How Who Represents Is Determined

The short version

New York City is divided into many different district systems that do not line up with each other. A community board is one such district. Sitting on top of it are City Council districts, two kinds of state legislative districts, a congressional district, a police precinct, a school district, a fire battalion, and a sanitation district — each drawn by a different agency for a different purpose, with different lines.

For each of the 59 community boards, this directory takes the board’s shape and asks, for every other district system: which of your districts share area with this board? Any district that meaningfully overlaps is listed as representing that board.

“CB6” is not one place. Four different community boards carry the number 6 — one each in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. The number is reused in every borough. Most low numbers are shared four or five ways. Searching a number in the directory now shows every board that carries it, so the reuse is visible rather than hidden.

The layers included

Each board and borough page groups its representatives into these systems:

Layer	What it is	Source boundary
Community Board	The district itself	DCP Community Districts
City Council	Citywide legislature	City Council Districts
State Assembly	NY State lower house	State Assembly Districts
State Senate	NY State upper house	State Senate Districts
U.S. Congress	Federal House seat	Congressional Districts
Police Precinct	NYPD patrol area	Police Precincts
School District	NYC Public Schools	School Districts
Fire Battalion	FDNY battalion area	Fire Battalions
Sanitation District	DSNY collection district	DSNY Sections

Borough President and District Attorney are assigned by borough. Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller, Governor, State Comptroller, Attorney General, and the two U.S. Senators represent everyone and appear on every page.

Worked example: Brooklyn CB6

Each panel below shows the Brooklyn CB6 district as a navy outline, with the districts of one system shaded behind it. Wherever a shaded shape shares meaningful area with the outline, that district is listed on the page.

Six maps showing how Brooklyn CB6 overlaps Council, Assembly, Senate, Police, Fire, and Sanitation districts

The same board overlaps a different number of districts in each system — two council districts, three assembly districts, four fire battalions, one sanitation district, and so on. That is why no single district line can stand in for “who represents this neighborhood.”

The method, step by step

Load the community board boundary and every district boundary from the source layers above, all as map geometry.
Repair any invalid shapes and merge multi-part districts into one shape each.
For each district system, intersect every district with the board and measure the shared area.
Keep a district if the shared area is at least 2% of the board, or at least 5% of the smaller of the two shapes. This drops slivers where lines barely graze each other while keeping every real overlap.
Sort matches by how much of the board they cover, then attach the official’s name and logo.

Because this is geometric, a board near a borough edge can list a district from the neighboring borough where the lines cross. That is correct: the directory answers “who has authority over any part of this area,” not “who is headquartered here.”

Why this matters

District lines feel like facts. They are decisions. Council, Assembly, Senate, congressional, police, fire, school, and sanitation maps were each drawn separately, at different times, for different goals, and they cut across one another constantly. A single block can sit in one council district, a different assembly district, a third senate district, and a fourth precinct. Laying all of them over one community board at once makes that visible, and makes it easy to see which of these lines are shared, reused, or contestable.

Open the directory →