Characteristic NYC Neighborhood Complaints

New York City month continues here at Kieran Healy Industries, an effort that will eventually produce something properly scholarly in nature. But in the meantime—and with my apologies to the many great urbanists of times past—we can enjoy ourselves by messing around with some data. Specifically, New York’s 311 Services and Complaints data. The 311 phone line and website is the the main point of contact for city services when it’s not an emergency. The city logs all the calls it gets and makes anonymized data available publicly via NYC OpenData. I got every record from 2010 to 2025 and packaged it up for R. The package is really just a front-end for a big parquet file managed by DuckDB. DuckDB offers a very powerful in-memory database engine that is optimized for the kinds of thing we want to do in data analysis. That is, we want to efficiently query a big dataset lots of different ways, rather than, say, repeatedly update its records as fast as possible. We can work in R and write…