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\u2019t tell the whole story.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere may be a discrepancy between reporting and actual instances,\u201d said Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the Department of Sanitation. \u201cThere are about 120,000 blocks in New York City, and in calendar year 2025, 1,801 of those had a dog-waste complaint.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s only 1.5 percent. For Devin Stagg, a freelance marketer and writer, the numbers didn\u2019t add up. \u201c311 data is the number of complaints, not actual dog poop,\u201d said Mr. Stagg, 33, whose interest in dog-poop data was piqued last winter after reading about a spike in complaints in Gothamist<\/a>.<\/p>\n So he went in search of observable field data and compiled a ranking<\/a> that was \u201ca little more granular.\u201d In March, he bicycled to 15 neighborhoods, chosen according to 311 dog-waste complaints and online comments. \u201cI logged 60 miles in two days,\u201d said Mr. Stagg, who always picks up after his yellow Labrador, Scout. \u201cIt was a lot of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n In each neighborhood, he counted piles of poop left on sidewalks on both sides of the street along a 1,000-foot stretch \u2014 about four blocks. Dog waste was often left in tree beds<\/a>, he found.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n Following Washington Heights were Park Slope (18 instances in 2,000 surveyed feet), the Upper East Side (14), Hell\u2019s Kitchen (14) and Greenwich Village (14).<\/p>\n