In 2022, New York City redrew its council districts according to the decennial Census. The New York City Districting Commission (NYCDC) held ten public meetings and hearings to collect input from residents on the redistricting process and proposed maps. The commission collected more than 13,200 individual testimonies from residents in all five boroughs.
Public input submitted to the NYCDC reflects the needs, wants, and concerns of thousands of residents. The testimonies captured insights into how New York City residents conceptualize and define their own communities, how they perceive the communities around them, and the various challenges facing different communities.
While the NYCDC website makes all testimony accessible to the public, testimony is stored in individual PDF files organized by date submitted. The city’s method of presenting testimony makes it difficult for individuals to access since finding submissions related to a particular district, neighborhood, or topic is cumbersome. The current storage format for this testimony renders a wealth of invaluable data near unusable. Our project resolves this problem.
Research Question
Who cares about redistricting in New York City? Who submits testimony to the NYCDC? What do they want? Is the public testimony data on the districting commission website accessible or useful to the broader public? Are certain neighborhoods more civically engaged than others? Are certain neighborhoods more vulnerable to redistricting than others? Our project seeks to answer these questions and allow members of the public to better understand different communities of interest and their particular concerns.
Methods
Our team used Named Entity Recognition (NER)—a computational text analysis method that identifies important keywords within a text corpus related to location, people, identities, laws, events, organizations, and other important entities within a text—to create a database of public testimony compiled during New York City’s 2022 redistricting process. We also attached shapefile data to all NYC neighborhoods identified through the NER process. Using this shapefile data, we created a map showing the distribution of testimony according to geographic locations referenced in each submission, including neighborhoods and city council districts. The resulting map shows the distribution of public testimony submitted for each neighborhood. By clicking on a particular neighborhood on the map, users can access PDF files containing each relevant submission. We labeled city council districts according to the final maps adopted for 2022.
Mapping
After coding our database, we mapped distribution of testimony data. We used a shape file of New York City neighborhoods provided by Zillow. This shape file includes some neighborhood names used for real estate or marketing purposes which also came up in public testimony. We built the map using Felt, a collaborative online mapping tool.
We created a website to host our project using the CUNY Academic Commons network. The website houses both the database and map.
Analysis
Public testimony came from neighborhoods in each of the five boroughs. The volume of testimony submitted in each neighborhood ranged from zero submissions to more than 500.
The opportunity for members of the public to submit testimony to the districting commission is based on the assumption that the communities or neighborhoods impacted by proposed changes to district boundaries will provide input on the districting process. That assumption was partially borne out in public testimony submitted in 2022. Neighborhoods that submitted the most testimony — with more than 6000 individual submissions — included the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, which were under threat of being moved from a Manhattan district into a Queens district under the preliminary map. Those neighborhoods submitted the most testimony out of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan and Queens. Other neighborhoods in those boroughs provided between 0 and 99 submissions, with most neighborhoods in the range between 10 and 24 submissions.
Neighborhoods with the next greatest number of submissions after the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island include Bay Ridge, Bath Beach, Flatbush, Midwood, Red Hook, and Sunset Park. These neighborhoods each provided between 100 and 500 submissions.
A common occurrence across neighborhoods with a greater volume of submissions was the use of templates by political and cultural organizations such as advocacy groups, tenant associations, real estate companies, and representative offices. These templates employed boilerplate text provided by an organization which individuals submitted, sometimes with additional language and concerns.
Submission topics included major thoroughfares, public transit lines, diasporic communities, social services, local businesses, public housing facilities, family composition, and schools.
Conclusion
Public testimony submitted to the New York City districting commission contains a unique set of data that captures various communities of interest. The data provide insight into how New York City communities are defined by external forces, how they define themselves, and how they are impacted by the redistricting process.
The NYCDC makes public testimony available on its website organized by date. However, there is no way for members of the public to find submissions relevant to their community without manually sifting through each piece of testimony, a process that is time-consuming and cumbersome which may deter someone otherwise interested in the resource from using testimony data.
We created a new database, map, and companion website that allows members of the public to access districting testimony associated with particular neighborhoods and council districts.
This project provides a starting point for future research on the redistricting process. Our database holds information on laws referenced in submission, mentions of home ownership, and descriptions of informal communities that users can refine for additional exploration.
