Allegheny County Map
In Allegheny County, the API, Latino, and mixed-race populations have grown dramatically, the African American population has held steady, and the white population has decreased. Our proposed districts are based off of 151 submissions from community members. Under the federal voting rights act, the LRC must create two majority-minority citizen voting age population districts in Allegheny county. Our recommendation, in keeping with historic precedent for the Pittsburgh area, is to create two majority-African American districts. Due to migration patterns and gentrification, the two districts that began the decade as those same voting rights act districts are no longer majority-African American, and so a significant realignment of boundaries is necessary.
This map would create two majority-African American citizen voting age population districts in HD 24 and HD 34. HD 34 would achieve this by dropping whiter communities like Churchill, Forest Hills, Chalfant, Turtle Creek, parts of Edgewood, and parts of Swissvale, and in their place adding more heavily African American communities in East Pittsburgh, Duquesne, McKeesport. Additionally, it would also take parts of Wilkinsburg that are currently in the 24th House District. For HD 24, those dropped parts of Wilkinsburg would be replaced by adding the most diverse core of downtown Pittsburgh and parts of the Penn Hill area.
As an effect of these maps, the Allegheny area would once again have two federally-mandated majority African American districts as required by the Federal Voting Rights Act. Additionally, House District 34 would lose some of its most wealthy communities and replace them with more working-class communities, thus increasing the electoral power of working people.