Bloomington is a "college town." The large university here is not its own municipality (hello, Clemson) and completely inside city limits, so half our 80,000 population is college students. But only one's ever served on our city council. A 🧵 about local gov’t (w/maps). 1/29.

RT @DougJBalloon: There is no Constitutional prohibition against deleting surveillance footage, so I’m not sure what Jack Smith thinks he’s….

Hey @aaron_renn @Ashton_Hackman @idsnews, I wrote a thing about redistricting the city council map of a college town, and the students who never get real representation. It's probably going to cost me my political career; maybe it's interesting.

I wrote a 67,000-word master’s thesis about the geography of American higher education (know any publishers?), so in case you have a lot of thoughts about this thread or related topics, I probably have a lot more thoughts about 'em. Let’s talk over a can of Liquid Death. 29/29.

. it’s unlikely that my home precinct will get put back in. My political future is a matter for another time (and tweetstorm). I've tried to do right by my constituents; this feels like the proper action I should take for them. 28/29.

Anyway, so, yeah, I can see in the near distance the end of my career representing Bloomington’s District 6. Ironically, I authored the ordinance that created the independent commission that redistricted me out. Their map is still a draft as of today, but. 27/29.

There’s a lot more to say about this. I won’t even have time tonight to do more than outline the basic changes that should be made to the city’s map. But there’s a contiguous area of student-only institutional housing big enough to be its own district. It’s time for one. 26/29.

If @idsnews or @IFC_IUB or @RHAatIU or @iustudentgov learns that there’s a guaranteed student seat on our city council, they’d be all over it, promoting it in student spaces. It’s a real job with real impact on students and has say over a $120M annual budget. 25/29.

I don’t know what part of “constitutionally protected right to be represented” people don’t get, though. Maybe if the map hadn’t always said, the concerns of this demographic of young people don’t matter to the rest of us who know better, they would participate more. 24/29.

Maybe students don’t vote locally because everyone around them tells them not to, that they don’t count, that they’re not from here, that they shouldn’t vote because “they don’t pay taxes”. That they’re “kids” and not “adults” yet. It’s all hooey. 23/29.

I’ve gotten a lot of pushback for this proposal. The biggest critique is: students vote so little that 50 votes might elect someone to a district of 13K. I see this as just more fear-mongering from non-students that mixes cause and effect. 22/29.

Unfortunately, we have to use the Census data even though we know it's an undercount, and we can’t split precincts. But these five precincts would be the closest we’ve ever come to an all-student city council district. 21/29

For decades this area has been “cracked” into several Council districts. I’m proposing that 13,000 of these students be “packed” into a single district, to all but guarantee that there would be a student voice on Council. 20/29.

But wait! Our council approved a zone in our latest zoning ordinance called “Mixed Use Student Housing”. The precinct BL-23 is almost completely big student-oriented apartment complexes. This is an area of 18,000 people where non-students are simply not allowed to live. 19/29

But wait, there’s more. New dorms opened between 2010 and 2021. Using the most up-to-date data gives us more than 15K residents living in a contiguous area owned by a single landlord: the public institution known as Indiana University. 18/29

So I went back to the last normal data I could verify: from the previous Census and from Indiana U. trustee reports. (One dorm that had almost 1100 residents in 2010 had exactly 8 in 2020.) This area now meets the ideal size for a city council district. 17/29

The numbers on this map are a problem, though. College towns across the nation instantly depopulated two weeks before Census Day 2020. Thanks partly to 45’s incompetence, students were supposed to be counted at college, but many more than usual weren’t. 16/29.

Here's a map of 3 full / 5 partial Bloomington city precincts and their 2020 populations. Everything in purple or pink is either dorms, Greek-letter houses, or "family student housing". There’s not a house or privately-owned dwelling to be found in this area about 1.5 mi^2. 15/29

There is, however, a subset of the group generically called “students” that deserves particular consideration for a specially-drawn district here: those living in university-owned housing. There’s a huge, contiguous swath of it. 14/29.

There are enough students here to justify three of the six district seats on Council. The young are new to participating in democracy, and naive and ignorant. They tend to vote less than the elderly, even less at the local level, and even less when the election is off-year. 13/29.

In contrast, the 26th Amendment was enforced right away and without trouble, let alone a century of violent prejudice. What I’m talking about doesn’t occur at a federal or state level. But for people of a certain age in any American college town, the problem is parallel. 12/29.