The American Community Survey (ACS) is a US Census Bureau product designed to provide accurate and timely demographic and economic indicators on an annual basis for both large and small geographic areas within the United States. Operational plans call for ACS to serve not only as a substitute for the decennial census long-form, but as a means of providing annual data at the national, state, county, and subcounty levels . In addition to being highly ambitious, this approach represents a major change in how data are collected and interpreted. Two of the major questions facing the ACS are its functionality and usability. This paper explores the latter of these two questions by examining "€œPersons Per Household (PPH)," a variable of high interest to demographers and others preparing regular post-censal population estimates. The data used in this exploration are taken from 18 of the counties that formed the set of 1999 ACS test sites. The examination proceeds by comparing ACS PPH values to PPH values generated using a geometric model based on PPH change between the 1990 and 2000 census counts. The ACS PPH values represent what could be called the "statistical perspective"€ because variations in the values of specific variables over time and space are viewed largely by statisticians with an eye toward sample (and non-sample) error. The model-based PPH values represent a "demographic perspective" because PPH values are largely viewed by demographers as varying systematically, an orientation stemming from theory and empirical evidence that PPH values respond to demographic and related determinants. The comparisons suggest that the ACS PPH values exhibit too much "noisy" variation for a given area over time to be usable by demographers and others preparing post-censal population estimates. These findings should be confirmed through further analysis and suggestions are provided for the directions this research could take.