After twin snow storms hit New York in January and February, complaints about the voluminous amounts of dog poop left behind flooded into 311. According to city data, complaints were up 81 percent from the same period in 2025, and the block most hounded by dog poop was in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. But those 311 numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“There may be a discrepancy between reporting and actual instances,” said Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the Department of Sanitation. “There are about 120,000 blocks in New York City, and in calendar year 2025, 1,801 of those had a dog-waste complaint.”
That’s only 1.5 percent. For Devin Stagg, a freelance marketer and writer, the numbers didn’t add up. “311 data is the number of complaints, not actual dog poop,” said Mr. Stagg, 33, whose interest in dog-poop data was piqued last winter after reading about a spike in complaints in Gothamist.
So he went in search of observable field data and compiled a ranking that was “a little more granular.” In March, he bicycled to 15 neighborhoods, chosen according to 311 dog-waste complaints and online comments. “I logged 60 miles in two days,” said Mr. Stagg, who always picks up after his yellow Labrador, Scout. “It was a lot of fun.”
In each neighborhood, he counted piles of poop left on sidewalks on both sides of the street along a 1,000-foot stretch — about four blocks. Dog waste was often left in tree beds, he found.
Washington Heights had the most dog waste in every metric he examined: complaints to 311, observed waste (33 instances) and both of those in relation to the neighborhood’s population of licensed dogs. (Washington Heights was also the source of the most poop complaints in 2025 by a wide margin, according to the city.)
Following Washington Heights were Park Slope (18 instances in 2,000 surveyed feet), the Upper East Side (14), Hell’s Kitchen (14) and Greenwich Village (14).
Unscooped poop complaints rise on weekdays, possibly indicating that hired dog walkers are the main culprits. Complaints also rise in winter, as they did this year. It’s almost impossible to enforce the city’s Pooper Scooper law, because the offender must be caught in the act by an enforcement agent. (Service dogs are exempt, and dog pee doesn’t count.)
Does it do any good to complain? “I’ve thought about this way more than one human probably should,” Mr. Stagg said. “It doesn’t hurt to complain but I don’t know how much it helps.”