About the data
This project was completed as part of Jack Walker's data journalism coursework at CUNY's Craig Newmark School of Journalism. Here are more details about the data decisions that powered this investigation.
Repeat offenders
Since January 2023, 41 trees in zip code 11234 have had 5 or more complaints over tree maintenance issues. Here is a map of some of the trees that have raised the most concern from residents, and their addresses.
Trees in the Marine Park zip code with 5+ complaints since 2023:
Calculating zip code data
This project uses 311 service request data to calculate the number of tree maintenance complaints filed in each zip code. The full dataset was filtered to include complaints over tree maintenance filed since 2023, and then was further filtered to determine subtypes of each complaint for each zip code. These calculations were used to inform the data visualizations on the main page, and the search tool on the compare page.
What if it's one person calling again and again?
To ensure outliers who frequently called 311 did not skew the dataset, results were filtered by individual address. Few addresses were reported more than 20 times, which indicates a variety of complaints across the board, and fewer instances of a single tree garnering an outsized number of complaints, skewing the dataset.
Why Marine Park?
Zip code 11234 encompasses the neighborhood of Marine Park, but also all or some of the neighborhoods of Mill Basin, Old Mill Basin, Flatlands and Bergen Beach, according to a neighborhood map by The New York Times.
For this story, I focused on Marine Park because of recent reporting on tree maintenance issues there. I used the neighborhood as a stand-in for the wider zip code for ease of understanding for general readers. Most issues touched on in this story hold true for surrounding areas as well.
