San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Walking 50 miles in effort to redraw district borders
It’s understandable that Raynell Cooper sometimes got that old Johnny Cash song “Walk the Line” stuck in his head over the past several weeks. After all, he spent his summer walking lines. Nearly 50 miles’ worth.
They were the boundaries of San Francisco’s 11 supervisorial districts. And this wasn’t just any walking challenge. Cooper was laying the groundwork for a big task he and eight other volunteers will undertake: drawing new boundaries for the city’s districts using new census data. Dozens of people applied for the spots, with three each chosen by the mayor, the
supervisors and the elections commission. Their drawing must be done by April 15.
Each of the city's 11 districts must be evenly populated — representing roughly oneeleventh of San Francisco's 873,965 people.
But first, Cooper needed to know his baseline. And so last month he began walking the current lines created by a different group of volunteers 10 years ago using the 2010 census data.
I met him Wednesday evening on top of Tank Hill, with Sutro Tower, well, towering less than a half mile to the southwest.
“For me, this was a prerequisite. We're going to be spending a lot of time talking about these lines,” Cooper said. “I see it as building a foundation upon which I'll be able to throw on a bunch more information.”
“Forty-six-ish miles down,” he added. “Two-ish miles to go.”
Cooper and the rest of the redistricting task force won't get the granular data they need until this fall, but there are already big clues about which districts will need to shrink geographically and which will need to grow.
San Francisco grew in population by 8.5% over the past decade — so much for that rumored exodus, right? But the growth wasn't even.
Data shows neighborhoods on the city's eastern edge grew the most. Mission Bay had the biggest population increase, swelling by a whopping 92%. South Beach, the South of Market area, Dogpatch and Bayview-Hunters Point also grew significantly.
Neighborhoods on the west side, famously resistant to new housing, saw little change in population from 10 years ago. Let's hope the 2030 census finally begins to show needed growth there, too.
So in general, to stay even in numbers of people, the districts on the east side of the city will need to shrink geographically, while those on the west side will need to expand.
Several local groups, including the League of Women Voters of San Francisco and the Asian Law Caucus, are urging residents to get involved in the redistricting process so they can ensure their communities of interest — cultural districts or neighborhoods or areas in which particular languages are spoken, for example — stick together.
Districts are supposed to be even within one percentage point — or can vary up to five points if that's essential to include an entire community of interest in one district.
For instance, San Francisco's American Indian Cultural District is currently split between Districts Eight and Nine. Maybe it fits more with the latter, the Mission, than the former, Noe Valley and the Castro. Cooper and his comrades could opt to try to draw their new lines taking that into account.
Alison Goh, president of the local League of Women Voters, said, “This is your chance to identify yourself. There's a lot of shine given to federal lines, but this is something that affects us on a daily basis.”
Julia Marks, a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus who manages its voting rights and census programs, agreed.
“Redistricting might sound boring, but it's really important,” she said. “If you have a lot in common with your neighbors and you get divided up by the way district lines are drawn, it's a lot harder both at the ballot box and in organizing and advocacy to make a difference on the issues you care about.”
So where are those lines now? I walked west with Cooper on his last remaining segment to find out. We descended Tank Hill and headed west, with anybody living to our right represented at City Hall by District Five Supervisor Dean Preston, and anybody living to our left represented by District Seven's Myrna Melgar.
Cooper stopped frequently to check on his phone that we were still tracking the right path, because there's nothing commonsense about it. It's supposed to cut north on Stanyan Street, but despite a street sign to the contrary, part of that street doesn't exist. Instead, it's one of the city's many “paper streets,” there on maps, but not in reality. It's actually a hillside behind a wrought-iron fence, and we had to go around. We walked through Sutro Forest before traipsing along the backside of the UCSF Medical Center. The route then proceeds in front of the campus on Parnassus Avenue, our fellow pedestrians sporting scrubs and surgical masks, before cutting straight through the dental building like a drill through a tooth. Again, we went around.
Cooper is a 26-year-old parking planner for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. He has a keen interest in civic engagement, geography and trivia — all important pursuits when you're redrawing district boundaries. He grew up in Oregon and remembers convincing his parents it would be great fun to drive from one end of U.S. Route 20 near his home to the other end in Boston. He was just 7 and pored over maps in the back seat for more than 3,000 miles.
The family moved to the Washington, D.C., suburbs when Cooper was 9, and his interest in trivia and geography swelled. He won the “Jeopardy” teen tournament in 2011 — and $75,000. Later this month, he'll appear on ABC's trivia show, “The Chase,” though he wouldn't divulge how he fared.
He studied geography at George Washington University and earned a master's degree in urban planning from the University of Maryland in 2017 before moving to San Francisco the next year. He's been a proud resident of District Five ever since.
On the last leg of our stroll, we walked through the Inner Sunset before arriving at our segment's end point, 17th Avenue and Judah Street. The sun began to set behind St. Anne of the Sunset church, its pink facade matching the sky. The N-Judah rumbled past.
“Oh my goodness!” Cooper exclaimed, ecstatic his line walking was finally complete. “It's all come full circle.”
Well, not a circle really. But miles and miles of lines.