Opinion

Someone made a Wrapped-style recap for neighborhood complaints in your city

Someone made a Wrapped-style recap for neighborhood complaints in your city

Every app seems to end the year with a Spotify Wrapped-style recap now, but what if you could get one for the neighborhood where you live? How many people complained about potholes? What was the most complained-about spot? A new project turns neighborhood complaints into a personalized highlight reel for your city.

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311 Wrapped is a project by Khaled Eltokhy that brings the fun of Spotify Wrapped to municipal grievances. It takes public data from several major cities and transforms it into a sleek, shareable breakdown of the local drama. Instead of counting how many times you listened to a specific artist, this tool tallies up complaints about things like graffiti, trash collection, and street light outages in specific zip codes.

To use the site, enter a zip code from one of the supported cities. Currently, that list includes New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Philadelphia, Boston, Calgary, and Washington, DC. You’ll then be guided through a presentation in slides and interactive maps. Right off the bat, it tells you how your zip code compares to other areas in the city, and it only gets better from there. All the data for this project comes from 311 complaints. If you’re unfamiliar, 3-1-1 is essentially the “customer support” line for nearly every city, and most have a place to report issues online as well.

Sadly, the city where I live is not supported yet, but I still found it fun to browse through several zip codes. It was interesting to see that a lot of the things people complain about where I live are being complained about in other cities, too. If you happen to live in one of the supported cities, it’s well worth seeing what your zip code's "personality" looks like and to see how your neighborhood compares to others.

There’s something extra fun about finding out that a movie, TV show, or book takes place in a location you’re familiar with. Maybe you've wondered how many pieces of media have taken place in your area, or any other place in the world. There’s a website for that.

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