Are you represented in the law? A look at which City Council districts produced the 1,717 enacted laws from the past decade

Out of 5,603 introduced

This is part of the MNY City Council Data Project.

In the past decade (legislative sessions from 2014-2017, 2018-2021, and 2022-2023), NYC has had:

• 1,717 enacted local laws, including 3 via charter referendum and 38 via the Public Advocate (1,676 were introduced by members of the City Council).

• 5,603 bills introduced into the City Council. 3,889 did not pass (which usually means they just didn’t get voted on and died in committee, not that they were vetoed by the mayor or voted down by the full Council). This is a pass rate of 30.1%.

In this post, I analyze which NYC City Council districts these laws came from, and, by rough proxy, which voters are most represented in enacted law.

Of course, just tallying up how many bills a council member gets passed doesn’t tell you whether those bills were good or bad, substantive or fluff. But the raw numbers over time give you a great jumping off point to ask deeper questions. I will be pairing this data with other datasets in future posts to do just that.

I welcome any questions you have in the meantime, and I’ll be happy to provide deeper looks at any individual council district or law.

Top-level data points:

• District 8 (northeast Manhattan, the southern Bronx, Randalls and Wards Islands) had the highest number of enacted laws over the decade: 79

• District 9 (central Harlem, north of Central Park) had the lowest number of enacted laws over the last decade: 5 (and all of these happened in one session, from one council member). On the map below, the district almost looks like it’s disappeared.

• The Public Advocates had 38 enacted local laws in the past decade (the Public Advocate may introduce bills into the Council, but cannot vote on them).

• The voters of New York City approved 3 City Charter amendment via referendum.

—> Find your City Council District and see how many laws your council district got enacted from the 2014-2023 sessions!

Charts!

I’ll end the post with four charts. In order, they are:

1. A choropleth map that shades City Council districts based on how many enacted local laws from the past decade were primarily sponsored by members from that district.

2. A searchable, sortable table with the same data as above, plus local laws enacted by charter referendum and those introduced by the Public Advocate. The rows are shaded in the same way.

3. Two histograms that show the frequency of sponsors attached to a bill (one histogram for enacted bills, one for non-enacted bills).

The histograms!