Calling 311 about one's neighbors is more common in areas squished between racial or ethnic enclaves, according to a new study presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
That seems to make sense: Clashing cultures causing complaints. But the study also found lower complaint rates in more evenly mixed neighborhoods and in areas where the boundaries are stark — such as New York Avenue in Crown Heights, where there is a majority black population on one side of the street and a majority white population on the other.
"Our work points at segregation as a factor that creates certain areas or places in the city where we expect an increased conflict to emerge, which would not necessarily be the case in more integrated areas," said Joscha Legewie, an assistant professor of education and sociology at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, who co-authored the study with Merlin Schaeffer at the University of Cologne.
They looked at 7.7 million 311 requests from 2009 to 2013. To account for the fact that some communities call 311 less frequently than others, they weighted the neighbor complaints relative to other non-neighbor 311 calls, such as those about heat and plumbing. Even then, there are limits to how the data can be used, since the identity of the caller and who the caller is complaining about is not recorded. About two percent of 311 calls are handled in a language other than English.