the census bureau stops counting on Aug. 14.

It’s possible to follow how the response rate is going nationally down through a “Hard to Count” map at www.censushardtocountmaps2020.us. The mapping tool was developed by a team led by Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center/CUNY.

“We launched the map in 2017 as a resource for stakeholders to prioritize their census outreach and Get Out the Count campaigns,” Romalewski said.

Castiglione reviewed the census reports for the Capital Region shown on the map. He said it reflects the traditional hard-to-count areas in the cities as well as the rural issues in places like Saratoga County’s towns of Day at 7.6 percent and Edinburg at 8.1 percent and Rensselaer County’s town of Berlin at 10.6 percent.