The House Districts of Brooklyn and Queens – Sabato’s Crystal Ball

Pricey Readers: For greater than 5 a long time, the Almanac of American Politics has set the usual for political reference books. This month, the Almanac is publishing its 2024 version, with some 2,200 pages providing absolutely up to date chapters on all 435 Home members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and way more.

One of many Crystal Ball’s senior columnists, Louis Jacobson, can be a senior creator of the Almanac. Jacobson has written for seven editions of the Almanac, going again to the 2000 quantity. At the moment, he writes the 100 state and gubernatorial chapters. For the 2024 version — the primary quantity to be revealed after the post-2020 Census redistricting — Jacobson additionally labored with chief creator Wealthy Cohen to revise each congressional district description to mirror their new strains.

Under are excerpts from the chapters within the 2024 Almanac that cowl seven Home districts positioned both absolutely or partly within the New York Metropolis boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Jacobson revised these chapters, aided by a day-long go to to those boroughs in December 2022 wherein he was accompanied by a tour information well-versed within the native demographics. The go to — by foot, subway, bus, boat, and automobile — included such neighborhoods as Downtown Brooklyn, Lengthy Island Metropolis, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona, Flushing, Bushwick, Mattress-Stuy, Crown Heights, Flatbush, Midwood, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, and Borough Park. The go to got here virtually precisely 20 years after Jacobson’s first prolonged tour of New York’s 5 boroughs for the Almanac, which was tailored right into a Washington Submit article. To maintain the size manageable for the Crystal Ball, the chapters beneath embrace diminished discussions of the parts of those districts that stretch past Brooklyn and Queens.

It additionally could also be that these descriptions should change at the very least barely for the 2026 version of the Almanac; final week, a decrease courtroom dominated that the state’s congressional map must be redrawn, a place pushed by Democrats who noticed the state’s highest courtroom foil their gerrymander final cycle. That courtroom seems prone to weigh in once more – what it decides might have necessary ripple results throughout New York state, and on the battle for the U.S. Home general.

Readers of the Crystal Ball can obtain a 15% low cost in the event that they buy the 2024 version via the Almanac’s web site and apply the code TAAP15CB at checkout via August. Additionally posted free on the web site is a brand new essay by the Almanac’s founding creator, Michael Barone, that’s included within the 2024 quantity: “Revisiting the 49 % Nation.”

– The Editors

NY-6: Flushing, Jackson Heights, Forest Hills (represented by Democratic Rep. Grace Meng)

Greater than a half-century in the past, many of the neighborhoods in New York Metropolis’s outer boroughs had been overwhelmingly white. Most of those areas had been crammed with descendants of the nice mass of immigrants who got here from japanese and southern Europe between 1890 and 1924, and from northern Europe earlier—Irish and Italians, Jews and Hungarians, Poles and Czechs and Greeks. A couple of components of Queens had been WASPy and high-income. Forest Hills in Queens, with its well-known tennis stadium and enormous Tudor homes, was a notable instance. However the one factor everlasting in New York is change. When liberal Manhattan Republican John Lindsay was mayor within the Sixties, middle-class New Yorkers fled town’s excessive taxes and crime-riddled neighborhoods. Forest Hills was the positioning of typically violent protests when Lindsay tried to position low-income housing tasks there.

Lately, the general image in Queens has brightened. It has develop into the borough with essentially the most residential development in New York Metropolis. A lot of this development has been in areas with massive numbers of latest immigrants, although a few of it has been from the extra economically established youngsters and grandchildren of immigrants. Queens is greater than one-third bigger than Brooklyn in space, however its civic nodes are extra extremely dispersed. The Economist wrote in 2018 that “it has the vibrancy of a complete world. Round 160 languages are spoken throughout the borough; residents hail from virtually 200 nations.” The 2020 Census reported that 55 % of the residents in Queens spoke a language aside from English at dwelling, and 47 % had been foreign-born.

The sixth District of New York, which is positioned solely in Queens, begins close to the border of Nassau County, at Contemporary Meadows, and runs west via Pomonok and the previous rail suburbs of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills. It continues west to Rego Park, Center Village and a part of Maspeth. Throughout Flushing Bay from LaGuardia Airport (which is within the 14th District), the sixth takes in Flushing, as soon as a middle-income white neighborhood, now overwhelmingly Asian, primarily Chinese language, together with Taiwanese in addition to ethnic Chinese language from Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand. Central Flushing is very urbanized; close to the tip of the 7 prepare, it consists of town’s busiest public library and a bustling underground meals courtroom that options what Gothamist known as “the boldest assortment of Chinese language, Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean delicacies” within the metropolis. (New York Metropolis has three main Chinatowns—one in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn’s Sundown Park, and the most important, in Flushing—along with many smaller Chinese language neighborhoods.) The world east of 138th Avenue consists of rapidly-growing Korean neighborhoods, together with Murray Hill and Koreatown. The district is 47 % Asian, the most important share for any district not in a Pacific Coast state; it’s 23 % Latino and 5 % Black, a notable distinction to the Black plurality within the neighboring fifth District, which is also solely in Queens.

The 2022 redistricting retained the fundamental design of the sixth. From the 14th District, it gained Woodside and far of Jackson Heights, a pair of adjoining neighborhoods that hug the elevated tracks of the 7 prepare. Woodside was traditionally Irish and is now Hispanic and Filipino (former Rep. Joe Crowley, who rose to energy in Woodside, misplaced the 14th District to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a 2018 major). Jackson Heights is among the metropolis’s most ethnically numerous neighborhoods, with middle- and upper-middle class households residing within the Thirties deliberate low-rise co-ops and business corridors which can be crammed with Colombian, Uruguayan, Tibetan, Nepali, and Indian companies (though most Indians have since moved additional out on Lengthy Island). The sixth additionally consists of Elmhurst, a lower-income, ethnically combined neighborhood with many Hispanics, positioned south of the 7 prepare; its hospital was one of many hardest hit through the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

NY-7: Williamsburg, Bushwick, Lengthy Island Metropolis (represented by Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez)

The story of the seventh Congressional District is the story of New York Metropolis: a wealthy historical past of immigrants, slums, and financial revival. The previous Brooklyn Navy Yard, which started constructing ships greater than two centuries in the past and employed 70,000 throughout World Battle II, shut down in 1966; it now homes a vibrant and quickly rising industrial park, together with new facilities for tech firms and the most important film and tv manufacturing complicated exterior Hollywood. Fort Greene has develop into Brooklyn’s tremendous arts heart. South of the Williamsburg Bridge is a major inhabitants of Hasidic Jews from the Satmar sect; whereas some have moved to the exurbs of New York and New Jersey, many have remained with the intention to be inside strolling distance of their synagogues. North of the bridge, an space that was as soon as dwelling to Puerto Ricans and Dominicans has sprouted high-rises and expensive procuring; over time, its modern hipster tradition has migrated out from the L prepare line to the inexpensive environs of Bushwick, the place road portray covers the facades of nightclubs, music venues and cafes. Close by East Williamsburg consists of an industrial zone the place Netflix has arrange a studio.

The seventh traverses Newtown Creek, the border between Brooklyn and Queens, together with the not too long ago rebuilt Kosciuszko Bridge that carries the Brooklyn Queens Expressway between the 2 boroughs. In Queens, Lengthy Island Metropolis has exploded in inhabitants, because of its easy accessibility to Manhattan on any one in every of 5 subway strains. The Asian American inhabitants in Lengthy Island Metropolis grew fivefold within the decade previous the 2020 Census, a sooner price than any New York Metropolis neighborhood. Areas equivalent to Courtroom Sq. have attracted second-generation Asian Individuals and others to excessive rises with spectacular views of Manhattan, in some instances enabled by rezoning from industrial to residential; the transformation is symbolized by the conversion of 5Pointz, as soon as a storied heart for graffiti artwork and now an costly excessive rise. Lengthy Island Metropolis has additionally been a magnet for workplace house; Jet Blue’s headquarters are in Queensboro Plaza. In 2018, Amazon introduced it will put one in every of its two new headquarters, with 25,000 jobs, in Hunter’s Level in Lengthy Island Metropolis; it will have been the capstone of an present workplace improvement growth alongside the East River. However politicians and neighbors objected to the size of the federal government’s incentives, and Amazon reversed its choice. Simply south of Lengthy Island Metropolis is the 180-acre Sunnyside Yard—an enormous expanse the place rail trains are serviced and saved, and which stays one of many metropolis’s nice undeveloped areas. In 2020, town unveiled a grasp plan that will cowl the yard’s operations and construct 12,000 models of reasonably priced housing and an workplace complicated on high. However masking that huge an space could be costly, and beneath Mayor Eric Adams, curiosity within the proposal appeared to wane.

The 2022 redistricting stripped Manhattan and Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood from the seventh and elevated its portion of Queens alongside the East River.

NY-8: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Canarsie (represented by Democratic Home Minority Chief Hakeem Jeffries)

African Individuals, going through restricted choices for homebuying, started settling in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in massive numbers within the Thirties, after the opening of the subway line that was celebrated within the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn music, “Take the ‘A’ Practice.” After World Battle II, the tempo accelerated, as crime and crowding in Harlem—in addition to a big inflow of African Individuals from the South—drove Black New Yorkers to the growing older however stable brownstones of “Mattress-Stuy.” When job development slowed, Mattress-Stuy was stricken by disinvestment, discrimination, poverty and crime. Within the Sixties, New York’s two senators, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy and Republican Jacob Javits, helped Mattress-Stuy safe a Mannequin Cities designation. That led to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Company, the primary such neighborhood improvement group in america.

Mattress-Stuy turned virtually as highly effective an emblem of Black New York as was Harlem, thanks partially to the movies of Spike Lee, a Brooklyn native. His “Do the Proper Factor,” shot on Stuyvesant Avenue between Lexington Avenue and Quincy Avenue, succinctly captured the racial tensions then brewing within the previous neighborhood. Jay-Z grew up within the Marcy Homes venture, whereas Infamous B.I.G. grew up in neighboring Clinton Hill. Mattress-Stuy has develop into a political powerhouse: As soon as so closely gerrymandered that it took a Voting Rights Act lawsuit to compel a district that Shirley Chisholm might win, Mattress-Stuy and adjoining neighborhoods are actually the house base of Mayor Eric Adams, Lawyer Basic Letitia James, and Home Democratic Chief Hakeem Jeffries. Because of organizing that secured a historic district designation, the Mattress-Stuy neighborhood’s stately structure largely prevented the wrecking ball; the brownstones are actually in excessive demand, together with from white consumers. Within the final decade, Mattress-Stuy misplaced over 22,000 non-Hispanic Black residents, essentially the most of any neighborhood citywide, Gothamist reported, and over the previous 20 years, the neighborhood declined from 75% Black to lower than half, whereas the median family earnings almost doubled and the poverty price declined. The business strips on Fulton Avenue and on Lewis and Tompkins avenues are dwelling to many Black-owned companies.

The eighth District of New York varieties a crescent that surrounds the ninth District. It begins in Bedford-Stuyvesant and continues to Ocean Hill and Brownsville. The latter communities had been on the heart of battle—together with a months-long academics strike in 1968—that continued into the Nineteen Seventies over racial discrimination and the standard of native schooling. The district runs alongside the Belt Parkway and the sting of Jamaica Bay via Spring Creek, Canarsie, and Starrett Metropolis, dwelling of Christian Cultural Heart, an evangelical megachurch that’s proposing to construct a $1.2 billion “city village.” These neighborhoods are considerably Black and embrace some Caribbean immigrants. The bay is inflicting elevated neighborhood flooding, even on in any other case dry days, because of elevated sea ranges from local weather change.

The district continues via components of closely African-American Flatlands and the closely white neighborhoods of Bergen Seashore, Marine Park and Mill Basin. It consists of the Coney Island peninsula, which was an island earlier than town stuffed in Coney Island Creek. Residence to the well-known amusement district with the Cyclone curler coaster, the Surprise Wheel, and the annual hot-dog consuming contest, Coney Island has each public housing and luxurious development. Brighton Seashore, which is a part of the peninsula, has extra immigrants from the previous Soviet Union than every other district within the nation. Sheepshead Bay, with many piers and marinas, has been a vacation spot for the middle-class youngsters of former Soviet immigrants who grew up in Brighton Seashore. General, the eighth is 48 % Black and 16 % Hispanic.

NY-9: Flatbush, Crown Heights (represented by Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke)

“Brooklyn.” Simply saying the phrase in a comic’s monologue used to elicit laughter. It evoked an accent of twisted English, a raucous, in-your-face fashion, a humorousness with an edge, and the chip-on-the-shoulder assertiveness of these certain they are going to at all times be in second place. Brooklyn was a separate neighborhood from the seventeenth century on, and within the nineteenth century, it was one of many largest cities within the nation, with its personal newspapers, baseball groups, and celebrities, together with Henry Ward Beecher and Walt Whitman. By 1898, when the 5 boroughs had been welded into Higher New York, 1 million folks lived in Brooklyn. In 1913, a transit settlement was struck to hyperlink town’s then-independent strains and triple the monitor to 619 miles. The settlement helped Brooklyn broaden properly past its authentic neighborhoods close to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Manhattan manufacturing facility staff not needed to dwell within the crowded Decrease East Aspect tenements that social reformer Jacob Riis had uncovered within the Eighteen Nineties, notably after the Williamsburg Bridge was in-built 1903. They moved in droves into neighborhoods of three- to five-story residences and four-family homes. Brooklyn grew from 1.1 million in 1900 to 2.6 million in 1930. The previous Brooklynites had been largely Protestant—Dutch, Yankee and German, plus some Catholic Irish. The brand new Brooklynites had been closely Italian and Jewish. Across the time Jackie Robinson suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the primary Black participant in Main League Baseball, Brooklyn was experiencing an inflow of African Individuals into Brownsville and Crown Heights close to Ebbets Subject. Ethnic whites left the borough, pushed away by concern of crime and fed by “blockbusting”—wherein unscrupulous actual property brokers stoked white fears, then purchased properties cheaply and resold them for larger costs—and the promise of low-cost mortgages within the suburbs. Even “Dem Bums” left Flatbush for Los Angeles in 1958; Ebbets Subject was knocked down and changed by an residence complicated.

Kings County, which is coterminous with Brooklyn, is New York’s most populous county and, as of 2022, the nation’s tenth largest. With a inhabitants that has grown again to 2.6 million, Brooklyn has witnessed nice vitality amongst upwardly cell Hispanic, Asian and Caribbean immigrants. Vacant land is scarce—Brooklyn has lower than one-tenth as many sq. miles as Orange County, California, which has a barely bigger inhabitants—however the borough has been seeing extra vertical improvement the place zoning permits it.

The ninth District of New York is one in every of two districts positioned solely in Kings County. On the east facet of Prospect Park is Flatbush, dwelling of the Metropolis College of New York’s Brooklyn Faculty; Crown Heights, which is the bottom of town’s Lubavitcher Hasidic Group in addition to the Little Caribbean and Little Haiti neighborhoods; most of Kensington, which incorporates Little Bangladesh and a Pakistani inhabitants; and Midwood, a neighborhood with broad, suburban-style streets populated by trendy Orthodox Jews, the place yow will discover kosher sushi eating places and boutiques with modest “tznius” clothes for ladies. The district’s inhabitants is 49 % Black (barely beating out the eighth to develop into the most important of any district in New York), 11 % Hispanic and 11 % Asian.

NY-10: Monetary District, Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope (represented by Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman)

Beginning on the Battery, on the southern tip of Manhattan, the tenth District of New York covers the Monetary District and lots of business and residential neighborhoods. Battery Park Metropolis has engaging, and costly, trendy residences and parks. Refined TriBeCa started with artists’ lofts and an annual movie competition and has since developed a procuring and restaurant space, as has neighboring SoHo. Chelsea is dwelling to artwork galleries and is a mecca for homosexual males. Greenwich Village has a radical previous; it’s now anchored by New York College. The tenth consists of components of the Decrease East Aspect, the East Village and Chinatown. The enlargement of Chinatown and SoHo have shrunk Little Italy into a couple of touristy blocks.

The tenth crosses the East River to Brooklyn, which now accounts for 56 % of the district’s inhabitants. The swath of Brooklyn within the tenth affords easy accessibility to Manhattan. In DUMBO (Down Below the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), artists moved into previous industrial lofts beginning within the Nineties, however these have given approach to high-priced residences and a notable tech-sector presence. Prosperous Brooklyn Heights is town’s oldest historic district, dwelling to gorgeous views of the Decrease Manhattan skyline and a preferred East River promenade cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Downtown Brooklyn, positioned partially within the seventh, is the borough’s governmental heart and residential to a quickly increasing academic complicated run by New York College. Park Slope, on Prospect Park’s west facet, is the affluent, hyper-liberal dwelling of Senate Majority Chief Chuck Schumer, former Mayor Invoice de Blasio, and metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander, a possible future mayoral candidate. The tenth consists of the Barclays Heart, dwelling to basketball’s Brooklyn Nets; the Grand Military Plaza; the Parisian-style Japanese Parkway; the Brooklyn Public Library; the Brooklyn Museum; the Brooklyn Botanic Backyard, with its Japanese landscaping and placid duck ponds; and industrial areas equivalent to Gowanus and Purple Hook. Within the southern a part of the district is sprawling Sundown Park, which has Mexican and Central American residents anchored round fifth Avenue and New York Metropolis’s second-largest Chinatown clustered round eighth Avenue. Neighboring Borough Park is dwelling to Hasidic Jews, largely from the Bobover sect.

NY-11: Staten Island, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst (represented by Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis)

Staten Island is a part of New York Metropolis, but is a land aside, nearer geographically and culturally to New Jersey than to town’s different boroughs. Ethnically, Staten Island has the very best proportion of residents of Italian ancestry within the nation. The Staten Island Ferry — an 18-minute journey from Manhattan — docks at St. George, the place Empire Shops in 2019 turned the primary outlet mall in New York Metropolis. The island’s west shore is industrial marshland, the place the two,200-acre Freshkills Park—almost thrice as massive as Central Park and unfold on high of the previous landfill that collected greater than 50 years and 150 million tons of town’s trash till 2001—has taken form, internet hosting quite a lot of plant and animal life. Staten Island’s scrubland inside has been remodeled into middle-income suburbia.

Culturally, Staten Islanders are extra conservative than residents of the opposite boroughs. In 1993, they supplied the margin of victory for Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Maybe looking forward to election time, Giuliani shepherded a brand new ferry terminal to completion and diminished the fare to zero. Demographic shifts have been evident in recent times. The northern shore of Staten Island has gained Blacks and Asians, together with Sri Lankans, whereas a big Hispanic neighborhood, predominantly Mexican, is located amongst well-established Italian neighborhoods on the southern facet. The Black and Asian shares of Staten Island are 12 % every, whereas the Hispanic proportion is nineteen %.

The eleventh District of New York extends past Staten Island to absorb the southwestern finish of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn parts account for a bit greater than 35 % of the district. The preliminary Democratic-drawn maps, ultimately rejected by the courts, would have linked Staten Island to liberal Brooklyn neighborhoods equivalent to Park Slope, offering a gap for a Democrat like Max Rose, who represented the district for one time period, to win the seat. As a substitute, the court-approved map linked Staten Island to components of Bensonhurst (from the tenth) in alternate for Gravesend, dwelling to a Sephardic and Syrian Jewish neighborhood, and different areas close to Ocean Parkway (which got to the eighth and ninth). Along with Bensonhurst, the Brooklyn portion of the eleventh now consists of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Bathtub Seashore. All are traditionally Italian (and in some instances, Jewish) middle-class enclaves consisting closely of enormous single-family properties. Extra not too long ago, these neighborhoods have attracted Mexican, Central American, Arab and Chinese language residents. Below the brand new strains, the Asian inhabitants elevated from 15 % to 22 %.

NY-14: Japanese Bronx, Northern Queens (represented by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)

Alongside the East River, LaGuardia Airport has struggled with brief runways and poor commuter entry. As one in every of his legacies, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo started to ship on his promise to improve it right into a “twenty first century airport”—an $8 billion venture, with 37 gates in a single massive new terminal that changed two smaller ones. When the ultimate part of the concourse opened in June 2022, airport officers hailed it as “the primary new main airport” in-built america in 25 years. However Cuomo’s resignation resulted within the demise of the deliberate AirTrain from town subway to the airport; persevering with reliance on floor transportation leaves LaGuardia as the one main East Coast airport with out a rail connection.

Close by in Queens is Corona, a neighborhood alongside the 7 line that was as soon as Italian and African American (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Malcolm X lived there) however is now lower-income Mexican, Dominican and Ecuadorian. Astoria has acquired successive waves of Greek, Latin American and Arab immigrants and is now dwelling to outposts of hipster boutiques that began in Brooklyn. Near LaGuardia is Rikers Island, since 1932 town’s jail, now severely out-moded. Upon taking workplace in January 2022, Mayor Eric Adams provided an “motion plan” to enhance safety on the facility; he pushed off a plan thought-about by his predecessor, Invoice de Blasio, to shut the power by 2026 and shift to smaller detention facilities in every of the boroughs besides Staten Island. The Mets’ Citi Subject is within the 14th, although it’s inside a baseball’s toss from the sixth on two sides. The rest of the district—54 % by inhabitants — is within the Bronx.

Louis Jacobson is a Senior Columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He’s additionally the senior correspondent on the fact-checking web site PolitiFact and is senior creator of the forthcoming Almanac of American Politics 2024. He was senior creator of the Almanac’s 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 editions and a contributing author for the 2000 and 2004 editions.