As we know it, major metropolitan cities across the United States still contain incredibly high levels of racial, social, and economic segregation, even after laws were passed meant to mitigate it (ex. Fair Housing Act of 1968). Here, I decided to look at the spatial organization of New York City and the ways it’s tied to characteristics like race and socioeconomic status. By exploring how neighborhoods in New York City differ in their access to resources like city services, quality education, or even hot water, I might be able to uncover the ways city government is perpetuating racial and economic inequality, not by accident but rather through a set of policy decisions.
With NYC Open Data I was able to find a dataset that collects all 311 service request records from 2010 to present: over 3 million records from all five boroughs, with complaint types ranging from noise in the park to heat or hot water repair. After exploring the data preliminarily, I was intrigued to learn more about the possible spatial variation in what types of complaints were made, how long it took the city to respond, and even what types of agencies were dispatched to address the complaint (i.e. Department of Housing vs. NYPD).
While this started out as a neighborhood research question, I quickly wanted to know how uneven access to resources spatially relates to unequal access to resources racially and economically. Through all of these thoughts, my ultimate research question began to formulate: What is the relationship between neighborhoods, racial composition of those neighborhoods, and access to city services in New York City?
Through all of these analyses, all statistically significant, I was able to find that increases in Black or Latino populations in neighborhoods cause case completion times to increase (get slower) when controlling for the same types of complaints that are made and the same government agency that is dispatched to respond. This is not the case with increases in the White population in the neighborhood, where typically, case completion times are lower (faster) the larger the white population in the neighborhood.
Even more captivating though was the finding via statistical interactions. I discovered that the case completion time also varies in terms of the type of complaint the city is responding to and how large the Black or Latino populations in the neighborhood are. Increases in Black or Latino populations are associated with city service complaints (ex. Heat and hot water) taking longer for the city to respond to, while the same population increases are associated with social conflict complaints (ex. Noise in the park) being responded to faster, most often by the NYPD. This suggests another hypothesis, that Black and Latino neighborhoods are underserved by basic city services but overserved by policing and surveillance services. Possible further research may include collecting 911 call records and comparing them to the 311 request analysis done here to understand how different types of city services are prevalent in different communities based on race and ethnicity.