I am currently working on a project where I am using Census tract data to figure out the population characteristics of the city council districts of several major US cities. For the cities that I have completed so far, I have been simply uploading the KML files for both the city council districts and the corresponding Census tracts (clipped to the city boundaries when I can find them) to Google Maps. I use Google Earth when the files exceed the 5MB limit on Google Maps. Then, I go through the tracts one by one and in a spreadsheet I record which city council district(s) they are in.
As you can guess, it takes an excruciatingly long time to do this manually.
I was wondering if there was a way to run some sort of script in ArcGIS Desktop that could do this automatically, recording the percent of the area of each Census tract contained within each district?