Parking got testy in Southeast Baltimore last year. The city’s rodent eradication team visited Belair-Edison frequently. And street lights on East Northern Parkway kept breaking, according to Baltimore’s 311 system.
Data analyzed by The Baltimore Sun shows that the system handled over a million requests in 2024 for various city services, from broken street lights to reporting potholes and sewer problems. The 311 complaints increased by 5% in 2024 compared to 2023, and services for certain issues, like rats, increased by over 10%.
The city uses the system to keep track of its progress on municipal services and uses that data to be more proactive on issues like litter and rats, the top two categories of complaints last year. Other researchers keep track of the city’s 311 data to build profiles of different neighborhoods.
Analyzing the city’s 311 data, as well as calls from its 911 center, are both “really good ways to sort of understand how people who live in Baltimore communities are engaging with the city,” said Amanda Phillips de Lucas, director of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.
The research unit affiliated with the University of Baltimore Jacob France Institute uses certain 311 data — reports about street lights, clogged stormed drains, dirty streets and alleys — to analyze Baltimore communities.
The system is a point of pride for the city — Baltimore was the first U.S. city to use 311 as a police non-emergency number.
As the system has evolved, 311 has become not only a streamlined way for residents to request city services but also a way to understand better the city and the different dynamics of its 250-plus neighborhoods.
311 data is a great way to see what activities are going on in a neighborhood, but that “doesn’t mean we get a fantastic meaning out of it,” Phillips de Lucas said.
Other data about a neighborhood, such as population or the balance between homeowners and renters, can give some clues. It also helps to tour the community and speak with residents to find out what’s going on.
The busiest neighborhoods, and their top calls
A few neighborhoods report more incidents than others. Many of the top neighborhoods for 311 requests last year — Belair-Edison (the busiest), Canton (second-busiest) and Brooklyn (fourth) — were simply Baltimore’s most populous, according to 2020 census data.
The Sun excluded financial requests from this count because they are overwhelmingly tied to services requested at city offices in Downtown Baltimore. It’s also important to note that even though many of the requests logged in the city’s 311 data are called in by residents, many, like “proactive” rat rubouts and “pickup” potholes, are put in by city employees.
Northeast Baltimore’s Belair-Edison neighborhood had the most requests, with over 29,000 reports to 311 in 2024.
Belair-Edison has a high number of "service requests related to rat activity," said Department of Public Works spokesperson Mary Stewart. There were over 153,000 rat rubout entries last year, but the number of residents actually calling about rats is much lower — over 95% of the rubout requests are labeled as "proactive."
The department's rat rubout team "takes a proactive approach by conducting targeted interventions in the neighborhood to help manage and mitigate rodent concerns before they scale further," said Stewart. There were nearly 15,000 more proactive rat rubouts in 2024 than in 2023, though the amount of resident-requested rat rubouts held flat.
The challenge with 311 data is that it "doesn't always mean one thing," Phillips de Lucas said.
Take clogged storm drains, for example.
With a lot of reports in a particular neighborhood, "it could mean that those storm drains are getting clogged really easily" she said.
But it could also be that a certain neighborhood association is concerned about flooding and encourages residents through newsletters and other communications to report issues with storm drains. It could show disinvestment in a certain community. Or, maybe, there are just two residents who are very passionate about an issue, and insistent about getting it fixed.
"That's kind of the joy of the 311 system," Phillips de Lucas said. It's "a way that people can participate" with the city on different levels.
Potholes
Baltimore has plenty of potholes.
Belair-Edison had the most pothole reports last year, with 414 total logged. Just over half of those were reported by citizens, while 179 were flagged by the city’s Department of Public Works.
The next biggest neighborhoods for potholes were in Frankford (322), Hamilton Hills (283), Downtown (260) and Roland Park (260), where the busiest intersection — Keswick Road and West University Parkway — is located.
That intersection had 49 pothole reports, though around half of them were closed as duplicate reports, meaning that crews determined multiple people had called about the same pothole.
Other busy blocks included the 600 block of East 25th Street in Northeast Baltimore (41), the 100 block of East McComas Street in the Locust Point Industrial Area (33), and the 600 block of West Patapsco Avenue in Cherry Hill (28).
With duplicate reports removed, busy trucker routes on the the 600 and 2100 blocks of West Patapsco Avenue were the busiest, followed by the 100 block of East McComas Street.
In Belair-Edison, Mannasota Avenue was a particularly busy street for pothole reports, with 69 complaints total. Most were in the 3000 blocks, situated in the area south of Herring Run Park.
Parking
In terms of parking complaints, Southeast Baltimore is the winner.
Canton had over 1,500 parking complaints in 2024, followed by Upper Fells Point (1,253) and Fells Point (1,247).
There are also separate, more specific complaints directed at abandoned vehicles and 48-hour parking. Belair-Edison topped the list for those types of complaints, with 1,252 handled in the neighborhood by Housing and Community Development as well as the Department of Transportation. Brooklyn and Frankford were the next busiest, with more than 800 complaints each.
The most problematic parking spots were on the 500 block of South Bond Street in Fells Point, with more than 380 complaints. Of those, 365 of them were at the same address — a condominium complex inside what was once Public School No. 25.
That block only recently became part of the city's residential parking permit program, with signs in most spaces restricting parking over two hours to permitholders.
City data indicates that just under 100 parking citations were issued on that block last year. More than half of them were for parking without a residential permit. And half of those cases are vehicles that were cited two or more times.
David Naumann, who has lived on the South Bond for nearly two decades, said that parking officials "should go a little bit easier" on residents of his block. He has a garage, though he recently got a $52 ticket for parking on the street without a permit. He said he will contest it.
He said the new permit system is a bit confusing, as there's paid parking around the corner on Eastern Avenue and free parking a block north on Bond.
"If you drive around the block a couple of times, you'll find something," he said.
The neighborhoods in Southeast Baltimore are some of the city's most densely populated. American Community Survey data suggests that residents in Fells Point and Canton are also some of the most likely to own a personal vehicle and the least likely to use public transportation, according to the BNIA.
Graffiti
Altogether, Charles Village had the most graffiti complaints, more than 1,100.
Nearby, Charles North — the home of Graffiti Alley — had the next most, with 727. Not many graffiti complaints were listed for the alley, where street artists can boldly tag walls without penalty. Most were concentrated on busy thoroughfares like Charles Street, Maryland Avenue and St. Paul Street, specifically at bars and empty lots.
Except for Downtown Baltimore, the third busiest neighborhood for graffiti complaints, most were concentrated in neighborhoods overlapping with or adjacent to the Station North Arts District, home of the Copycat Building and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Hampden had the fourth most graffiti complaints, and Bolton Hill had the fifth most.
Graffiti has been part of Station North's cultural identity for a "long, long time," said Patrick Swickard, a Mount Vernon resident who has documented tens of thousands of tags throughout the city for over a decade.
Though it may have plenty of 311 reports for removal, it's certainly a place where graffiti is "more tolerated," allowing people to practice spraying more impressive work. That's resulted in locations like Graffiti Alley, the walkway where much of the city's boldest tags have been welcomed by the city.
As far as where tags get sprayed, there's sort of an "unspoken code for where it goes up" and where it doesn't — private residences, vehicles and other people's tags are off-limits, and more harmless locations like alleys or vacant lots are more acceptable.
Have a news tip? Contact Dan Belson at dbelson@baltsun.com, on X as @DanBelson_ or on Signal as @danbels.62.
