How it works

Block by Block lets any resident say what is working and what is not on their block — in under 30 seconds, in their own language, with no account. Those signals become a planning instrument: clustered by issue, weighted by corroboration, and mapped against where money is actually being spent.

This is not another 311. 311 is a complaint intake queue. This is the layer above it: it tells the city what residents think matters most, not just what broke.

What data we hold

Almost none. No account is required to file a report. We never store your precise home location — reports snap to a block segment of roughly 150 meters. A "same here" stores only an anonymous session code, never your identity.

How the priority score works

Each cluster of reports is scored from five ingredients: how many reports it has, how many neighbors corroborated them, how long the issue has persisted, how geographically concentrated it is — and how little budget the category receives compared to the need residents express. An issue raised often where little is being spent rises to the top. Every score can be opened to see exactly why.

About the data in this demo

This pilot is seeded with real, public NYC Open Data: 12 months of 311 service requests for Queens Community District 1 (Astoria) and the city's FY2026 expense budget, scaled per-capita to the district. "Working well" examples are illustrative. No City of New York endorsement is implied.

Reporting is not need

Neighborhoods that trust government less, report less. A score fed by reports alone would reward the loudest blocks, not the neediest. That is why the pilot pairs this platform with offline outreach, why the calculation is open to audit in line with New York's algorithmic accountability framework, and why reporting-propensity normalization is on the roadmap before any citywide scale-up.