You are lying on a blanket in the park, soaking up the rays, watching kids run around, and you reach over to find… broken glass? If you have been in the city long enough you have had an experience like this. Our parks are usually beautiful communal spaces, but it is impossible for them to escape the tradedy of the commons - good news though, since 2017 NYC has been collecting inspection records of how clean our public space are, and things are getting better!

Records indicate that since 2022, we have observed a 34% decrease in “filth” in our parks (and yes, the level of inspections appears constant at around 3,000 per year). The inspection data includes flags for the presence of five issues - animal waste, broken glass, illegal dumping, graffiti, and medical waste. Each of them have gone down in the past 3 years:

Category	% Decrease
Animal Waste	29%
Broken Glass	31%
Illegal Dumping	39%
Graffiti	40%
Medical Waste	50%

Let’s focus on the two biggest drops - graffiti and medical waste.

Where did all the graffiti go?

NYC is a mecca for street art, some of which is iconic, other that is a nuissance. Since 2021 there has been a focused effort to remove illegal graffiti around NYC. Despite the efforts, Highbridge Park remains a leading place to spot graffiti.

As an aside, I used to live near 5Pointz, which was demolished and converted into whitebox apartments where you can rent a studio for $4k a month. Conflicted feelings on that one…

Wait, medical waste?

Yes, medical waste. In fact there is a whole dataset devoted to tracking syringes in NYC(perhaps to be explored on a later date). Data on medical waste is a little suspect - in particular, in 2022 Marine Park far surpassed every other park for medical waste sightings, with more then 50% higher than Highbridge Park in second place, however in subsequent years sightings dropped to at or near 0. This harkens back to a terrifying incident in the 80’s called syringe tide, where medical waste washed up on CT, NJ, and NY shores, devastating local businesses.

Looking at the concentration of medical waste in our parks, looks like the current “leader” is Estella Diggs Park:

If the description of Estella Diggs Park is meant to be true - particularly “encourages kids and New Yorkers of all ages to come outside” - then perhaps it is an area to focus prevention efforts.

Where is this going from here?

It is great that there has been an overall drop in “filth” in our city. More can be done though - and in 2025 Mayor Adams established significant permanant funding for the Department of Sanitation to continue efforts to clean our parks, including the second shift program to provide daily focused cleaning efforts for our highest use areas. It seems optimistic that we should continue to see the trend towards cleaner parks, and a little less broken glass when you are lounging on those warm summer days.

I preface this by admitting I am very late to the game - I have seemingly had my head buried in the sand as all of the LinkNYC stations went up around the city. It is not that I was not aware of them - they are nearly impossible to miss, with their digital ad displays, tablets (occasionally flashing explicit material…), and dubious looking plugs. I had not asked “why” though - and so here is what I found after a little digging.

There are 2308 of the hubs erected around the city, with 53% of them being located in Manhattan. There is sort of a patchwork distribution of them scattered around the 5 boroughs, with some heavy concentrations in the familiar areas.

Across the whole city, only 20% of census tracts have 1, while some (like in Red Hook or near Times Square) have many. In general, after removing a few outliers and controlling for population density, the distribution looks fairly reasonable.

How many would be needed to completely tile the city?

Each unit has an optimal range of about 150 ft and a maximum range of 400 ft. So assuming the units were optimally distributed, how many would it take to tile the whole city? 2308 seems like a lot, however it would actually require up to 119k of them to completely cover the city. Enter the the 5g variants of the towers, which have a range of 750 ft - we would only need 4740 of those to tile the city (ignoring for a second the difficulty those little 5g waves have in actually reaching people).

Internet for All

One of the objectives of the program was to provide internet to the least advantaged residents of NYC. The 5g program in particular seems to be targeting that - the 262 5g towers that have been built so far are generally distributed towards lower household income areas (on average, areas with 5g towers have 23% lower median income than standard towers).

Who Pays for this?

Advertisers! In fact, NYC appears to get a kickback from the program. In 2024 NYC booked $5.8M in revenue from the program, thanks in part to its contract to harvest 5% revenue LinkNYC makes from operating the digitial ad displays. Revenue is also harvested from leasing the 5g tower space to 3rd party carriers. Of course, this is all a little far off the astronomical initial projections, which was supposed to generate $500M over 12 years, but the deal was restructured in 2021 and appears to be smooth sailing now. Not bad for a municipal project!

What did we lose?

Phone Booths. The LinkNYC stations originated from a De Blasio program to replace the aging phone booths around the city. And it was successful in that - in 2022 the last phone booth was removed from 49th street and 7th ave. I suppose I am waiting now for Hollywood to do a reboot of Phone Booth centered around the LinkNYC stations.

According to OpenData’s daycare inspection dataset, there are 2,948 daycare providers in NYC. That includes infant daycares, school based programs, and camps. Brooklyn has the lionshare of daycare centers - 1,255, or roughly 43% of all the daycare centers, with Manhattan coming in second (732, or 24%), and The Bronx third (430, or 14%).

Here is how the daycare centers are distributed around the city:

What is the best neighborhood to have a new baby in?

If you are interested in daycare, then it looks like you should be headed to Dumbo. The top five neighborhoods for the availability of infant daycare, controlling for population, are:

Neighborhood	People per Infant Daycare
DUMBO-Vinegar Hill-Downtown Brooklyn-Boerum Hill	3450
Midtown-Midtown South	4090
Battery Park City-Lower Manhattan	4411
Prospect Heights	4962
Clinton Hill	4970

This mostly correlates with stroller sightings around those neighborhoods (though Midtown, really?).

Where to go to camp?

Not surprisingly, camps look to be clustered around parks. The top neighborhoods with camps are:

Neighborhood	Number of Camps
Park Slope-Gowanus	24
East New York	12
Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill	11
East Harlem South	11
Central Harlem North-Polo Grounds	11

Park Slope has double the next most, but if you have visited Prospect Park in the summer this will not surprise you.

Where should there by more daycare centers?

Here is the plot of daycare centers throughout the city, controlling for population:

Notice anything? Looks like Queens is the outlier. Either there is a massive shortage of daycare centers in Queens, or daycare centers there are systemically under reported.

If we remove Queens from the data, the distribution looks more like this:

Looks like the neighborhoods with the lowest concentration of daycare centers are mostly in the Bronx. Here are the top five:

Neighborhood	Borough	People per Daycare
Arden Heights	Staten Island	12619
West Farms-Bronx River	The Bronx	11670
Stuyvesant Town-Cooper Village	Manhattan	10525
Parkchester	The Bronx	9940
Allerton-Pelham Gardens	The Bronx	9634

Presumably StuyTown is because of the high concentration of residential within that neighborhood. Still, the surrounding areas do not make up for it - perhaps a good place to start a daycare center?

NYC, like any city, has rats, and a lot of them - a study done in 2014 estimated that there are around 2 million rats who call NYC home. Most of those rats are the exotic Norwegian Rat (spoiler, they most likely did not actually come from Norway). But thanks to NYC’s Open Data portal, we can learn a lot more about our furry little cohabitants.

We can start by filtering the 311 data data to see the distribution of rat sightings around the city. In total, since 2010 there have been 78k rat sightings (and 25k mouse sightings) reported by New Yorkers. Which borough is the most rodent infested? That distinction goes to Brooklyn, with a combined 34k rat and mouse sightings reported. Then comes Manhattan with 27k, the Bronx with 21k, Queens with 15k, and last is Staten Island, with only 4.5k sightings. I guess rats don’t like commuting on the Staten Island ferry.

Rats versus mice

There are more then 3x as many rat reportings as there are mice reporting in NYC. But are they geographically distributed in the same regions? Are there “rat territories” and “mice territories” in the city? Turns out, yes - here is a plot of the difference in rat versus mice reporting by census tract. Areas in red have more rats being reported, areas in blue have more mice.

Rats appear to have a firm grip on most of Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, but as you get further out in Brooklyn and Queens there are spots where mice run the show.

When do rats show up?

Looks like they start scampering about around 10am, and then sightings taper off throughout the rest of the day. Note, this is based on human reported sightings, so perhaps New Yorkers are just most startled/disgusted by them in the morning, but when the evening rolls around they are used to them.

And rats tend to mingle when the weather is nicer outside. Below is the chart of the number of sightings in different months of the year - rat sighting peak in July, stay steady into October, and then drop precipitously for the winter.

What are we doing to stop them?

Recently De Blasio kicked off a $32 million rat reduction plan, so the rat population is definitely under attack. NYC offers up records of where they are doing their inspections and baitings, which allows us to isolate rat “safe zones” - areas where there are high concentrations of rat sightings, but low concentrations of inspections. Feel free to share this with your local community rat inspector (or with your rat population, depending on whose side you are on):

Rats are the most aggressively hunted in Manhattan; it has the most inspections or baitings (470k). There are spots within Brooklyn and Staten Island where there has historically been lower coverage despite high rat populations. And overall, Brooklyn has had only the third most inspections, 225k, less than half that of Manhattan. This runs counter to the fact that Brooklyn has 25% more rodent sightings reported than Manhattan. Maybe an area for some of that $32 million to go?

What cuisines do rats fancy?

Thanks to the restaurant inspections dataset we can see which NYC restaurants have had a problem with rodents at some point in their operation. Turns out, most restaurants have had an issue - 63% of all NYC restaurants have been cited at some point for either mice or rats being present in their facilities. But which cuisines do rats prefer the most?

The winner is Latin food, with 80% being cited for rodent problems. Caribbean (79% cited), Delicatessen (75% cited), Indian (75% cited), and Thai (74.5% cited) round out the top five cuisine types where you are most likely to run into a rat. Looks like rats generally stay away from juice and salad places (39% cited), as well as coffee (45% cited), and ice cream (46% cited).

I have to admit, I was really hoping that French food was going to top the list, but that is firmly in the middle, with 64% being cited.

What are rats worst enemy?

Apparently terriers - go figure.