Spatiality

UPDATE June 25, 2012

We launched a companion map featuring Congressional districts with statistics on eligible voters by race/ethnicity compared with total population.

UPDATE March 6, 2012

We’ve added Congressional districts as proposed by District Court Judge Hon. Roanne Mann to our interactive redistricting site. Here’s a link that compares District 9 (Rep. Turner, in NYC) with one of the proposed districts that it would become under her proposed lines: http://t.co/01K4hMu8

We also submitted a letter today to the court [PDF] suggesting that they can use our maps to visually compare the different proposed lines.  Hopefully they’ll put our online maps to good use as they review the different Congressional district proposals.

UPDATE March 5, 2012

We’ve made two updates the information below.

1. We’ve added the Congressional district data in shapefile and KMZ formats based on Common Cause’s submission to the court.  We think this will be especially helpful since the court has asked the intervenors to compare their maps with Common Cause’s proposal.
2. Now you can visualize the proposed districts based on the mapped data below at the Center for Urban Research’s interactive redistricting site.
   1. compare with existing Congressional districts;
   2. easily switch among the Congressional proposals from Common Cause and the Senate & Assembly majorities; and
   3. view the proposed districts in relation to block-level demographic maps (do any of them appear to “pack,” “crack,” or dilute the potential voting power of minority populations?) or local voting patterns (click the “More Data” tab at the bottom right).

Here are some examples:

• District 9 (Rep. Turner), as proposed by the Senate majority, the Assembly majority , and Common Cause
• District 22 (Rep. Hinchey): Senate proposal , Assembly proposal, and Common Cause
• District 5 (Rep. Ackerman): Senate proposal , Assembly plan, and Common Cause

Today the New York World posted an analysis of how these different Congressional district proposals might impact Rep. Charles Rangel’s current district 15.

Original Post

If you’re hoping to use GIS or any of the online mapping tools to map the Congressional district lines in New York State that were proposed late yesterday, you’ll have some work to do.  The maps were released in PDF format as well as “block assignment lists” for the proposed districts.

But if you’d like to use shapefiles and/or KML files, you’ve come to right place!  Our team at the CUNY Graduate Center has created them and posted them for downloading here:

http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/proposed-congress-districts-in-gis-format/

We hope to add these soon to our interactive redistricting map. Stay tuned!

Filed under: Cartography, Data | Tagged: Cartography, Census, Data, Policy, redistricting |