What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (2024)

What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (1)What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (2)

Divided City

Divided City

October 24, 2024

Feature

by Inori Roy

From wealthy neighbours griping about shrubbery to low-income tenants requesting winter heat—a map of 311 requests charts a certain kind of civic engagement, and privilege.

In the summer of 2020, residents of the wealthy midtown Toronto enclave of Wychwood gathered online to complain about how much they disliked their neighbour Nina-Marie Lister’s garden.

On a street of manicured lawns managed by a small army of landscapers, Lister’s plot stood out. The 58-year-old ecologist and urban planning professor at Toronto Metropolitan University had transformed the sprawling lawn of her three-story brick house into a riotous pollinator garden, bursting with five-foot tall goldenrods, milkweed, brown-eyed Susans, and dozens of other plant species drawing in bees and butterflies.

The neighbours described the garden as a blight and an eyesore. They accused Lister and her husband of laziness for not maintaining it. They wondered when the yard would be fixed up. The signs the family had put up around the garden to explain its manifold functions—“This is a pollinator patch,” “This is stormwater irrigation,” “This is a rain garden”—had been repeatedly torn down by passersby, Lister says.

The email threads and Facebook conversations, she admits, were “more stigmatizing than I was prepared for…Who would think that a garden could be that polarizing?”

Then, in August of that year, Lister’s youngest son opened their front door to a city official, who said the garden violated Toronto bylaws for lawn height, capped at 20 cm, and weed maintenance. According to Lister, the officials couldn’t actually point to the presence of any particular weeds in the pollinator garden. But they planned to raze the whole thing.

The officials had arrived in response to a complaint. Someone, or likely several someones, had called 311, escalating the communal grousing into a full-blown municipal request.

311 is the city portal to make requests for municipal services or file complaints about violations of city bylaws. If a traffic light is broken or a tree branch threatens to fall, this is who you turn to. Most calls (or emails, or increasingly, requests through the website and app) are fairly innocuous: the majority in 2023 were for injured or dead wildlife. Any resident of Toronto can make a request for municipal services, or ask for help when they feel something isn’t working properly in their neighbourhood. But not everyone does.

Mapped out by ward, the differing frequency of 311 requests between downtown neighbourhoods and the suburbs, and between wealthy wards and lower-income ones, reveal a stark difference in the relationship these neighbourhoods have with their local government. The volume of 311 calls made on a particular issue doesn’t necessarily reflect the prevalence or seriousness of that issue in a given ward. It reflects, more than anything, who feels able to call up their city and ask for help.

That same sense of confidence and—for better or worse—entitlement that leads a higher-income Toronto resident to make requests of 311 also shapes their willingness to show up to community meetings, to talk to their city councillor, to petition local developers, even, analysis by The Local confirms, to vote. A map of 311 requests, then, is a map of a certain kind of civic engagement. It charts a community’s standards for the city and their trust in its municipal governance—their sense of what they owe the city, and what they are entitled to in return.

The idea of 311 as a non-emergency municipal phone service has only been around for a few decades. First implemented in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1996, it was created as an alternative to calling an overburdened police service. The service followed two principles of governance that had grown increasingly popular since the 1970s—“co-production,” or involving residents of a region in the creation and implementation of government programs (community consultation, in essence), and “citizen relationship management,” which imagines citizens as customers of the government. The aim was to reinvent North American governance from its top-down, bureaucratic, centralized form. And while these principles did put greater agency and power into local hands—a first, for many communities—critics recognized early on that community uptake would be contingent on people’s existing relationships with the government.

In a 1984 study of eight mid-sized American cities, administrators pointed out that lower-income and racialized residents might be hesitant and uneasy about calling their local representatives for help, or would fear condescension from city employees. It quickly became apparent that local governance driven by community consultation would give more space to the loud and the opinionated, regardless of whether or not their opinions were factual or representative. The system also risked incentivizing local politicians to funnel attention and effort toward the most high-profile, dramatic issues, which aren’t always the ones that merit attention. (Putting it a different way: do you care for your tax dollars being spent to mow the Lister lawn?)

In the U.S., several studies have tried to break down who actually uses 311 services, and what motivates them. A survey of interactions in New York—the largest 311 system in North America, receiving 8 million requests annually—found that city residents were much less likely to contact 311 if they were unemployed, from a minority group, or faced language barriers. In Kansas City, Missouri, similarly, higher-income neighbourhoods were more likely to use 311 services, frequently complaining about low-stakes “nuisance” issues, while lower-income neighbourhoods made fewer calls, but about more serious problems. In Dallas, Texas, lower-income communities were less likely to make noise complaints. One study looking at the relationship between gentrification and garbage-related 311 calls found that across five major American cities, the volume of requests grew with the rise in white residents in a given neighbourhood, regardless of income level.

The same patterns that show up from New York to Kansas City seem to appear in Toronto’s interactions with 311. The Local’s analysis of 311 request data available through the City’s open data portal—which is, the City notes, a partial sample of the more than a million interactions logged each year—found that Torontonians living in upper-middle class wards are disproportionately more likely to use 311 services than people in lower-income wards. There’s a sort of bell curve to this trend: the three wealthiest wards in the city make fewer requests than upper-middle class wards like Beaches-East York and Toronto-Danforth. Perhaps the wealthiest neighbourhoods have fewer issues to complain about, or, when they do face problems, can afford to bypass the city and use private services to resolve them. But overall, wards between $85,000 and $100,000, above the city-wide median income of $84,000, make more 311 requests than average.

And not all requests are for life-or-death issues. Requests for the “general pruning” of public parks and spaces for example—one of the less serious of the more than 500 categories of requests a Toronto resident could make through the portal—were disproportionately more likely to come from neighbourhoods with higher median incomes, as were requests related to graffiti.

Bylaw violation complaints—like the ones directed at Nina-Marie Lister—are also a rich man’s game, particularly popular in wealthy midtown wards like Eglinton-Lawrence and Don Valley West.

When lower-income wards make requests, they’re much more likely to be for serious issues in categories like “adequate heat” and “property standards,” which consist of requests by tenants about their living conditions—two of the few categories in which rates of request go down as income goes up.

The Local has reported on similar trends in civic engagement before. In 2022, we found that whiter, wealthier wards in Toronto were 1.5 times more likely to make requests for road safety measures than racially diverse, lower-income wards, despite actually facing lower rates of speeding on local streets. The problem isn’t that people are asking the City to provide speed bumps or remove graffiti—communities thrive when residents are engaged. The problem is that only the communities that feel entitled to ask for municipal services are getting them.

Carolyn Heath sent around 140 emails to the City’s 311 service between November 2021 and this summer. Her regular dog walks through her Wexford neighbourhood in the west end of Scarborough afford her plenty of chances to spot problems that need fixing—litter, sick or dead animals, malfunctioning traffic lights, speeding, damage to the streets from snow plows, excessive salt in the winter. And, as a retiree at 66, she’s got some spare time to make requests. When we spoke in early September, her most recent request was a mid-August graffiti complaint: someone had scrawled the n-word on a wall in the underground parking garage of her local GoodLife. Usually, graffiti doesn’t warrant a complaint in her book, she says, but this was offensive. “If I notice something, then I usually report it,” she says. “I don’t let things go.”

Heath spent 32 years as a city employee working in welfare and housing before retirement, so she knows her way around the bureaucracy of a city form and how to talk to bylaw officers. She has an uncommon affinity for the intricacies of city functions and the harmony promised by municipal regulations—“[explaining] what goes in the green bin, what goes in the blue bin, I love that kind of stuff.” She can also be a stickler for the rules. When she noticed her neighbours leaving their garbage bins out, she didn’t just ignore it. “I thought, well, you’re not supposed to do that, and it looks like there is a bylaw against that. And so, you know, I reported it.”

What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (3)

As a habitual 311 user, Heath is motivated by a strong sense of civic responsibility. In her spare time, she picks up litter and cigarette butts in local parks. She’s not afraid to bag up a dead squirrel or racoon for the City to pick up from her curb. She makes 311 requests with the same sense of a shared public good—for the success of the neighbourhood in which she’s resided for the past 30 years and raised two children on her own.

But there’s a fine, sometimes imperceptible line between a civic-minded approach to public complaints and something more akin to community policing. (Sometimes that distinction isn’t so fine, and the complainant’s use of 311 as a tool for personal vendettas can be spotted a mile off. The City has protocols for these callers.)

A 2017 study of the motivations behind 311 requests made in Boston, describes this second, more self-serving motivation as “territoriality”—the desire to not only maintain one’s own neighbourhood but to defend it, enforcing one’s own standard of social norms. The study’s authors attribute a majority of 311 requests made in one’s own neighbourhood to this sentiment. A 311 complaint about, say, a wild garden on your street is an attempt to control the aesthetics of the neighbourhood, not because of any genuine harm caused to its residents, but because of the visible departure from some unspoken community image.

There are few issues that so readily serve as a battleground for urban territoriality as the matter of noise. Does a summer festival spilling past the municipal 11:00 p.m. quiet time restriction warrant complaint, or is it just a cultural byproduct of living in Canada’s biggest city? How can we have more housing if we’re always complaining about the sound of construction?

Some of Clare Kumar’s earliest requests to 311 were about noise. The 56-year-old productivity and inclusivity consultant lives in the upper penthouse of a condo building on the Etobicoke lakefront, in a cluster of towers near Park Lawn Road and Lake Shore Boulevard. The towers—glass-fronted and numbering more than a dozen in a half-kilometre radius—have the unfortunate effect of bouncing sound from the streets and the Gardiner Expressway below, sending the noise of amplified car exhausts and construction up to Kumar’s two 44th-storey balconies every few minutes.

Kumar, like a growing population of city residents who’ve taken to both complaining on social media and calling 311, sees excessive noise as more than just a nuisance—it’s a health risk, a contributor to poor heart health, stress, anxiety, and lack of sleep, backed by a new body of research.

In her email inbox, Kumar has 25 311 requests from the past two years, and she’s not sure how many more phone calls she’s made. But she and many of the city’s noise activists have found that noise complaints don’t result in any action; you can’t chase down a car with an amplified exhaust, and you can’t ask a jackhammer to be quiet. While many still complain to 311 and, in some cases, the police, others have created a new means of civic engagement—their own app, Not311, on which they’ve accumulated 10,000 noise reports and sound levels recorded on phones and home decibel-measuring setups, and used the results to lobby at city hall.

Having largely given up on reaching 311 for noise or light, Kumar instead approaches other requests with the same zeal. When I spoke with Kumar, one of her most recent 311 requests had been for a sign at a local park that read, “Please come back in the spring to enjoy these flowers.”

“It’s summer. The flowers are fine,” Kumar says bluntly. “Why is this stupid [sign] here? I call it garden clutter. It’s been bothering me—I walk past and I’m like, ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake.’ It’s just silly.”

“I was pissed off one day. And what I do when I’m pissed off is try to turn it into some good cleanup energy,” Kumar continues. “That’s the one I’m the happiest about. I saw [the sign] was removed the next week.”

Kumar doesn’t think of her comfort with using 311 services as a matter of privilege. “I’ve been an advocate for my entire life on different things,” she says, remembering the time she told staff at a hotel about noise issues at age 12. “I think there is an opportunity for anyone in any walk of life to raise their voice.”

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What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (4)

Carolyn Heath, too, sees her 311 use as a civic duty. But halfway through our conversation, she begins to sound uncertain. “Here I am contacting them about traffic lights, and litter, and trees and, you know, making things tidy. I mean, I also do reports to the police about speeding…” she says. “I kind of feel like, wow, I’m bothering the City with all these minor things when there [are] more pressing needs.”

The City, for what it’s worth, doesn’t consider 311 requests a bother. The department has an annual budget of $20 million, and last year responded to more than a million phone calls and 181,000 online requests. (A phone call can cost a relatively astronomical average of $11 to $16 compared to the 10 cents to a dollar it costs to make a request through the app.) In recent years, it’s made efforts to improve 311 services—streamlining the requests process and making it easier to complain, and giving itself more generous deadlines to pick up things like wildlife cadavers (which would make the City’s services seem more effective at reaching their goals, though Councillor Brad Bradford has since motioned to restore the previous standard of 48-hour pickup).

This is a political process in itself: a resident of a city will likely have a higher approval of the municipal administration if their snow is getting plowed on time and their requests are being met without fuss. U.S. psychologist and scholar of complaint Robin Kowalski describes this as a near-universal shift in Western governance. “When we are dissatisfied with a product, service, or person today, we are much more likely to gripe about it than people were thirty or forty years ago because we expect that something will be done to satisfy us,” she wrote in a 2003 book. “Our federal and state governments have issued regulations that tell us we deserve to have our grievances satisfied.”

There’s a fine, sometimes imperceptible line between a civic-minded approach to public complaints and something more akin to community policing.

In York South-Weston, a lower-income neighbourhood in Toronto’s northwest, most people are not in the habit of airing their grievances with the City. Complaints, local advocates say, aren’t made casually. Last year, 311 complaints about property standards more than doubled requests in any other category.

“Low income people, usually when they call, it’s at a crisis,” says Alan Martucci, the tenant clinic coordinator at the York South-Weston Tenant Union. Most of the tenants who come to him for help with poor living conditions don’t even realize they can call 311. Often, they’ve tried in vain to reach out to the Landlord and Tenant Board, which is plagued by long wait times. They don’t know that there’s a municipal service meant to investigate complaints of poor living conditions—unsafe homes, mold, pests, inadequate heat, and more.

They also, Martucci says, worry about the repercussions of being seen as making a fuss. “A lot of people, they don’t want to bother the landlord because they’re in fear of some kind of reprisal…They don’t want to jeopardize their housing,” he says. So they’ll only call the City when they have tried everything else, including attempting to fix the problem themselves—hence, the lack of non-essential requests.

Over the years, the City has tried to bridge the functional barriers that prevent lower-income communities from using 311. The City now offers phone services in more than 180 languages, and it has tried to push awareness of the services available. But deeper-rooted obstacles, like a hesitance to complain about one’s circumstances, or a skepticism that doing so will yield any changes, are harder to overcome and impossible to fix from the outside alone.

Giovanna Scarpa has lived in east Scarborough for going on 20 years, and has been part of the East Scarborough Tenant’s Union since its inception during the pandemic. “It’s like our last, last resort,” she says of 311. “We don’t believe that the City is going to do anything.”

Property standards were among the top requests across all six Scarborough wards last year. But when bylaw enforcement officers show up, Scarpa says, they often refer tenants back to their landlords or property managers one more time before issuing any fines. Sometimes, she says, they half-address a problem—solving the symptom of a problem but not the root cause—and then never follow up. “It feels like it’s always us that have to do the work,” she says.

Scarpa has lived with pest issues for nearly two years, as have many other residents in her apartment building. When I ask her whether she’d ever consider calling 311 for something like an overgrown lawn, her incredulity betrays a tired anger.

“We’d laugh about that—like, really, people call [about lawns]? ” she says. “Here, we have people whose mental health and physical health are deteriorating because of the conditions they live in.”

Ultimately, Scarpa suspects, it’s a matter of scale. It’s easier for the City to mow one person’s lawn than it is to enforce a whole building’s worth of property complaints. 311 is a system built for individual problems, not systemic ones. And in communities like Scarpa’s—places where people are more likely to be renters, newcomers, somehow disenfranchised, or maybe just passing through—making a non-essential request of the City about a petty grievance like a front lawn is simply unimaginable. In order to experience and exert territoriality, you have to first feel like you belong somewhere, and feel that place belongs to you in turn.

What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (5)

What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (6)

What 311 Complaints Say About Your Neighbourhood | The Local (7)

Across town, four years after the 311 complaint that brought by-law officers to her door, Nina-Marie Lister’s garden is still intact. It’s easy to call 311 about a garden you think is overgrown, but it’s harder to enforce that complaint when the garden belongs to an urban planner and ecologist. Lister fought the accusation she’d violated city bylaws—citing a 1996 Ontario Superior Court ruling that a pollinator garden is protected under freedom of expression—and won. In the last three years, she’s turned the experience into a national initiative through TMU’s Ecological Design Lab to work with municipal governments to create more biodiversity-friendly bylaws for private gardens.

All the while, the garden is verdant, and the ire from neighbours undiminished. When I visited on a sunny afternoon in September—New England asters and Canada redbud swaying in the yellowing sunlight—someone had dumped a pile of discarded asphalt at the western edge of the garden. “This is the kind of thing that happens all the time,” Lister explained, hauling it to the curb in handfuls.

“On the surface, it’s just silly,” says Lister. “It’s a squabble over aesthetics…These are mostly retired people, mostly white, with time on their hands, and frankly in my view, a sense of nostalgia and order that comes from a very different ethos of gardening.”

This fall, looking to downsize with three of their kids having moved out, Lister and her husband put the three-story brick house on the market. Whoever moves in will have to make the choice to either leave the garden as-is or, Lister laments, tear it out to match the other pristine lawns on the street. The neighbours will surely have something to say either way. This beautiful neighbourhood, with its quiet roads curving past $4-million Swiss cottages, is the kind of place where residents spring to action and call the City in the event of a fallen tree branch or a broken stop sign. It’s a neighbourhood where people feel a genuine sense of ownership, for better and worse. When the new owners of the sprawling corner lot face any problems of their own, they’ll know who to call.

Corrections—October 24, 2024: A previous version of this article misidentified Giovanna Scarpa as living in a condo tower; she in fact lives in an apartment building. Separately, the article has been amended to reflect that the City’s prohibited weeds list only came into effect in 2022, after Lister had challenged the City bylaw enforcement.

About the author, Inori Roy

Inori Roy is a Toronto-based journalist and Associate Editor at The Local. Her work has also appeared in the Toronto Star, environmental journalism publicationsThe NarwhalandUnearthed, and theCBC. You can reach her by email at inori@thelocal.to or on Twitter@royinori.

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