New York City Open Data: 311, sanitation, health, housing, buildings, finance and parks records Sept. 2024 to Aug. 2026

The lots nobody fixes

Of the city's 24,461 vacant lots, 737 drew records of neglect from two or more agencies between September 2024 and August 2026, and 670 of those are privately owned.

Every vacant lot in New York City, every building the city has put on a distress list and every park, scored by how many separate agencies recorded neglect there in the last 24 months: neighbors through 311, sanitation and health inspectors, the housing, buildings and finance departments and the Parks Department's own inspectors. Of 24,461 vacant lots, 2,701 have at least one record and 92 have three or more. The map also carries 2,460 distressed buildings and 269 parks flagged by two or more sources. Underneath sits the sanitation department's lot-cleaning file from 2010 to 2021: 2,042 lots it cleaned then are still vacant.

Sources: New York City Open Data · Methodology

Each dot is one vacant lot, distressed building or park, coloured by how many separate agencies recorded neglect there since September 2024.
Search and filter the map
No agency 1 agency 2 agencies 3 or more Sanitation cleaned it 2010–2021 Park property, filled by the same score
Lot file
Click a lot or a park. Zoom in past street level and the lots draw as parcels. Colour is the number of separate agencies with a record of neglect there since September 2024; a ring means the sanitation department cleaned that lot at least once between 2010 and 2021.
What the sanitation lot-cleaning file shows
Cleaned most often, still vacantlot records 2010–2021
Vacant land by owner
Share of lots, by owner
Where neighbors and inspectors disagree
Vacant lots by community districtflagged in 24 months
What the Parks Department finds when it inspects itself
Failed most often by Parks inspectorswindow inspections, 3 or more
Ranked by agencies, then by quarters with a record, then by cleaning history

And please read this AI caution. The concept, the choice of sources and the layout are the author's (a human). The code, the data pulls and the file handling were done by Anthropic's Claude Code under close direction. Quality control done on this project: every source count was re-queried directly against the New York City Open Data API and compared with the built files; the join keys were spot-checked by hand against the city's property records; the sanitation history layer was checked by reading raw inspector notes for sampled lots. The risks of using AI remain, and red flags in what you see here are welcome.

How this was built, what counts as a signal and what it leaves out →