For the U.S. cities and towns that have challenged their 2020 census population figures, the victories have been mostly small. But small turned out to be big for tiny Whiteville, Tennessee.
Of the dozen or so municipalities that have appealed and had the results made public by the U.S. Census Bureau because they say residents were overlooked during the nation’s last headcount, the biggest gain so far has been 1,958 residents in Whiteville, which now has a revised population of 4,564 residents and could see a significant boost in the money it gets from the state and federal governments.
Even with just small increases of several hundred residents, cities like Milwaukee are taking what they can get. Wisconsin’s largest city recently gained more than 800 residents after it was discovered that inmates at one of the local jails were wrongly assigned to a neighboring city. That challenge was organized with other Wisconsin municipalities.
Milwaukee has another appeal still pending, claiming 16,500 residents were overlooked in houses and apartments primarily in communities of color. The 2020 census put Milwaukee at 577,222 residents, down about 3% from 2010.
“We will take the 817 people to start,” said Jeff Fleming, a spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson. “We have to fight when they tell us we lost population.”