Of interest:
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NEW: Except for #DistrictD, all the #CouncilDistricts held by minorities need to add people to equalize population in #Houston’s #political jurisdictions. #redistricting
@MarcCommentary @jcortina @PabloMPinto @houtopia @ReneeCrossTX @UHPoliticalSci @MarkPJonesTX @bjrottinghaus— hectordeleon (@hdl_perspective) 9:54 PM – 21 August 2021
The embedded image is a table of population figures for Houston City Council by district, broken down by race and ethnicity. The “target” population for each district, which is to say basically the total city population as enumerated by the Census (2,304,580) divided by 11. That number is 209,507, and as former County Clerk numbers guy Hector DeLeon observes, it’s the mostly Black and Latino districts that would need people added to them to meet that.
Note that the red negative numbers are in relation to the target population. If you want to know how each district has changed since 2011, when City Council was expanded to 11 members, part of a court settlement from some years before, you can review the actual population totals that the districts had at that time here. There’s some variation in there, with a range of 180K to 199K and a target of 190,859. A little variation, up to about five percent in either direction, is tolerated to accommodate other factors like communities of interest.
With that, you can see that districts H and I actually lost a little bit of population, while J is basically the same. To the extent that there was an undercount in Houston, due to COVID and Trump malfeasance and whatever else, those are the districts where you would expect it to manifest. District C grew by about 46K, districts D and G by about 40K each.
The big question is whether or not City Council is required to redistrict. It’s my understanding that the charter mandates a review of population figures to ensure that the districts are not “materially unbalanced”. As you may suspect from that kind of wording, there’s some discretion in there. There’s also some time, since the next city elections are in 2023. HISD has elections in 2021, but their filing deadline has already passed, and there wouldn’t be time to review and redraw their boundaries for this November in any event. So, it’s 2023 for them as well.
City Council is legally required to redistrict to comply with one person, one vote constitutional law precedents. Historically a 10% variation has been allowed by some courts, but any deviation may require an explanation where it is possible to draw equal population districts.