The Anatomy of Neglect

Philadelphia's 311 system takes thousands of complaints a year for illegal dumping. They do not spread smoothly across the city's 50 ZIP codes — they hyper-concentrate in a handful of places. 19134 alone carries an immense burden compared to the rest of the city; Northeast and North Philadelphia bear most of the load.

Illegal dumping is a physical symptom — a mattress on the sidewalk, tires in an empty lot. Same zips, different lens next: L&I violations, the city's formal record of structural neglect. The shading will shift to marigold.

These are License & Inspections (L&I) Violations — the formal enforcement record for property blight, zoning, and structural issues. Notice how the heat map barely changes? The correlation between illegal dumping and L&I violations is massive (r = 0.77). The places where people illegally dump trash are the exact same places where properties are literally falling apart.

Stack the two together, add 311 vacant-property complaints, and the picture sharpens into a single composite — brick shading next.

The Neglect Index is the three signals — Illegal Dumping, L&I Violations, and 311 Vacant Property complaints — normalized and equally weighted. The darker the ZIP code, the more intensely all three factors overlap.

Neighborhood neglect isn't a series of isolated incidents; it is a compounding structural failure. A ZIP code doesn't just get a dumping problem. It gets a dumping problem, and an abandoned property problem, and a code violation problem, all at once.

When city resources are deployed, they aren't fighting single issues in these ZIP codes — they are fighting an entire ecosystem of neglect.