Understanding the Real Meaning of Data

Understanding the Real Meaning of Data

Todd M. Richardson, Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development. Secretary Julián Castro travels a lot. When he travels, the Secretary gets to meet with the people HUD serves and have important conversations with our local partners who do the hard work on the ground. This week (the week of October 20th) he is visiting South and North Dakota, including a stop at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

By coincidence, my colleague Ben Winter and I were in South Dakota in September visiting several tribes. Our goal was to look behind the data we have for these tribal areas and learn more about residents’ housing needs.

Getting good data on rural areas is hard. Sampling methodologies work pretty well in urban areas, they work less well in areas with low population densities. And for our Native American programs we want to know about the subgroup in mostly rural areas of Native Americans that are eligible to be served by their tribes.

In the 1990s I visited a number of tribal areas (see my previous post on this topic), including many tribes in the Southwest and Alaska, I had not visited the tribes in the Dakotas. And since the 1990s, the data we collect and the way we collect the data have changed in three important ways:

• In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau began allowing individuals to self-identify as multiracial.
• Beginning in 2009, we replaced the former “long-form” of the decennial census with the annual American Community Survey, which uses data collected over multiple years to report on needs in low population areas.
• The availability of administrative data that can be used for statistical purposes.

Ben and I wanted to understand how the change in the main data source we use for small areas — the American Community Survey — lines up with what the tribes see as their housing needs. In a best-case scenario, we wanted to see if there were opportunities to also tap into administrative data.

We visited South Dakota’s Cheyenne River and Rosebud reservations and concluded at Pine Ridge, where I was honored to participate in a groundbreaking for the construction of 45 new housing units.

On Tuesday morning Ben and I met staff from the Cheyenne River Housing Authority on the western edge of the reservation in the town of Howes (population of 2). We spent the next 8 hours driving across a reservation the size of Connecticut with a population of about 8,000 (according to the 2010 census) scattered in more than two dozen communities. On Wednesday we visited with the staff of the Rosebud Housing Authority and toured one of their developments. On Thursday, we spent the day on Pine Ridge, which included a visit with two families in their homes and the groundbreaking event.

We made several observations:

• Land. These vast reservations are a patchwork of tribally owned and individually owned land, a very long legacy of the Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) of 1887. This mix of allotted and tribal lands complicates where tribes can develop housing.
• Infrastructure. It is expensive to provide infrastructure in these remote rural areas with long distances between small communities. On Cheyenne River they had a moratorium on building new homes since 2006 because the water infrastructure was fully utilized. Only recently have some resources been found to fund expansion. In Pine Ridge, their new development where I participated in the groundbreaking still needs funding to build roads.
• Distance. On Cheyenne River, builders have to travel about 180 miles to get building supplies.
• Poverty. There are very few jobs, and nearly all of those are government-related jobs: the tribe, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, and the housing authority employ the majority of working tribal members. As a result, unemployment rates are high and poverty rates are even higher.

Since the extent of poverty and unemployment is so great in these areas, families that live in units provided by the housing authority can spend very little on rent. That means the affordable housing stock requires additional operating subsidy to maintain housing in this very low density and rugged environment that endures harsh winters and strong summer storms. Overcrowding is very high in the data, and the tribes think it is even higher, citing long waiting lists for affordable housing.

Tribes are clearly having to make difficult choices among developing new housing, providing additional operating subsidies for existing units, investing in infrastructure, or rehabilitating the older assisted stock. Paul Iron Cloud, CEO of the Pine Ridge Housing Authority, summarized this need in this way – “We need funding for roads and roofs”.

Returning to the goal of our visit – connecting the dots between the data we have and the actual needs – we found a number of opportunities we will be exploring with our colleagues at the Indian Health Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Census Bureau.

You can’t understand data unless you see what is behind the data. After spending three days in South Dakota, traveling almost 800 miles, and visiting with the very welcoming and patient Lakota Sioux, I have made a new commitment to improving the data we have for tribes and for rural areas.