Detroit Redistricting Draft Maps Revealed By City Council

Detroit City Council is set to reveal four draft maps for the city's new local-level districts Monday. The redistricting process is mandated under Detroit's new City Charter, which went into effect Jan. 1.

The charter calls for City Council members to be elected by districts, a rule residents approved in the 2009 vote that created the City Charter Commission. Council members will create seven districts following federal guidelines.

Data Driven Detroit is helping draft the maps. The seven districts must be roughly equal in population, but they must also ensure that minority communities are properly represented.

Four draft maps City Council President Charles Pugh shared with the Detroit Free Press show an eye toward creating at least one district that encompasses Southwest Detroit. Such a move might allow for the election of Detroit's first Latino City Council member.

Reuben Martinez, director of Michigan State University's Julian Zamora Research Institute, told HuffPost earlier this month that a Latino candidate has never a won a city-wide election in Detroit, with the exception of Judge Isidore Torres.

Other redistricting challenges include how to draw lines around downtown, and how the central business district will be included or split between neighborhoods.

At Monday's Committee of the Whole meeting, Council members discussed the maps and the best way to ensure minority representation while still adhering to the edicts of compactness and even population among districts.

Council Member JoAnn Watson brought up some oversights in census data that could affect representation for Detroit's Arab Americans. She noted Arab Americans are not counted separately in census data.

"Why would we rely only on that data base?" Watson asked.

Council Member Ken Cockrel agreed that the redistricting process should at least take a rough look at the location of Arab Americans in the city.

"There's no official federal government recognition of them, but we do generally know what parts of the city those individuals are located in," Cockrel said. "So are they all in the same district?"

Pugh raised concerns over splitting neighborhoods in the redistricting process. Staffers from the Planning Department said the city does not have a comprehensive neighborhood map, but they compared the subsectors identified under the city's current master plan to the new district maps.

City Council should vote to approve a redistricting map on or before Feb. 17, Pugh said.

See the maps below and let us know what you think in the comments.

Comments

[freedom1947]

11:30 PM on 01/23/2012

Already pissing off the pubs?

[Kurfco]

01:19 PM on 01/23/2012

What about Lithuanians? Left handed dyslexics? Gender conflicted unemployed Doukhobors? And lumping Coptic Christian Egyptians with Muslim Egyptians? Is it specified how large these districts must be? Could each house be its own district and represent itself?

Where does this kind of nonsense end?! Are we one country or a collection of folks who are merely living on the same piece of dirt?

[luapmi2]

05:07 AM on 01/24/2012

It all starts with "African-American" instead of just plain old "American."

[socialtalker]

08:10 PM on 01/24/2012

no it starts with INTOLERANCE. why should you or anyone have a problem with african american? with have 50 states, are you saying we should only have one state instead of 50? one religion?

[bubwalt]

01:08 PM on 01/23/2012

Not one word was used to described on the status of the "few" whites that reside in Detroit. Are they being considered for the change in district or do they don't count?

[brightalchemy]

03:15 PM on 01/23/2012

they don't count get use to it

[socialtalker]

05:03 PM on 01/23/2012

it was the WHITE community that has been pushing for districts, so stop crying about it.

[bubwalt]

06:16 PM on 01/23/2012

Before or after they left?

[BlairCase]

11:55 AM on 01/23/2012

Racial or ethnic gerrymandering is a tricky business. A redistricting map drawn to intentionally dillute minority votes by breaking up minority neighborhoods into separate voting districts is an obvious violation of the Voting Right Act. However, drawing redistricting maps to intentionally create so-called "safe" districts in which minorities are the majority is also a violation. The United States Supreme Court in Miller v. Johnson (1995) overturned a 1992 Congressional redistricting plan which had created minority majority districts in Georgia as unconstitutional gerrymandering. In Bush v. Vera, the Supreme Court rejected Texas's contention that Section 5 required racially-gerrymandered districts. Last week, in rejecting an interim Texas redistricting map drawn by a federal district court in San Antonio, the Supreme Court was sharply critical of the interim map's inclusion of a "minority coalition opportunity district" in which the distrct court "expected two different minority groups [African Americans and Hispanics] to band together to form an electoral majority." The Supreme Court ruled that "If the District Court did set out to create a minority coalition district, rather than drawing a district that simply reflected population growth, it had no basis fordoing so."

[Kurfco]

01:22 PM on 01/23/2012

I have almost never seen as steep a slippery slope as this one. Where does this line of thinking end? What does "United States" or "American" even mean in a world where every conceivable difference is granted its own claim to being represented?!

[bubwalt]

10:10 PM on 01/23/2012

As long as the idea of balancing equal population with new districts go, I do not have a problem with gerrymandering. Social engineering becomes bs in this day and age.