Does calling 311 actually work?

311 is Philadelphia's public interface to city government — the number you call when your alley floods, your neighbor's roof is caving in, or someone dumped a couch on the sidewalk. But filing a request and having it resolved are different things. The data shows a city that handles some complaint types with high efficiency and quietly under-serves others.

Among the high-volume categories (more than 500 complaints since 2024-01-01), Information Request closes 100.0% of its tickets — the best-performing category in the dataset. At the other end: License Complaint, which closes just 61.9% of its complaints. That's a 38-percentage-point gap between the city's most and least resolved complaint types. The gap is structural, not random.

Click any row to open the SQL playground filtered to that category. Categories with fewer than 500 complaints since 2024-01-01 are excluded. Closure here means the city marked the ticket "Closed" — not necessarily that the underlying problem was fixed.

The geography of slow service

Resolution rate tells you which types of complaints get answered. Wait time tells you which neighborhoods get served. They're different questions, and the answers don't line up neatly.

Among Philadelphia's zip codes with at least 50 closed complaints since 2024-01-01, the slowest — 19142 — has a median resolution time of 19 days. The fastest — 19102 — closes complaints at a median of 3 days. That's a 6.6× difference for the same city service. A complaint filed in one neighborhood is not the same as a complaint filed in another.

Median computed over closed complaints only — this measures how long it actually took to close a ticket, not how long open tickets have been waiting. Zip codes with fewer than 50 closed complaints since 2024-01-01 excluded. Click any row to explore that zip in the playground.

What "closed" doesn't mean

Closing a 311 complaint means the city logged a response — a crew drove by, a call was made, the ticket was routed to another department. It doesn't mean the underlying problem is resolved. A blighted property can be "closed" on the 311 side while remaining blighted. An illegal dump can receive a "Closed" status after a cleanup that leaves debris on the adjacent block.

The enforcement record is kept separately. Philadelphia's License & Inspections system logs violation notices — the formal citations issued after an L&I inspector visits a property. When a resident calls 311 about a neighbor's failing structure or an overgrown vacant lot, L&I is supposed to inspect and issue a violation. Whether that actually happens — and at what rate, in which zip codes — is a question the L&I Violations dataset can start to answer.