DCP’s Interactive Tool Needs Retooling So New Yorkers Can Easily Determine How Redistricting Changed their Districts

By Yehudit Garmaise

The Department of City Planning (DCP) launched a new online, interactive website, which can be accessed here, that the agency calls a “brilliant data visualization tool to reveal the new City Council districts map,” but BoroPark24 found that neighborhoods are not labeled so the interactive tool can be difficult to use. 

Using the data the DCP gathered in the census of 2020, the agency redrew the City’s 51 Council District boundaries to best represent each district’s population.

The DCP launched its latest round of redistricting, which occurs every ten years, to ensure that council members represent each population proportionally and can appoint an appropriate number of board members to each community board, as required by the NYC City Charter.

Community Boards, which represent New York City’s 59 community districts whose borders change less frequently, will remain the same after continuing essentially unchanged since 1975.

While the borders of the city’s community districts remain, the borders of the City’s Council districts remain more in flux over the years.

As a result, the borders of the community and council districts do not directly match and are ever-changing. 

In Brooklyn, for instance, Community District 10, comprised of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Fort Hamilton, saw the largest change in its distribution in the borough, the DCP reported.

While in 2013, Council District 43 comprised 91% of the Community District’s population in 2013, in 2023, Council District 43 shrunk to 11% of that district’s population.

“Good governance means addressing the needs of constituents in Community Districts through representation by members of the New York City Council,” said Joe Salvo, Institute Fellow at the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia and former New York City Chief Demographer. “That is not a one-to-one relationship in many cases, with Community Districts sometimes represented by multiple members of the City Council. 

“By showing changes in how Community Districts are juxtaposed with Council Districts, local constituents can better understand how their needs are being represented by members of the City Council.”