The Second City logs an average of 1.5 million 311 complaints per year, more than one complaint for every two Chicagoans. Property Sentinel is the only place that tracks complaints by address and sends alerts for what's important. Though building complaints are our primary focus, we also track business and consumer complaints—restaurant inspections, wage violations, tobacco sales, and more. We'll cover those in a future post.
In January 1999, Chicago debuted a centralized 3-1-1 municipal service system to route non-emergency calls away from 9-1-1. Every year since, the city has recorded and responded to over a million complaints a year for everything from building violations to rodent baiting. In December 2018, the city fully modernized the 311 platform by releasing a web and mobile app alongside a free-to-access and comprehensive database. That database is the city's buried treasure—a geocoded catalogue of seven years and counting of citizen interactions with city services. City Logical was founded to make sense of that data; Property Sentinel concerns itself specifically with building-related complaints.
Complaint Types
Each complaint is tagged with a short code that denotes the approximate reason for the complaint: e.g. NAC for No Air Conditioning, CIAC for Coyote Interaction, HFF for Smokeless Tobacco at Sports. There are over 100 codes in total. Information Only Calls (50%) and Aircraft Noise (25%) are the most popular complaints by far and stand apart—no follow-up is required, no enforcement is expected, and no resolution is delivered. The real 311 complaints, about 400,000 per year, generate and demand an appropriate and prompt city response.
Top 10 Complaints from the Last 12 Months (LTM)
| Code | Type | Total | Open | Per mo. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 311IOC | 311 Info Only Call | 711,586 | 0 | 59,299 |
| AVN | Aircraft Noise | 379,643 | 0 | 31,637 |
| GRAF | Graffiti Removal | 95,118 | 4,722 | 7,927 |
| SKA | Abandoned Vehicle | 53,158 | 7,083 | 4,430 |
| PHF | Pothole in Street | 50,726 | 7,789 | 4,227 |
| SIE | Garbage Cart Maintenance | 50,563 | 4,379 | 4,214 |
| SEF | Tree Trim (discontinued) | 45,409 | 6 | 3,784 |
| SGA | Rodent Baiting/Rat | 44,425 | 2,318 | 3,702 |
| SFD | Street Light Out | 35,679 | 4,221 | 2,973 |
| SEL | Tree Debris Clean-Up | 29,086 | 1,637 | 2,424 |
Building Complaints
Depending on how you slice it, there is a building complaint reported to Chicago 311 every four and a half minutes. Though some are more serious than others, all require a response from the relevant department: Department of Buildings (DoB) conducts a follow-up inspection for every no permit and plumbing complaint, Department of Water Management (DoWM) investigates basement flooding, and ward-level inspectors check out sanitation code violations. Depending on the circumstances, the inspection may result in a follow-up visit, which may itself require an additional inspection before the complaint is finally closed. As you might imagine, city inspectors are spread thin.
Serious Building Complaints and Response Times LTM
| Code | Type | Closed | Median | Lower Quartile | Upper Quartile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BBC | Plumbing Violation | 6,911 | 45.9 days | 16.8 days | 66.6 days |
| BBD | No Permit / Construction | 2,145 | 35.8 days | 13.7 days | 72.8 days |
| BBA | Building Violation | 16,680 | 16.7 days | 3.7 days | 50.1 days |
| SHVR | Shared Housing/STR | 489 | 3.7 days | 1.5 days | 24.6 days |
| AAF | Water in Basement | 19,243 | 0.1 days | 0.0 days | 0.4 days |
Water in basement resolves in 2.4 hours. That's not because the city fixes anything, it's because the DoWM dispatches someone to check the sewer, confirms whether it's a city-side or a building-side issue, and closes the ticket. The resolution is a triage, not a repair.
Plumbing violations take 46 days to resolve, nearly three times longer than general building violations, because they require an initial inspection, a licensed plumber to make repairs, and a reinspection to verify. The DoB is the bottleneck on both the initial and reinspection. The upper quartile of 67 days means one in four landlords has an open violation on their record for two months.
Shared housing/vacation rental complaints are handled by Business Affairs & Consumer Protection (BACP) and have a long tail: if you complain about the bachelor party happening at the AirBnB upstairs, the city either warns the host if they're in compliance or conducts an investigation of all the hosts' properties if they're not.
Building complaints are only one piece of the 311 picture. Chicago logged nearly 10,000 business-related complaints in the last 12 months—restaurant complaints, consumer fraud, wage theft, sidewalk café violations—each handled by a different department with its own enforcement timeline. We'll break those down in a separate post.
Staying Compliant
Each building complaint has its own nuances and learning curve. The city only has "a few dozen" building inspectors which means they are reactive by necessity, working through the queue of complaints as they come in, often prioritizing certain buildings and geographies over others. If you're a building owner, finding out about a complaint on the same day it's recorded allows for a quick call to your own plumber—possibly the difference between a quick inspection vs thousands of dollars in fines, or a clean bill of health vs an RLTO violation.
Property Sentinel alerts you to building & business complaints within a half hour of filing. It will also guide you through the complaint-to-resolution window, providing an estimate of inspector response times weighted on recent inspections, weather, time-of-year, and ward-level data. And if you need a recommended tradesman for the job, we're building a network for that too.
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