Downtown Complains to City Government 79 Times Per Day
Somewhere within the confines of Community Board 1, someone complains about air quality, on average, once every 1.6 days. We know this thanks to a new, online data tool that quantifies complaints to the City’s 311 call center and website that originate in Lower Manhattan (defined here as neighborhoods bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge). The same dashboard visualizes the locations from which the complaints originate through an interactive map.
In the 139 days between October 1 and this past Monday (February 16), 11,260 complaints from within CB1’s boundaries were logged by 311, a total that averages 79 contacts each day. The single most-often cited issue of concern was street vendor enforcement, which spurred 2,521 notifications, while noise in seven categories (general, commercial, helicopter, park, residential, street/sidewalk, and vehicle) was the focus in a combined total of 2,016 contacts. (In a surprising tally, helicopter noise, which has been a chronic complaint among Downtown residents for more than a decade, accounted for only 88 of these.)
Illegal parking inspired 1,775 complaints. Three issues related to homelessness (unhoused people needing assistance, the presence of encampments on streets, and panhandling) led to 409, 280, and 99 notices, respectively.
Concerns about heat or hot water were registered during 357 contacts, while air quality was the reason for 86 complaints during the same period, which comes to roughly one notification every 40 hours.
The 311 data tool was created by Julia Qian, a graduate student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and a planning fellow at the Fund for the City of New York, who has been seconded to CB1 as an urban planning expert.
At the Tuesday meeting of CB1’s Quality of Life Committee, Ms. Qian said, “this dashboard is automatically updated every day, and is designed to be easy for the public to navigate.” In the months to come, she will create similar data tools documenting local statistics about crime and vehicle crashes. Then she plans to develop a process for translating this information into actionable policy recommendations.
View the data dashboard for 311 complaints from Lower Manhattan at