urbanSTL

I think a significant portion of the board will want to achieve "racial equality" by avoiding having any more wards than necessary with no outright racial majority.

^Oh, I don't think the board will like this. Or necessarily anyone else. I just think it's a pretty fair map.

@symphonicpoet I think you did a great job.

Map looks pretty good but some detailed cut off points are hard to see. 


Anyone remember if there is a provision in the law to adjust the wards every census? I get working out the populations as closely as possible but the numbers are probably already out of date. The central corridor population will continue to grow and the north continue to decline.

flipz wrote: ↑

Nov 04, 2021

Map looks pretty good but some detailed cut off points are hard to see. 

The problem I'm having is that the web interface isn't the most clear at a zoom that fits the whole city on screen. I can export it as a shape file of sorts, or in several geographic formats, but I'm much more experienced with photo manipulation than actual cartography. (I'm strictly an amateur mapmaker. And I mostly do fantasy, so I've never had a need to use real geospatial stuff. I like maps a lot, but I'm a bit out of my depth here.) Inkscape might work. Or maybe the freeware GIS suite. (I forget the name.) I figured out how to import it into Google Earth, but not Google Maps, which would be more immediately useful for me. Or if I could get it into GIMP in a way that would allow me to make it pretty . . . 

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑

Nov 07, 2021

flipz wrote: ↑

Nov 04, 2021

Map looks pretty good but some detailed cut off points are hard to see. 

Maybe this will work better. I redid it in Dave's Redistricting DRA 2020 and got what should be a sharable link.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/cf6 ... 4cec981e79

It should make the corners more clear and such. I'm not positive it's quite a perfect reproduction. The numbers are off, but I can't find the differences as the two websites work so differently. (Each has advantages, but all in all I think DRA 2020 is probably the more user friendly and has the better analysis.) Might tweak it a little, but it's at least close enough.

Great map, except for slicing the CWE in four. There are certainly different pockets of the CWE (BJC, Cortex, SLU-facing, Gaslight Square, Portland/Westmoreland Place quadrant, Euclid Corridor), but having 3 different wards at the corner of Euclid and McPherson is kind of rough. Understandable that somewhere in the process something (or some neighborhood border or business district) has to give though. 

^I didn't really do the Grover any favors either. It's . . . a surprisingly difficult proposition. And I figure if any one neighborhood can stand to have its power diluted that's the one. I tried to keep the most critical parts together. I kept Maryland and Euclid in with Barnes and Forest Park, but to make the numbers work I needed to give more people to the northern wards. I don't think putting the entire north side in two, or maybe three giant wards is reasonable. It's a compromise. I have a little more appreciation for the genuine difficulty of it now. (I did a state map too and even if Cleaver's district is a horror-show that I didn't repeat to get reasonably compact districts things really still work out about the same. The proposed Illinois map, however . . . )

The SDCC has been in two wards for a long time. You have to pay attention to which ward a thing is in.

flipz wrote: ↑

Nov 04, 2021

Map looks pretty good but some detailed cut off points are hard to see. 


Anyone remember if there is a provision in the law to adjust the wards every census? I get working out the populations as closely as possible but the numbers are probably already out of date. The central corridor population will continue to grow and the north continue to decline.

You have to adjust district boundaries every census due to the 1 person 1 vote doctrine from Reynolds v. Sims.

doellingd wrote: ↑

Nov 08, 2021

^ This map gives me anxiety , but it also forces the neighborhood association into needed conversations:

1) The FPSE Neighborhood Association has always been within one ward. What are the challenges and learnings of other associations who are divided into different ward boundaries?  
2) FPSE is a neighborhood that was just 10 or so years ago divided into three associations. An alarm bell for us and others: make sure your defunct associations are officially incorporated into your existing association so rogue developers don't resurrect old neighborhood groups to circumnavigate processes.

Hey, I'm happy to make some folks anxious, particularly complacent alderfolk. Fortunately, my map is just a fantasy and no one will use it as a basis for anything other than internet discussions. On the other hand, I'll be pleasantly surprised if whatever the board ends up with is half as compact or keeps as many neighborhoods intact. I expect it will get messy and that the board has concerns rather different than my own desire to keep the map tidy and accurately reflect the diversity of our fair city.

The East Loop CID spans two wards.

doellingd wrote: ↑

Nov 09, 2021

^ What I should have said is that this map is interesting, and that the resulting questions swirling in my head give me anxiety . 

Another question that impacts the businesses and City more than the residents or the association is if and how to keep the CID together. A map like yours splits the business district into 3, and it's difficult to split a neighborhood and keep the CID intact - especially as they discuss expansion.

To tell you the truth, I'm a little suspicious of most CIDs, TDDs, and such related private quasi-governments. They can serve a purpose, but quite often they're opaque organizations used by business and property owners to pass off their expenses on shoppers as though they were a tax. Wards, CIDs, and the official city neighborhoods are three entirely separate things that really have little or nothing to do with one another. (They often overlap in funny and interesting ways, and they all have their own histories.)

But anyway, you're fine. My response was a tad snarky, but I didn't mean to aim it at you, but rather at the fancy folk who will actually draw and benefit from this stuff for realses. I quite carefully did exactly no research at all into what CID was where. Nor any into the official city neighborhood boundaries. I have a little familiarity with both from reporting, and I won't say I don't care about either, but my overriding goal was to create a map that made the wards compact and representative of the city as I see it in my mind. It's an odd exercise, I admit. But the truth is, I figure most of us don't think about borders very much, and I think the real borders should reflect the imagined borders we don't think about much as closely as possible.

There is a sense in which I think place names on a map better reflect reality before you draw in the boundaries, since the real ones, the ones in our head to which we respond on a daily basis, which we actually use, are fuzzy and indistinct. If you take a map of the city and write Downtown at Market and Tucker and Midtown at Lindell and Grand pretty much no one will say anything negative, because that probably reflects what 99% of us think anyway. But as soon as you draw in a line separating them someone will complain because the boundaries are fuzzy. I usually put the line at Jefferson, but I still think of A. G. Edwards/Pony Express Bank/Western whatever that is as downtown, not midtown because downtown is mostly synonymous with "business district" in my head and midtown is theatre. And I can't imagine there are really very many of us who are different. Most folks don't sit around staring at lines on maps all day, so we use a sense of "well, that stuff goes together" to define our spaces. I want our boundaries to approximate that internal reality as well as possible, rather than asking messy meat computers to deal with crud some jerk drew on a map.

. . . wait. Yeah yeah, somebody's always got to draw the map, but the more organic we can make it the better. And maybe ignoring the agendas of previous generations of political mapmakers is a good first step. (Maybe. Maybe not, but maybe. I figure you've got to try it to figure it out.)

And my apologies to the Grove. I'd honestly rather not split it, but you have to put the line somewhere. Like I said, now that I've tried to do it I have a little more respect for the folks that really do it. In the end, I don't think I can accurately depict the fuzzy boundaries in my own head, let alone everyone's. And if you have to make things equal population . . . Good luck.

Seriously. I'd love to see other folks maps. There's some neat tools out there to help with the process. DRA works pretty well. You have to sign up, but actually making the map is fairly easy. And the analytics are neat.

 

New version today butchers downtown even more, including this thing where parts of Washington Ave are including in the largest ward by land mass

I'd like Skinker DeBaliviere to be in the same ward as the West End and DeBaliviere Place. Our fortunes are more tied to those neighborhoods than the CWE. Also ward boundaries running along Delmar stymies our collective efforts to bridge Delmar.

Still a notable Northside bias. Reed trying to keep alive a dream of 5 wards at least partially above Delmar. 

Apologies is this is a silly question - do citizens have input on this?  A covers a huge area and I just can't imagine the residents at opposing ends have similar interests.

You can submit your comments and thoughts here

https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/d ... UMP_929250

Southampton Neighborhood Association requested to be one ward since the last draft and got its wish. So in that sense yes