Why is the congressional map in NYC so ugly?

[minionofmidas]

The problem is that the South Americans in northwest Queens barely vote (or are citizens), that the Puertoricans and Dominicans (who do vote) sometimes doubly identify as Black as well as Hispanic, that Nydia Velazquez is entrenched in the areas she actually represents (her district got whiter with gentrification over the 2000s), and that it is really drawn not as a Hispanic district but as a Puertorican and Chinese coalition district. Which is why it is its weird shape and why it was maintained in that weird shape, which in turn forced much of the remainder of the map to pick up new weirdnesses - it certainly forced the dismantling of Weiner's / Turner's district (and the worse-than-ever carveup of the Brooklyn Jewish Republican areas.)
Replace it with the effectively-new district with more Hispanics but that is actually less safe for her (and retrocesses out of some minority areas) that you have there, and suddenly you have options galore, including some fairly clean looking ones. Consider it sacrosanct, and the map draws itself.