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I would like to know U.S. House of Representatives from Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles in 1980. I know districts and city boundaries do not overlap, but is there any way to know them?

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Los Angeles

Wikipedia's page for California's Congressional districts will tell you the historical boundaries from 2002-2010. You can then work backwards from those to find districts from Los Angeles in 1980.

For example, if you look at the map, you will see that the 31st district was in Los Angeles in 2002. The Wikipedia page says that the 31st was redistricted from the 30th. The 30th district was from Los Angeles in 1980. George E. Danielson. You can see that if you look at the historical list of representatives for the 30th.

Atlanta

Atlanta is simpler. Wikipedia has the map in effect in 1980. It shows that Atlanta covered the 4th (Elliott H. Levitas) and 5th (John Lewis).

Houston

Texas also has a historical map from 1980. It looks like Houston was covered by the 7th (Bill Archer), 8th (Bob Eckhardt), and 18th (Mickey Leland) in 1980.

Summary

I picked out the districts by eye. I'm not so familiar with any of these cities that I could not have made a mistake. I'm confident that these districts each had a slice of the listed city. I'm not confident that I didn't miss any. And of course, I hardly tried with California. That's more just to get you started.

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  • Thanks! I also checked Wikipedia, but don't we have to consider redistricting? Are districts in 2000's the same in 1980?
    – user51966
    Nov 12, 2018 at 2:40
  • @user51966 Sorry, for some reason I decided that you wanted the 2000 data rather than the 1980 data. Adjusted.
    – Brythan
    Nov 12, 2018 at 3:31
  • For Houston (city of Houston proper, not just Greater Houston), in 1980 the districts also included 22 and possibly 9. Source: District maps for 96th Congress from cdmaps.polisci.ucla.edu , loaded into Google Earth Pro. Also applying knowledge of Houston to the historical map from 1980 linked in the answer. You can see where district 22 reaches up inside the loop at highway 90 / S. Main, which is definitely within Houston boundaries. You can also see where district 9 reaches down from the northeast corner, which may or may not have been within the city boundaries in 1980.
    – shoover
    Oct 26, 2021 at 0:00

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