New York City is a city of dreams, hopes and new lifes. Many people are leaving their old homes, friends and families behind to start anew in New York. The charm of New York as the beacon of hope, as the chance of better existence stands tall as its skyscrapers. But is this the reality or just a urban myth popularized by its many musicals, movies and poems? Starting from November 2021, I will look into the Open Data Datasets of New York City and will publish monthly a shorter or longer article about NYC.
As the first entry, let’s look at how satisfied New Yorkers are with their City, or rather, let us look at their complaints first.
The diagram shows all complaints of New York City per month since 2010. Without going into details, you can see three different parts of the graph, their separation highlighted by the focus groups. Up to 2014/2015 the complaints averaging roughly 85.000 per month, making it approximately 2.900 complaints per day. In “Focus I” the complaints went up almost double up to 2019. With the impact of COVID-19, the complaints reached a new level, almost 250.000 complaints in one single month. Especially the months between July and November 2020 are prominent. They were followed by a strong decrease, just to raise up to the almost same level again. It will be interesting to see, if the complaints will stay on this new height or will go down to pre-COVID levels again.
Looking at the first increase of complaints, from October 2013 to June 2015, we can see two seasonal effects: Heating in the fall/winter months of 2013/2014 and Heat/Hot Water in the following winter, 2014/2015. Noteworthy is, that the complaint type “Heating” (red) was merged together with “Hot Water” into “Heat/Hot Water” (blue). Two complaint types (street light condition and noise — residential) stay constant in that timeframe. It seems unusual that in the cold months residential noise complaints didn’t increase, either the apartments in New York are very soundproof or people spend most of the time outside. Knowing New Yorkers, but especially knowing the apartments in New York for four months now, I would bet my money on the second reasoning. The more interesting and the more concerning graph is the red/blue one. It seems logical that most complaints about heat and hot water are increasing, when people need them the most, in winter. It is beautiful visible in the diagram. Starting from October the complaints are rising up to January/February to return to almost zero complaints. In both winter seasons they are responsible for a third or a fourth of all complaints. This should raise massive concerns for the departments responsible for water infrastructure. Assuming that only a small fraction of affected people are actually complaining, some say only 4% will complain (slide 8), there will be a high number of non reported incidents, in which residents suffer from not having access to hot water or heat. This does not only stresses the neglect of critical infrastructure in New York City but also scratches the image of the city as a beacon for better life. Nevertheless, there is hope left. From the winter 2013/2014 to the next winter the numbers of complaints went down, even when “Heat” and “Hot Water” complaints were merged.
Looking at “Focus II” we can see, the amount of complaints increased overall. For the exception of heat-related complaints in winter, all complaint types, except “Residential Noise” and Street Condition in early 2015, stayed at around 10,000 complaints per month. This changed. Now all top five complaint types are averaging at least 10,000 monthly complaints. It is worth looking into it, to answer the question if New York’s residents are more willing to complain than before or if the state of New York got worse. Unfortunately this is a topic for another time.
Coming back to the diagram, two complaint types are appearing again: “Heat/Hot Water” and “Noise Residential”, although in different colors. Heating and hot water complaints are peaking again during the winter months and are almost zero during the warmer months. Residential noise complaints went up from 20,000 monthly complaints up to 50,000 with the start of COVID-19 and the following lockdown. This course supports my earlier theory, that the apartments are not really soundproof, but that the life of many New Yorkers are outside of their apartments. Interestingly, “Noise — Street/Sidewalk — complaints peaked at the same time but the amount decreased almost instantly. Given the fast rise and fall, it looks a like shock effect; a sudden event influencing people until they adapt (relatively fast) to it. In this case, I assume it was the lockdown and its consequences of working from home. Suddenly hearing people from the sidewalks takes a while to adjust to, or getting equipment to eliminate this noise, for example sound-prof headsets, soundproof curtains or acoustic panels, easier to adjust to than residential noise. Two new complaint types are “Blocked Driveway” and “Illegal Parking”, replacing “Street Condition and Street Light Condition”. Both are remaining fairly constant, except for their lowest point in April 2020. Both graphs are almost running parallel. A very likely correlation, which will be looked into in the next blog entry at the end of November. Here is a small teaser.
Sources:
– Kolsky, Esteban (2015): CX for Executives, https://www.slideshare.net/ekolsky/cx-for-executives (last accessed: 10/31/2021).
– New York City Department of Information Technology & Communications (2021): 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present, https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9 (last accessed: 10/31/2021).
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