City Council Quintiles

I've made a couple changes to this map that I made the other day:



I divided the Council up by quintiles because any more than five colors and it gets hard to read. The "green quintile" is the areas with over 75.5% of households without a car; these ten districts include lower and Midtown Manhattan (some of the densest areas in the country), Upper Manhattan and most of the South Bronx. Lots of apartment buildings, lots of subway access.

The "yellow quintile" contains ten districts between 64.4 and 75.4%. It includes the Upper East and West Sides (which are just as dense as the green districts but where the residents believe that their wealth entitles them to drive to their summer homes), a good chunk of Brownstone Brooklyn extending out to East Flatbush, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and Joel Rivera's transitional Central Bronx district (which includes dense areas like West Farms and more spread-out areas like Belmont). Slightly less dense, but lots of attached row houses and projects. Still good subway access and not much parking.

The "orange quintile" has the rest of the majority-carless households; I moved Dom Recchia's district (Bensonhurst and Coney Island, at 50.8%) into this quintile for the new version. These eleven districts contain a mix of row-house and apartment districts (South Brooklyn, Astoria, Coney Island, Ocean Parkway, Soundview) and areas with more detached houses (East Elmhurst, Windsor Terrace, Morris Park, Bensonhurst).

The "red quintile" contains a number of "transit villages" with lots of apartment buildings (Forest Hills, Bay Ridge, Flushing), detached houses on relatively small plots (Forest Hills Gardens, Springfield Gardens, Throgs Neck). These ten districts also include some areas with lots of apartment buildings that are not well-served by transit, like Riverdale, Co-Op City and Far Rockaway. I moved James Sanders' district (Southeast Queens, 31.2% of households carfree) from the purple quintile into the red for this version.

Finally, the "purple quintile" includes the most suburban parts of the city, such as Staten Island (with no direct rail connection to Manhattan), Marine Park and Douglaston (parts of which feel like a North Shore Long Island town). It also includes the Central Queens district recently won by Anthony Como in a special election, containing the neighborhoods of Maspeth, Middle Village and Glendale. Of the neighborhoods in these districts, only a few have subway service (Howard Beach, Rockaway Park, Woodhaven), but that service is slow and infrequent. The more affluent parts of Northeastern and Southeastern Queens have Long Island Railroad stations, but the coverage isn't very good. Also, most of the properties are large enough to hold driveways.