Objective

Effectively prioritizing the needs of the 150,000+ people living in District 7 of New York City is by no means an easy task for a City Councilmember and his staff. However, with the advent of NYC Open Data, we can get a more detailed breakdown of the common complaints in our district using real-time data that is freely available to the public. This report aims to support the policy research and development pipeline for FY2015 by providing the following information:

Approach

We will be using a public dataset that contains “All 311 Service Requests from 2010 to present”, which is made freely available in adherence to Local Law 47 of 2005. You may download the dataset from NYC Open Data by clicking here.

Because we are interested in fresh, persisting issues to build policy around, we limit the data to open complaints created after 1/1/14. Since we are focusing on District 7 issues, we filtered complaints by zip codes in district (10025, 10027, 10030, 10031, 10032) - not perfect, but close enough and useful for data reduction.

All in all, this brings the final number of 311 complaints in District 7 from 1/1/14 to 7/15/14 to 10,926 complaints.

Summary Statistics

First, let’s group by complaint type and see what our top 15 hits are:

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-2

Paint/Plaster, Unsanitary Conditions, Plumbing - these are Housing & Building issues, which is likely overrepresented. After all, this is NYC we’re talking about here. Let’s check out the number of complaints by agency. If our suspicions are correct, we should see a huge spike for HPD, the agency that deals with these issues:

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-3

Almost 7 out of 10 complaints are HPD-related! That warrants a breakdown. Let’s look at HPD complaints based on each individual HPD Descriptor.

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-4

Wall, Ceiling, Floor - much of these complaints are regarding structural damage to places of residence. Pests and Mold are also common complaints, categorized under Unsanitary Conditions.

Housing & Building are notoriously tough to deal with when creating policy solutions. Short of fixing it up ourselves and pressuring the landlords, not sure how much we can do to help. If our goal is to have a variety of policy issues to tackle, then perhaps it would be better to revisit our top 15 after filtering the HPD-related issues:

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-5

Ah, more variety! As we well know through the number of phone calls received at the office, Rodents are a huge problem in our district. Also listed are out-of-service elevators and complaints regarding graffiti. These can be relatively easy fixes for the community.

However, Noise, our top hit, is a pretty broad category. What kind of noise are people complaining about?

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-6

Noise from construction before and after hours is by far the most prominent non-HPD related problem in our district (followed by those pesky ice cream trucks). As such, it may be in the community’s best interest for the Councilmember and his staff to investigate this matter further.

Mapping Key Issues

Because each complaint comes with an incident address, it is possible to map issues across District 7 to uncover spatial trends. Where are these issues happening?

For this section, we will focus on mapping three issues that would stand to gain the most from a spatial analysis (determined by level of importance, ease of solution):

Rodents

Rodents were largely classified by 311 as Rat Sightings or Mouse Sightings. Large clusters of complaints occurred at the following locations:

  • 151st between Amsterdam and Broadway
  • 106th/107th between Amsterdam and Broadway
  • 127th/128th and Morningside

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-7 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-8 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-9 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-10

These areas are prime location to outreach for the upcoming Rat Forum event and further investigation with respect to sanitation - are these rodent complaint clusters correlated with poorly designed trash pick up routes?

Noise

Noise complaints were largely classified as “Construction before and after hours”. Large clusters of complaints occurred primarily in the southern portion of the district with a small cluster near New York Presbyterian Hospital on the northside.

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-11 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-12 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-13

New York City is always under construction, but the fact that Noise is the largest complaint in our district and that it is largely focused around the southern border suggests that a very high volume of 311 calls are coming from that area.

Street Conditions

Street Conditions were largely classified as Potholes, which can be an easy fix and an easy win. Hotspots for potholes include the following:

  • 111th-114th between Broadway and Amsterdam
  • 167th-168th on St. Nicholas
  • 131st and Amsterdam

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-14 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-15 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-16 plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-17

A call to DOT and a notice to constituents in the area shouldn’t be too difficult to do.

Conclusion

Of course, it is important to note that this is not the complete picture since it is unlikely that everyone files a formal complaint to 311 regarding their issue. Low-income and immigrant populations may be underrepresented in this data.

That being said, this is just a brief snapshot of how using NYC Open Data can inform public policy. While this is not intended to replace brainstorming for new policy solutions, think of this as a fun and informative way to understand the distribution and details of some of District 7’s most common constituent issues.