Where the 311 Wait Gap Comes From
The complaint-by-complaint cut on Poor people wait ~1.5x longer for service through Philly 311 and Three-Fifths of Philadelphia's 311 Gap Is About Which Complaints People File
The median closed 311 ticket took 7.0 days in poorer ZIP codes and 4.5 days in richer ones — a 2.5-day gap.
How long it takes
17.8 days slower in poorer ZIPs
Both bars use the same scale, 0 to 140 days.
How much of each side’s L&I caseload it is
Notes, Sources, and Methodology
All data is from the OpenDataPhilly 311 Service Requests table public_cases_fc, requests filed from January 2024 onward, with Information Requests and rows without a usable close date dropped; income is U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2022 five-year estimates, table B19013.
Methodology details. Income tiers are quartiles of ACS 2022 five-year median household income across the 43 zip codes that have a value: the bottom ten are the lower tier, the top ten the higher tier, and the 23 in between the middle, with no dollar cutoffs. The tool covers the 33 complaint types belonging to the five agencies whose case mix can be decomposed — Police, L&I, CLIP, Streets and Parks — because only those five cleared 1,000 tickets in each income tier. For each complaint the tool shows the median days to close in each tier, the gap between them, and each tier’s share of that agency’s caseload.
Mix against delivery. An agency’s gap between the tiers can come from two places. Composition: poorer zip codes file a different mix of complaints, and some complaint types take far longer to close than others. Delivery: the same complaint takes longer to close in a poorer zip code. The tool shows both halves — the first chart times the same complaint in each tier, the second shows how much of each side’s work it is. The two are separated by direct standardization: reweighting the higher-income tier’s tickets to the lower-income tier’s complaint mix and recomputing the median wait.
Limitations. Every figure is closed tickets only, and under the capped treatment those are tickets with actual_days between 0 and 365. Dropping the open tickets flatters the gap: treating them as right-censored instead puts the citywide gap at 15.4 days, against the 2.5 days the closed-ticket medians show. The long tail matters most for a handful of complaints — abandoned vehicles above all — and the tool flags those individually where the answer reverses without the one-year cap.