311 calls expose land of 10,000 urban gripes

From potholes to dead streetlights, Minneapolis' 311 calls expose a land of 10,000 urban gripes. Actually, it is quite a bit more than that.

The Star Tribune requested and analyzed three years of calls to the city's nonemergency 311 line, broken down by category and address, and found both surprising and logical patterns.

There are fewer graffiti calls in high-crime areas of north Minneapolis compared with other corners of the city, for instance. The calls are more prevalent in areas with large artist populations, city staffers said. Other discoveries are more straightforward: Commercial food safety complaints match closely to areas with high numbers of restaurants, like downtown and Lake Street.

"There are about 4,000 people who work for this city, but there are about 400,000 people who live here," said former Mayor R.T. Rybak, who pushed for the 311 system 10 years ago this January, in the first days of his second term. "And if we can all help figure out where the potholes are, where the abandoned buildings are, we can get things done a lot better."

Rybak said the new information allows the city to see the need for services in new ways that were not possible before.

Scott Wellan, the city's interim 311 director, said they receive about 360,000 contacts per year via phone, the Web and e-mail. Most of those are from residents seeking information about city services, Wellan said, which is why the number of 311 contacts has dropped as the city has put more information online.

The Star Tribune database includes more than 154,000 calls for service between September 2011 and 2014, spread out over about 60 different categories.

Some of the clearest disparities between more affluent and low-income neighborhoods were apparent in calls about residential conditions, suspicious activity and debris left in public and private spaces.

The broader Uptown area — particularly surrounding Hennepin Avenue — stood out in several categories, including high numbers of parking complaints, abandoned bikes and noise pollution.

Southwest Minneapolis, the most affluent portion of the city, registered higher-than-average calls about contractors performing work in violation of work permits — a reflection of well-publicized neighborhood anger over single-family home construction. The city's development services director, Doug Kress, said complaints include parking issues, dumpsters and portable bathroom placement, as well as the height, bulk, grading and landscaping of the project in question.

"We have seen more permits issued in the [Southwest] area and we have also had more complaints filed," Kress wrote in an e-mail.

Air pollution complaints are slightly more common on the city's northern riverfront, where recycling and concrete plants are located.

Not all of the requests come from residents. Some are generated by city staffers out of the office, including snowy sidewalk complaints and problems encountered during multiunit apartment building inspections. Reporting problems in larger apartment buildings only began last year, said the city's regulatory services director Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde.

"That way, we could not only track them, but we could also account for our staff/resource needs as this allowed us to make a full accounting of staff time in the field," Rivera-Vandermyde said.

There were other oddities in the data, like calls about sports equipment in the streets exclusively in north Minneapolis. Complaints about abandoned sports equipment are frequently lodged in an area just northwest of Wirth Lake.

Council President Barb Johnson said portable basketball hoops are often left on the curb after people play a game in the street. "We have people that play basketball at 4 o'clock in the morning," Johnson said. "And the stuff gets left out in the streets, knocked over."

Some other patterns:

• Nearly all calls about broken or empty newspaper boxes pertain to problems downtown.

• Complaints about businesses operating without a license or in violation of a license were most prevalent in downtown and along Lake Street.

Rybak said more public access to the nonemergency information helps neighborhoods identify trends and tackle problems.

"It's been done for many years with crime," he said. "Why shouldn't they have information about housing inspections and vacant property and abandoned cars?"

Star Tribune data visualization designer to Jeff Hargarten contributed to this report.