Stories
Articles and scrollytelling deep dives. Mix of short reads and longer-form data pieces.
The Anatomy of Neglect
Illegal dumping, property violations, and blight complaints don't spread evenly across Philadelphia. They compound, almost exclusively, in the exact same neighborhoods. A scroll-driven look at how civic failure stacks.
Mapping Philadelphia’s illegal-dumping hot spots
In 2024, residents filed thousands of illegal-dumping reports across the city. 19134 alone accounts for nearly a quarter of all reports—and the day-of-week pattern reveals when dumping peaks.
Does calling 311 actually work?
Philadelphia's 311 closure rates vary wildly by category — and response times across the city's zip codes are anything but equal. The data behind the inequity.
You called 311. Then what?
Property and blight complaints land at 311; violation notices come from L&I. Where do those two records line up across the city, and where do they diverge? A zip-by-zip co-occurrence map.
A day in the life of Philadelphia, by 311 call
From the predawn lull to late-night maintenance complaints, every kind of trouble has its hour. The city's 24-hour rhythm in 311 calls — plus the weekly heatmap and how five holidays show up in the data.
The seasonal city
Two categories define Philadelphia's 311 winter — Salting and Shoveling, both literally 100% winter. Almost everything else peaks in summer. The seasonal flip, ranked.
Trash in transit
Two waste-related 311 categories — illegal dumping and missed rubbish/recyclable collection — leave very different fingerprints on the map. A two-layer hex-bin view of where they overlap and where they don't.
The 1 in 10 zip codes
Eight zip codes — out of 48 — drove most of Philly's 2024 illegal-dumping reports. A scroll-driven walk from the citywide map down to one zip's day-of-week fingerprint, contrasted against the median.
Pandemic 311
Six categories of Philly 311 calls, stacked month by month from 2019 through 2024. The shape of the city's complaints didn't return to normal — it just settled at a new normal.
When the city sleeps
Different parts of Philly call about different things at 2 AM. A scroll-driven flyover of four neighborhoods and their 24-hour 311 fingerprints.
Where Philly burns
47% of PFD calls are false alarms. Only 14% are actual fires. And one zip — Kensington — accounts for nearly a fifth of every fire in the city. A scroll through what the Philadelphia Fire Department actually responds to since 2024.
The Narcan Map
Two readings of Philadelphia's overdose crisis: where the deaths landed in 2024, and where the Opioid Response Unit's Narcan kits went. The city's published trend tells you direction; only the raw counts tell you scale.
Stations and zips: who PFD answers to
Sixty-three stations, seven battalions, a million dispatches — and a small handful of zips that swallow most of the call load. A scroll-driven walk through the busiest places and the busiest stations, with the map's data morphing between every beat.
Medic-unit load
PFD's medic units carry roughly four EMS calls for every fire the department answers — and the geography of that load doesn't track the geography of where the medics live. Where raw volume and per-unit workload diverge.
Where shots land
Eight years of shooting victims, plotted block by block, then rolled up by police district. The pre-pandemic baseline, the 2021 peak, the partial recovery — and the three districts that absorb most of every year, regardless of trend.
The non-fire fire calls
Only 14% of PFD dispatches are actual fires. A taxonomy of the other 86% — false alarms, good intent, service calls, hazmat, weather. The operational reality behind the department's name.
EMS vs. fire, by neighborhood
Citywide PFD answers four EMS calls for every fire. Each of Philadelphia's nine broad regions tells its own version of that ratio — Center City leans medical, the river wards carry both.
The day shape of Philly crime
Six categories of PPD incidents, twenty-four hours each. Thefts spike at rush hour; aggravated assaults skew toward bar close; residential burglary tilts to daytime when residents are out. The fingerprint of each crime by hour.
What the congestion toll did to yellow cabs
On January 5, 2025, the Congestion Relief Zone toll went live. Battery Park lost 40% of its yellow cab pickups. World Trade Center dropped 22%. The TLC trip records show which zones the toll hit hardest — and which barely moved.
The tip tells you where you are
Yellow cab tip percentages by pickup zone don't track the income map as neatly as you'd expect. Airport runs, tourist corridors, and short hops have their own tipping logic — all of it baked into every credit card receipt since 2008.
NYC at 3 am
Every yellow cab drop-off between midnight and 5 am in 2023, aggregated by zone. The East Village handles more late-night arrivals than most of the outer boroughs combined. The nocturnal city has a geography — and it's not where you think.
The black car takeover
In 2017 there were more yellow cab trips than Uber and Lyft combined. By 2023 it wasn't close. Seven years of TLC data tells the story of the largest disruption in urban transportation since the car replaced the horse.
The taxi data is coming
1.5 billion rows of NYC taxi trips. The largest mobility dataset any U.S. city publishes — and the first to include the new Manhattan congestion-toll field. Why it doesn't fit our live-Socrata pattern, and what the planned pipeline looks like.
Less than 2 percent
Drug activity, drinking, disorderly youth, graffiti — the categories most invoked when 311 gets framed as a 'social disorder hotline' — together account for under 2% of NYC's 311 calls. Noise alone is roughly 30%. The chaos isn't disorder; the chaos is plumbing.
The unknown pipes
The biggest threat in NYC's lead service line inventory isn't the lead — it's the third of the city's service lines classified 'Unknown.' The data void is the public-health crisis. The Find Lead Pipes Faster Act exists because the open data made the blind spots quantifiable.
Mice vs roaches
DOHMH doesn't track pest type as a column on its restaurant inspection data. But it's all there in the violation descriptions, parsed by the inspector. Mice, roaches, flies — the urban biome of NYC's kitchens, mapped per borough.
The algorithmic city
Every year NYC publishes a list of the algorithmic tools its agencies use to make decisions affecting residents' rights and benefits. Local Law 35, the ACS predictive risk-score controversy, the GUARD Act response — and the next horizon of open data.
Twenty-seven months in the Bronx
A 180-unit affordable building was complete in 2022. Eighteen months after the lottery had closed and the waitlist filled, no one had moved in. The lease-up bottleneck that suppresses affordable housing availability for years after construction is physically done.
Who owns this building?
Twelve buildings citywide generated more than 20 Class C — immediately hazardous — housing violations apiece since 2024. The named owner is always an LLC. The beneficial owner is always findable. The corporate-veil-piercing pattern at the heart of NYC tenant advocacy.
The sound of the city
NYC's noise complaints have grown every year since 2010 — population is roughly flat, awareness was already high, but the calls keep coming. Epidemiologists treat the 311 noise feed as a city-scale environmental surveillance layer. The growth is a public-health signal.
The subway tide
Four million weekday riders. The MTA used to know where they boarded but not where they got off — turnstiles only read entries. Then they built an algorithm. The cleanest public view of NYC's transit circulatory system that has ever existed.