urbanSTL

North St. Louis has lost a bunch of representation. At least a few of the wards extend further south but still.

pattimagee wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

What are the percentages included with each ward? 

chriss752 wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

North St. Louis has lost a bunch of representation. At least a few of the wards extend further south but still.

With the population decreases, this was expected though, no?

Laife Fulk wrote:

chriss752 wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

North St. Louis has lost a bunch of representation. At least a few of the wards extend further south but still.

With the population decreases, this was expected though, no?

I expected it but not like this

Laife Fulk wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

chriss752 wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

North St. Louis has lost a bunch of representation. At least a few of the wards extend further south but still.

With the population decreases, this was expected though, no?

Definitely. The Northside went from ~30% to ~25% of the City's population between 2010 and 2020. 

Not sure what Reed said but it appears from Ald. Cohn that the % shown is the deviation from the target population.... L & M e.g. will have to reduce people and others will have to add people to get to an acceptable level of evenly populated boundaries.  Feels like this is only a working draft to get to a real proposal.

Edit: Listening to Reed, it sounds like w/in 5% is the acceptable deviation between wards.

Yeah, if you watch the video presentation of Reed on the Fox website you'll see that he refers to those numbers as the "deviation" numbers. It is implied that it is the percentage point deviation of the % population in that ward from city population / 14. He explains that that is why they had to move a square hole of TGE from ward H to ward I.

The population imbalance violates one person, one vote principles. I’m putting together local maps on my new site over the next few days that should be fair, legal, and balanced. I’ve got 5 up so far.
STLRedistricting.com


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Yeah the current deviations are not going to persist in the final map.

brianadler6545 wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

The population imbalance violates one person, one vote principles. I’m putting together local maps on my new site over the next few days that should be fair, legal, and balanced. I’ve got 5 up so far.
STLRedistricting.com


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Agreed.  Some back of the napkin math, a 5% deviation would be +/- 1,077 people. (301,578 people / 14 wards * .05 variation) If two neighboring wards were at the opposite ends of the max 5% deviation, one would have 22,618 people and one would have 20,464.  

All hypothetical here, but let's say one ward at the max minimum (20,464 residents) includes the Greater Ville and O'Fallon neighborhoods, two neighborhoods that saw the largest decrease in population from 2010 - 2020.  (Greater Ville: -1,644 people, -26.56% & O’Fallon: -1,449 people, -25.02%).  Even if their population decrease trends are cut in half in 5 years (say GV loses only 822 and OF loses only 724), that's still an additional potential population of 1,546 less people. Or an additional 5%+ deviation.  Same exercise could be done for the neighborhoods growing at the fastest pace if they were at the maximum deviation number.

I'm not sure what the solution should be, but I'd much prefer if the deviation numbers used now were based upon 1%.  Because there's going to be natural deviation in ward populations over the years, why try to get them as balanced as possible now so that one person, one vote principles are upheld for as long as possible?

The population deviations do seem pretty extreme in some cases.

Ward D's shape and included neighborhoods seems very odd to me, but maybe I am paying closer attention to it since I live in in FPSE. I figured figured FPSE would either continued to be lumped in with the WUMC/CWE/CORTEX to the north (as it is now), joined up with some combinations of the neighborhoods to the south (Botanical Grove, Shaw), the West (Dogtown, the Hill), or directly east (Botanical Heights, Tiffany, Gate District). Instead it narrows then joins with neighborhoods further away to the East and North. If I am reading the map correctly, it includes:

Forest Park Southeast/The Grove
Midtown
SLU
Grand Center
Downtown West and a decent chunk of what I would think of as downtown proper
Jeff-Vander-Lou
Part of The Ville/Greater Ville

Seems very sprawling to me, with very different needs/constituencies across the ward that need different kinds of leadership.

I am disappointed that downtown continues to get diced up(3 wards in the map, I think?), seems like it might benefit from more unified leadership/direction.

wabash wrote: ↑

Nov 01, 2021

I see some value in maintaining proximity to neighborhood lines as a means of "keeping neighbors together". Not that it should necessarily be the primary determining factor, but some neighborhoods have active and involved neighborhood associations, which can be an effective means of organizing and vocalizing neighborhood priorities. Having a neighborhood represented by just one or two aldermen can help facilitate a close relationship between the association and aldermen and better representation.

I suppose my objection to the neighborhoods is mostly that we have way too many of them (more even than the wards), so breaking them up isn't really necessary. I certainly don't mean to split up neighbors, so I concede the point. (I'd argue there's probably maybe a dozen neighborhoods in town, more or less. Not fifty. And certainly not 79. This isn't New York for crying out loud. It's compact and there aren't really all that many of us.)

Why can’t we have Downtown and Downtown west as one area! STL sets itself for failure once again!!


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^Amen, JJ!

JJ Taino wrote: ↑

Nov 02, 2021

Why can’t we have Downtown and Downtown west as one area! STL sets itself for failure once again!!


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Jack Coatar.

Does he personally enjoy the feeling of an entire inbox of unanswered emails from his constituents?

Dude can't even handle Soulard and Lafayette Square and we think we should continue to give him the urban core of St. Louis.

bwcrow1s wrote:Does he personally enjoy the feeling of an entire inbox of unanswered emails from his constituents?

Dude can't even handle Soulard and Lafayette Square and we think we should continue to give him the urban core of St. Louis.

Downtown and Downtown West should be one ward! If the problem is the alderman that’s why we have elections!


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Coatar will have to run against James Page in 2023, Page is much more organized and better campaigner then the guy that almost beat Jack in April.

JJ Taino wrote: ↑

Nov 02, 2021

Why can’t we have Downtown and Downtown west as one area! STL sets itself for failure once again!!


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I will completely get behind putting "downtown" and "downtown west" in a single ward. The idea that "downtown west" even exists as a separate entity is just . . . stupid.

would need another 11,000 residents to add to downtown+ west for it to be one ward. Could go either north or back to soulard/Lafayette sq

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑

Nov 03, 2021

JJ Taino wrote: ↑

Nov 02, 2021

Why can’t we have Downtown and Downtown west as one area! STL sets itself for failure once again!!


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I will completely get behind putting "downtown" and "downtown west" in a single ward. The idea that "downtown west" even exists as a separate entity is just . . . stupid.

So you do agree that neighborhood borders should be respected 

TBH it would make more sense for the the downtown ward to extend west along the central corridor to include Grand Center, Wells Fargo, and Midtown Alley. It makes more sense than including Soulard and Lafayette and Benton Park. 

Something along the lines of Chouteau, the river, MLK/Franklin and Vandeventer. 

GoHarvOrGoHome wrote: ↑

Nov 03, 2021

TBH it would make more sense for the the downtown ward to extend west along the central corridor to include Grand Center, Wells Fargo, and Midtown Alley. It makes more sense than including Soulard and Lafayette and Benton Park. 

Something along the lines of Chouteau, the river, MLK/Franklin and Vandeventer. 

This makes so much more sense to me than the current proposal. In my rough calculations the combined populations of the neighborhoods of Columbus Square, Downtown, Downtown West, Midtown, and Grand Center are about the size of the new wards. I think these neighborhoods are all a lot more similar than Downtown and the residential areas south of Chouteau.

So I spent a few hours fussing around with a website called districtbuilder. It's imperfect at best, since it's designed for federal and state redistricting, not local. But it has demographics and it's fairly open. Here's what I arrived at trying to build 14 districts that keep things compact and reasonable. In the end, I don't think you really can respect the official neighborhood map and have functional wards. The populations are just too different. (And the official neighborhood maps are insufficiently compact anyway. Some are worse than others, of course.) It's probably a question of what neighborhoods to split and why.

Other than that, I think it's a fair enough map. You have five majority African American wards, though one is only just barely. You have five majority white wards, though most aren't heavily so. And you have four plurality wards. Four northside, three central, and seven south. (Which is probably unavoidable unless you want to go the two central route. The center of gravity has just moved south. And the character of the southside is radically different than it once was anyway.)




Ward 1 is a bit overpopulated, but I couldn't find a good way to fix it and if any one ward gets to be a tad overlarge I'd say that's the one. Everything else is within two percent of the mean, I think, and mostly within one. If I did the math right. The mean should be 21,541. A percent up or down gets you a range of 21,756 to 21,326. Two gets you a range of 21,972 to 21110. I'm not sure how close you're legally obliged to be. The more finicky you get the more you have to split things.

I could go back in and fuss with it, but none of it means much anyway. Still, there's my initial answer.