To Understand Which L.A. Neighborhoods Have the Most ‘Power,’ You Have to Understand Redistricting. Here’s a Primer

Think of Los Angeles like a birthday cake. 

When you’re cutting up a cake, you’re gonna try to cut the pieces up pretty equally. Now imagine that the cake is covered in sprinkles. And the sprinkles are unevenly distributed, kind of like people in a city. But you want every piece of cake to have about the same number of sprinkles, kind of like a council district.

Cutting the cake is like redistricting. 

Once every decade, we redraw the borders of Los Angeles’s districts… ostensibly, to keep about the same number of people in each district. About 260,000.