Abstract
Cities offer a unique context for the study of redistricting because the national partisan divide is often less relevant and because most U.S. cities feature large minority populations. The latter characteristic is important because minorities regularly lobby for majority-minority districts in their cities. Despite their perception as an important tool for minority empowerment, it is unclear what conditions facilitate the creation of majority-minority districts. In this paper, we have taken geospatial data of over 100 city council district maps, merged them with census demographic information, and used an MCMC-based redistricting simulator to draw a representative sample of the underlying distribution of plausible maps within each city. We demonstrate that when majority-minority districts are viable, cities tend to implement more of them than are drawn in the average race-neutral simulation. This is true of both Black-majority and Latine-majority districts. We also find that citizenship and segregation rates are fundamental determinants of the number of Latine-majority and Black-majority districts than can be drawn, as well as the number implemented.