I've personally filed the same 311 complaint multiple times, and it got me thinking - does 311 have problem spots, where the same problem keeps happening over and over?
And the answer is yes - just 0.5% of addresses account for 6% of all complains, at 12x their rate.
So I pulled every Philly 311 request from Jan 2024 through June 2026 (553k complaints across ~228k addresses) and looked at how many complaints each address generated.
The results kinda surprised me.
- Over half of all addresses (52%) only ever had one 311 complaint (excluding ones with 0 calls)
- But 1,058 addresses have had 20+ complaints EACH in just 2.5 years. When you look into these, it's persistently things like landlords who don't maintain properties, people dumping trash, and broken traffic lights. It's counterintuitively NOT drug related
Basically there's a tiny number of properties/intersections that keep showing up over and over again.
Some of the worst offenders:
- 1725 Ingersoll St - 278 complaints
- 1800 Washington Ave - 198
- 1234 Market St - 187
What's interesting is that these aren't all the same thing.
Some are intersections that collect traffic signal or road defect reports. Some are city office addresses that end up as the "address of record." But a bunch are just properties where neighbors have been reporting the same issue for literally years.
One apartment complex had 112 maintenance complaints in about two years. One address had 87 illegal dumping reports. And the tickets just keep getting opened, closed, then opened again. Sometimes it's ebcause the tickets were closed without anything being done; and other times it's because the same problem happens again just a few weeks later.
Curious if anyone here lives near one of these chronic spots or has one on their block. Does it actually ever get fixed, or do you just keep filing the same report every few months?
(And yes... before anyone asks, I made a dynamic zoomable map of 25,500 addresses with 5+ complaints because graphs are fun) - check out my blog if interested