Think You Know Your Neighborhood? City Map Sparks Boundary Debate

NEW YORK — There are some subjects New Yorkers will never stop arguing about, like who has the best pizza or which subway line is the worst. But few stoke as much passion as the amorphous boundaries between the city's hundreds of neighborhoods.

That debate was revived last week thanks to a map that's part of the city's outreach effort for next year's nationwide census.

The interactive map on the NYC Census 2020 campaign's website divides the city into 245 neighborhoods. Users can click on each one to see what percentage of people responded to the 2010 census on their own and sign up for neighborhood census organizing committees.

New Yorkers can also use the map to see their neighborhood's census response rate each day after it begins next year, said Kathleen Daniel, NYC Census 2020's field director. It's meant to engage people in the crucial count that will determine the city's representation in Congress and its federal funding levels, she said.

"You don’t have to think about census tract 001273," Daniel said. "You’re thinking about Flatbush. You’re thinking about Bushwick. You’re thinking about DUMBO."

But some of the map's neighborhood boundary lines raised eyebrows among Big Apple geography enthusiasts despite the city's good intentions.

For instance, it shows Prospect Heights extending east of its typical border along Washington Avenue. And certain neighborhoods such as Ditmas Park and Nolita were subsumed into larger areas, while others such as Manhattan Valley and Hudson Square stand on their own.

Some of the lines may look funny because the census team mapped the neighborhoods as clusters of smaller census tracts, according to Daniel.

The team grouped the tracts together and drew neighborhood boundaries around them roughly corresponding with the Department of City Planning's so-called neighborhood tabulation areas, she said.

That method will prove useful because the U.S. Census Bureau will provide data for each tract on a daily basis during the count next year, allowing the website to update in real time, officials say. But drawing the neighborhood lines was a tough task even for the city's veteran organizers, Daniel said.

"Did we come to 100 percent consensus? No, because we’re New Yorkers. Nobody agrees on everything here," she said. "… What we reasonably tried to do was label the neighborhoods in a manner that was most familiar to people."

Daniel is familiar with the endless neighborhood debates. She grew up near Ditmas Park and now lives in Old Mill Basin, which she said is also called just plain Mill Basin or Flatlands depending on whom you ask. "I know where my house is, I know where to get the best coffee, I know where to get the best pizza ever, and I’m good with that," she said.

While the online map is meant to get as many New Yorkers involved in the census as possible, Daniel said she thinks the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid at stake across the nation will trump the neighborhood boundaries in people's minds.

"I don’t think they’re going to care about the line," Daniel said. "My sincere hope is that people continue to draw the line at not participating and make sure that we get our fair share."

Where do you draw the boundaries for your neighborhood? Did the city's map get them right or wrong? Check out the map here and let us know in the comments, or email us at patchnyc@patch.com.