Crown Heights Is Again Unified In Final Congressional Redistricting

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Crown Heights, unite! (Again.)

Mapmakers redrawing the city's congressional districts have abandoned a plan to split up Crown Heights, leaving the neighborhood as the "core of District 9" in final maps approved last week by Steuben County Supreme Court Justice Patrick McAllister.

Bed-Stuy — which would have been split between the 8th and 9th District — is also reunited under the final plan.

The last-minute change comes after Brooklyn leaders blasted the proposal to divide the historically Black neighborhoods as a ploy to "diminish Black voting strength."

Court-appointed special master Jonathan Cervas, who drew the maps, claimed both of the controversial splits were unintentional.

"In the draft congressional map, I inadvertently split the community of Crown Heights while trying to crate compact, legally compliant districts in Brooklyn," he wrote Friday. "In the final versions of the map, I have placed this community in full in district 9. Crown Heights is now the core of district 9, as has historically been the case."

Though Crown Heights is kept whole, the new map does include changes to the 9th District's boundaries.

The district, represented by U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, no longer extends over Prospect Park and into Park Slope. Instead, its boundaries include larger portions of Midwood and Kensington, the maps shows.

For Bed-Stuy, the original drafts would have been the first time the neighborhood was divided in Congress since a 1968 court ruling that allowed for the win of U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the legislature, leaders point out.

Chisholm's historic 1968 victory came after a lawsuit that successfully claimed Bed-Stuy had been made "politically impotent" by gerrymandering that divided it between five congressional districts, according to the court letters and records.

Still, the unification of both neighborhoods did not satisfy all qualms with the map, which was ordered after the state's top appeals court declared Democratic-drawn congressional and state Senate maps unconstitutional.

District 8 U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries pointed to remaining "degradation" of Black and Latino populations in the new maps, including a loss of 2 percent of Black voters in his own district and in Clarke's.

"The restoration of the iconic neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant into one Congressional District is a small step," he said. "We will not let modest changes to a severely flawed draft map whitewash the violence done to communities of color through New York City."

The new maps degrade the voting age population of minorities in other districts as well, including 10 percent drops in Hispanic and Black voters in two Bronx districts, a 4 percent drop in Black voters in Queens' 5th District and a 3 percent drop in Hispanic voters in the 7th District in Northern Brooklyn, Jeffries notes.

The lawmaker also pointed to the split of Borough Park and the Upper West Side in what was previously the most Jewish district in the country. The Upper West Side and Upper East Side are combined into District 12 in the new maps and District 10 now covers Lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn.

For his part, Cervas pointed out that using race as a "preponderant motive in redistricting" is unconstitutional.

"Some of the changes that were proposed involved moving pockets of minority populations from one district to another simply to increase minority influence without a clear justification in terms of unifying long-established geographically defined neighborhoods and communities," he said.