More on Rip Van Winkle 🧔‍…

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Every time I go back to my hometown, Greenville I bemoan the changes over the past twenty years. But how much has it really changed compared to myself? I’ve been working and studying in the city for twenty years now and my connection is most distant to the town I grew up in.

But more than that, I’ve also become more wilder and aware of places far beyond the borders of the town I few up in. Greenville is rural and it’s farm country but at 25 miles from Albany it’s still very exurban. Compared to the deep rural country of Madison County – to say nothing of the Allegheny Wilds of Pennsylvania or the back country of West Virginia.

And thanks to the internet I’ve been exposed to greater and more wild country in places like the Mid-West, and the true West like Idaho. I’ve been able to learn about off-griders and homesteaders who really are living on the frontier. I’ve learned about cattle ranchers and dairyman, goat farmers and trappers. Often residing on far greater acreages than is common in an commuter town on the far outskirts of Albany.

It’s not to say that I didn’t grow up in a town of country boys and gals, that there aren’t still cattle and hills and hollers on the back roads. But I’ve experienced far more wild places even in New York State to say nothing of those other states I’ve visited. There are many other towns that smell like cows, places where they homes are far more spread out, where the mountains are bigger and the people are more wild.

Greenville might be rural and the Catskill Mountains looming large, but it’s no Idaho or even West Virginia. In many ways I’ve outgrown my old town both in my dreams and hopes, and while it has changed so I have during my past twenty years away.

Town of Bethlehem Divided Into Four Equal Population Districts

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Like most towns in New York State, Bethlehem doesn't have Wards. All elected officials are elected at-large.

But could you draw equal population districts that represent actual communities of interest? Not looking a demographics or political competitiveness, but actual communities of interest based on my knowledge of the town -- like Slingerlands, Delmar, Elsmere, Glenmont or South Bethlehem, and have them come out to be equal population? I tried, and here was the results.

There are different ways to look at this problem. One could use an algorithm to draw districts, although I've yet to find one that does a particularly good job. Turns out it's hard to automate district drawing, as often different demographics live next to one and another, and you get stuck with pockets of similar demographics living on opposite ends of the town. You end up packing and cracking or splitting similar demographics, unintentionally. It always seems like equal population is enemy of building communities of interest.

Drawing districts is a fascinating GIS question. But often the best districts are still drawn by humans, watching the totals add up in redistricting plugin, and then looking at maps of demographics. And that involves a lot of acceptance of the fact that districts you have drawn still have a lot of problems with packing and cracking. I don't like how this ultimately came out, but the equal population constraint really causes a lot of problems. Having more districts, might help solve the problem.

The qgis plugin I used for this was the Statto Software Redistricter, using a PL 94-171 Census Data joined against the block-level files. I didn't load any political or demographic graphics, just raw population along with my knowledge of what the neighborhoods look like from a map and having explored them in person, with a goal of grouping highly dense and very rural neighborhoods separately. A goal that was largely a failure in this effort! But it is a fun thought experiment.