Consumer, Noise & Housing complaints on the Rise as COVID-19 hits NYC (and other early trends)
The first documented case of Coronavirus in New York City was announced on March 1st, 2020. Since then, subway ridership has dropped, large gatherings have been banned, and citizens have been advised to practice social distancing. These precautionary measures mean drastic changes in lifestyle and behavior, and they also leave a footprint in our civic data.
In this post we explore the differences in activity visible in the New York City 311 dataset since Coronavirus precautions took effect. The city publishes data for every 311 service request in a massive 22 million row dataset going all the way back to 2010. In it there is a trove of information, including the date and time a request was made, the request type, resolution status, address, and more. Service requests can be tenants reporting a lack of heat, requests for a street tree, rat sightings, graffiti, broken parking meters, dumping of trash, noisy neighbors, and more. While 311 data comes with its own set of biases and can be hard to draw serious conclusions from, it can offer some insight into civic issues as analysts can look at trends over both time and space.
A Tweet Asking Citizens to Report Price-Gouging
A few days ago a tweet from the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs caught my eye. Price gouging has been reported throughout the city as demand for things like hand sanitizer and face masks has increased, and DCA advises citizens to report it to 311.
There’s even a special section for reporting Coronavirus price gouging on the 311 website:
I was immediately curious to know how many New Yorkers actually report this sort of thing, and how these reports are handled. If New Yorkers are complacent, few will call can we will see business as usual in the data. If they are vigilant, we’ll see a spike.
I downloaded data from January 19th through March 14th to get a 60-day run-up to now, and a 1000% increase in daily “Consumer Complaint” 311 service requests jumped off the screen.
This type of 311 request normally lingers around 40 daily calls, but saw a sharp increase after the first COVID-19 case was announced on March 1st, and a dramatic increase in the second week of March. The last available complete day of data when I made this chart was March 14th, which had 575 Consumer Complaint service requests. For more on recent price-gouging in NYC, check out this article in The City which explores the claim that shops are just passing on higher prices from their suppliers.
It’s worth noting that the “Consumer Complaint” type includes several types of complaints, and it’s not possible to determine in the data which of these are price gouging. There is more information for a given service request on the 311 website, and you can match individual requests with their row in the dataset using the address and timestamp.
For example, this record shows up with a descriptor “retail store” with an address on New Lots Ave in Brooklyn.
We can find the same request on the 311 website. In the Additional Details section we see overcharge, which is how price gouging is logged in the system. That’s all we get, unfortunately, as the details of the complaint are sent to the handling agency and not shared publicly.
I spot checked several Consumer Complaint > Retail Store requests from the last two weeks and found an overcharge for each, so I’m confident in saying the spike we see in the daily counts is my fellow New Yorkers reporting price gouging. There are hundreds per day doing this at the moment, and it will be interesting to see if it levels off or keeps climbing as COVID-19 precautions get more strict.
Exploring Other Complaint Categories
I quickly charted all of the complaint categories in the 311 dataset over the same time period, and took note of any that had a change in their “normal” daily activity after March 1st.
First, let’s look at where we see increased volume. (Keep in mind that the y-axes for these charts are not uniform and don’t always start at zero, they are meant to show the range of activity for each complaint type). We still see spikes and dips, but there are generally larger numbers than the two months before Coronavirus arrived in NYC.
Almost all of these complaint types are housing-related, and I suspect that with so many people sequestered in their homes avoiding contact with others, they’ve decided to report lingering issues. Or, perhaps, the prospect of spending a lot of time at home in the coming weeks and months makes reporting issues early a priority. (A similar pattern is seen in the explosion in demand for home office furniture as people prepare for extended teleworking)
What’s down?
These five categories had visibly lower trends after March 1st. The dip in Taxi and For-hire Vehicle complaints match what we have heard in the news about the sharp decline in demand for vehicle trips as people are staying home. For blocked driveways (usually ~350 calls per day!) we see a sharp decrease in the second week of March. Is it happening less, or are people just not complaining because they aren’t making as many trips? Perhaps both.
We’ll do a follow-up analysis in a few weeks to see what becomes of these early trends and whether new ones arise as New Yorkers adapt to a new normal.
The Dataset
The dataset used in this analysis has been versioned and published on qri.cloud at https://qri.cloud/chriswhong/nyc_311_prior_to_covid19.
The charts were created using plotly express in a Jupyter Notebook. Code here.
If you’d like to reproduce this work, or dig deeper on this specific time frame of NYC 311 data, you can clone the dataset and pick up where we left off. Download Qri Desktop to give it a try!
Stay vigilant in the fight to stop the spread of Coronavirus. Thanks for reading!
