For Whom the Plows Come

When the snow started falling on the evening of February 22nd, it came down the way the forecasters said it would: fast, heavy, and indiscriminate. By sunrise, 22 inches had accumulated at LaGuardia. Schools were closed. Roads were impassable. And across all five boroughs, New Yorkers picked up the phone.

On February 23, 15,387 of them called 311, a roughly 50% spike over the winter daily average. The number alone tells you little. Storms cause surges; surges recede. But the shape of those calls (who made them, from where, and about what) tells you everything. The snow fell on everyone equally. What happened next did not.

Here is the first thing the data shows, and the most disorienting: Staten Island, population 496,000, the borough that consistently files the fewest 311 complaints on any given day, filed the most. Not by a hair. By a mile. Its 4,027 complaints on the 23rd outpaced Brooklyn (3,803), Queens (3,425), the Bronx (2,287) and Manhattan (1,834). Of those, 3,546 were for snow and ice, outnumbering the other four boroughs combined. Eight of the 10 hardest-hit zip codes were on the island. Meanwhile, Manhattan, population 1.7 million, logged 146 snow complaints.

One hundred forty-six.

Adjusted for population, Staten Island’s snow complaint rate was 715 per 100,000 residents. Manhattan’s was 9. That is an 83-to-1 ratio.

The 311 system is one of Michael Bloomberg’s most lasting legacies. Before he launched it in March of 2003, New Yorkers seeking city services were left to sort through over 40 agency-specific phone numbers: one for potholes, another for rats, a third for noise, most of which rang and rang or went to voicemail. Bloomberg, ever the systems thinker, saw this as an information problem. Consolidate the intake, route the requests, track performance. A McKinsey fix, neatly boxed into three digits. It worked. And then it became something else.

Because every 311 call is also an act of faith: a New Yorker picking up the phone and trusting that someone on the other end will do something. Over 23 years, tens of millions of those calls have piled up, and they tell you, in close to real time, where the city is failing. When 6,524 people called about snow and ice on a single day — nearly five times the previous winter’s worst — that was thousands of people saying: I cannot get out of my house.

Staten Island is the least urban borough by a lot, and it shows. One subway line (the Staten Island Railway, 14 miles, unconnected to the rest of the system). A bus network that leaves much of the South Shore immobile without a car. Most days, they make it work, as people all over America do. But when 22 inches of snow fall and only 41% of your street segments are designated for priority plowing — compared with nearly two-thirds of street segments in Brooklyn and Manhattan — that independence turns into isolation.

Staten Island has always felt a little like a stepchild. In 1993, 65% of its voters sought to leave New York City entirely. The vote was symbolic, but the frustration was real. Many of its residents have spent their lives feeling like Manhattan and Brooklyn politicians only remember them when it is time to collect a toll. 

When Nicole Malliotakis, the island’s congresswoman, rails against congestion pricing, she is channeling a community exhausted by paying for a city that rarely pays them any mind. Zip code 10314, Mid-Island, where strip malls meet single-family homes, filed 791 complaints on the 23rd. That is more than any Manhattan zip code filed all week. 

The 311 data tells a second story too. The Bronx, which ranked fourth in total complaints, led the city in one category that has nothing to do with snow: lack of heat and hot water. Of the 2,256 heating complaints filed that day, 766 came from the Bronx alone, outpacing every other borough, including Brooklyn, which has nearly twice its population. The most common descriptor was two words: “entire building.” Not one apartment, not one floor. The whole building. No heat in the freezing cold. 

So on the same day, in the same storm, Staten Island was calling about snow in the streets and the Bronx was calling about cold inside the walls. The first problem is a city that did not send enough plows. The second is landlords whose buildings lost heat. One is a failure by the government. The other is a failure by a landlord.

The Department of Sanitation fielded 43% of the day’s complaints. Housing Preservation and Development fielded 23%. Snow removal is the Department of Sanitation’s job; heat is a landlord’s obligation, enforced by HPD. The snow and the cold came from the same sky, but the failures had nothing to do with each other. Yet we talk about all of it as ‘storm response,’ as if the answer is always more salt and more shovels. The snow, at least, will melt. The landlord will still be there in April. 

Then there are the trees. On an average day, about 44 New Yorkers call to report a damaged tree; the previous winter’s worst day drew 306. On the 23rd, 1,496 people called. That number includes 572 reports of entire trees falling, and 724 of major limbs coming down. The Parks Department, which on most days concerns itself with mowing schedules and playground permits, was suddenly an emergency response agency. And while fallen trees might sound like a secondary concern next to frozen pipes and buried cars, they block streets, take out power lines, crush parked vehicles, and, on occasion, kill people. In the language of emergency management, this is called a cascading emergency: one problem that generates five others. The less glamorous companion stat: 88 complaints about “wood pile remaining,” a 60-fold spike over the winter average. The trees came down fast. Cleaning them up took considerably longer.

It snowed in Manhattan too, by the way, triggering 146 complaints. You might wonder how an entire borough gets through a blizzard with 146 complaints. After the January storm, DSNY issued over 4,500 sidewalk violation summonses across the city. Manhattan received 179. Queens got 1,529. The sidewalks in Manhattan were already clear, because Manhattan has doormen, building managers, commercial landlords and BIDs like the Downtown Alliance, whose 60-person sanitation team clears bus stops, crosswalks and sidewalks after every snowfall. It feels as if below 96th Street, the borough handles itself. That is how it works when you have money. You do not call 311. You do not need to. 

Staten Island has no equivalent of the Downtown Alliance, and its business improvement districts cover far less ground. Neither do the Rockaways, where zip code 11691 still cracked the top 10 in complaints. In neighborhoods like these, when the plow does not come, 311 is the only thing between you and waiting. During the January storm, CBS New York reported that DSNY had pulled crews off the island and reassigned them to Brooklyn while streets were still buried. Borough President Vito Fossella did not mince words: “Staten Island became second-class citizens a couple of days ago.”

When schools reopened, citywide attendance was 63%. On Staten Island, where accumulations reached 28 inches, elected officials put the figure at 16%. It took 4,000 calls and two buried days before the city sent reinforcements, and it was not the first time the borough had been left waiting. Weeks earlier, the Sanitation Department had reassigned its crews to Brooklyn mid-cleanup. According to its own priority maps, only 41% of Staten Island’s streets are designated for first-pass plowing, the lowest rate of any borough. The snow did not fall unevenly, but the plows did.