Topics
Editorial tracks that collect stories, datasets, and ideas around a shared theme.
Philly 311
Philadelphia's 311 system turns every complaint into a data point. Stories using that database as a lens on city life — service equity, response patterns, and the geography of civic engagement.
Fire & Emergency
Stories drawn from Philadelphia Fire Department dispatch data, EMS call records, the police shooting-victims feed, and public-health emergency records — what the city responds to, and where.
Waste & Illegal Dumping
Eight zip codes drove most of Philly's illegal-dumping reports in 2024. Stories mapping where trash ends up, when it happens, and which neighborhoods bear the burden.
Housing & Blight
The gap between a 311 complaint and an L&I violation notice — mapped zip by zip. Stories on property enforcement, blight, and whether the city's systems talk to each other.
NYC 311
Twenty-four million 311 records since 2010. Noise dominates; the disorder framing doesn't survive the data; the long-arc growth in noise complaints is a public-health surveillance signal.
NYC Housing
The lease-up bottleneck. The corporate-veil offenders. The upzoning paradox. NYC's housing apparatus is data-rich and contradiction-rich; this track maps both.
NYC Environment & Health
The lead pipes the city has lost track of. The pests every restaurant inspector parses out of free-text violation descriptions. The environmental-health surveillance that open data made possible.
NYC Mobility
Four million daily subway riders mapped from one-sided turnstile data. Plus the 1.5-billion-row taxi dataset that's about to need its own pipeline.
NYC Algorithmic Governance
Local Law 35 made NYC the first U.S. city to mandate annual disclosure of every algorithmic tool its agencies use to make decisions affecting residents. The GUARD Act made that disclosure pre-procurement instead of post-facto.