Letter to the Editor:

We, the undersigned, believe the attached map which we submit today represents a more fair and equitable redistricting of the city. This map enhances proportional representation for people of color while still maintaining current neighborhood boundaries and communities of interest and meets the necessary legal standards.

We believe that the map proposed by the City Council redistricting Committee represents only minor adjustments and does not go far enough to adequately encompass the changes that capture Boston’s current demographic shifts.

The map we submit today would strengthen the current four majority non white districts based on voting age population and improve opportunities for people of color to increase influence and representation commensurate with their population numbers.

There are four major differences between the map we submit and the proposed map offered by the City Council:

We propose that District 2 shift to include South Boston, Downtown, Beacon Hill, and the Back Bay. Decades of voting patterns reveal that the current pairing all of South Boston with parts of Chinatown and the South End has served to dilute minority voting strength in Chinatown and the South End impeding the political growth of these majority minority communities.

We propose that Districts 3 and 4 bisect Dorchester east-to-west as opposed to the current north-to-south line of delineation. This change relieves the current “packing” of District 4, which consists of nearly 90% non-white residents and strengthens opportunities for influence in District 3.

We propose that District 7 includes shifts to include Roxbury, Lower Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mission Hill. Mission Hill, historically considered a part of Roxbury, is a working class, racially mixed neighborhood that shares many common concerns with the rest of this district. 

We propose that District 8 shift to include Chinatown, the South End, and the Fenway. This reconfigured District 8 would become an incumbent-free, racially-mixed district with common interests and anchored by a growing Asian-American population, creating significant opportunities for historically under-represented communities.

Fifty-three percent of Bostonians are people of color, yet only 22 percent of the current district councillors are of color, a statistic that has remained unchanged since the advent of district elections in the 1980s. While we aspire to be a society in which race no longer matters, the consistent racial imbalance in representation signals otherwise.

We propose that the city council’s top priority in redistricting should be to create districts which facilitate rather than obstruct proportional representation for Boston’s communities of color. Prioritizing incumbency by tinkering on the edges of existing districts will not get us to that goal.

The undersigned, 
Asian American Resource Workshop 
Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center 
Boston Chinatown Resident Association 
Castle Square Tenants Organization 
Chinese Progressive Association & Chinese Progressive Political Action 
Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción 
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights 
Oíste 
MassVOTE 
NAACP Boston Branch