ACS 5 years estimate data, through their API.
The data of the
Department of Buildings (DOB) violations are divided to more than a hundred
complaint categories, most of them are minor in the sense of urban renewal. It was hard to define the exact categories that will best contribute to this analysis. In order to avoid possible biases and misinterpretations another data source was selected -
311 complaints. The 311 data were filtered to include only
Building related complaints and
2016 complaints only prior retrieving. The complaints in the 311 dataset are also divided by complaint descriptor; the descriptors were included in this analysis are:
- Illegal Conversion Of Residential Building/Space
- Illegal Commercial Use In Resident Zone
- Zoning - Non-Conforming/Illegal Vehicle Storage
- No Certificate Of Occupancy/Illegal/Contrary To CO
- SRO - Illegal Work/No Permit/Change In Occupancy/Use
- ROOFING
- PORCH/BALCONY
- SKYLIGHT
- GUTTER/LEADER
- FENCING
311 is a relatively new citizens-city/government engagement system, of which not all citizens are taking advantage or aware. To overcome this bias the 311 data were normalized by dividing each Zip code's number of building-related complaints by the overall number of 311 complaints in the specific zip code. Due to the large size of the 311 data the way to assess the overall number of complaints in 2016 was to extract two months only from that year, January and June, proxies for winter overall complaints and summer overall complaints respectively.
Additionally, for the second part of the analysis, data of number of renter-occupied housing units and owner-occupied housing units were obtained, also from the Census Bureau website.