data . willkara
dataset · Chicago Data Portal via Socrata

Chicago 311 service requests

Live snapshot of the City of Chicago's 311 service requests, queried directly against data.cityofchicago.org through our Cloudflare worker proxy. Roughly 13.8 million rows from the consolidated 2018-onward register.

data through 2026-06-13 · 14,034,275 rows

About this dataset

The City of Chicago's 311 service requests, hosted on the Chicago Data Portal as Socrata dataset v6vf-nfxy. In 2018 the city consolidated its CSR 1.0 and CSR 2.0 intake systems into a single register; this dataset starts there. Each row is one resident-filed service request — potholes, graffiti, alley lights, rodent baiting, abandoned vehicles, water leaks — with timestamps, owner department, community area, ward, and (for most rows) a geocoded coordinate.

Source

  • Catalog page: Chicago Data Portal
  • Endpoint (SODA v3): POST https://data.cityofchicago.org/api/v3/views/v6vf-nfxy/query.json
  • Rows: 14,034,275 (grows daily)

How we query it

All requests go through our Cloudflare Worker proxy at /api/socrata/[domain]/[dataset]. The proxy hashes the SoQL into a KV cache key and serves repeats from KV (TTL: 24h for metadata, 1h for aggregates, 5min for raw rows). On a fresh deploy or a cache miss the proxy POSTs the SoQL body to the SODA v3 endpoint. Chicago Open Data is public — no authentication required — but the same secret-injection path NYC uses is available if Chicago tightens its rate limits.

Caveats

  • 311 measures reporting behavior, not infrastructure decay. Volume reflects who is calling 311 as much as what is actually broken — community areas with low call rates can look "well-served" purely because residents are less likely to file. Treat low volumes as a participation signal first, a condition signal second.
  • Aircraft Noise Complaint is the second-most-common request type since 2024 — over 800K records driven by O'Hare flight-path organizing. A handful of caller addresses generate a disproportionate share. Useful as a measure of organized civic pressure; misleading as a measure of ambient noise exposure.
  • community_area = 0 is the placeholder for rows the city couldn't geocode. Filter it out of any spatial aggregate.
  • Use community area, not ward, for longitudinal joins. Chicago's 50 wards were last redrawn in 2023; older filings carry their boundary at intake-time. Community areas (1–77) are the city's stable socio-demographic geography and the recommended join key for any multi-year analysis.
  • closed_date is sometimes blank for rows the city marks as Completed administratively without timestamping the resolution. Filter closed_date IS NOT NULL for lag analyses.

Citation

City of Chicago (2026). 311 Service Requests. Retrieved 2026-06-13 via Chicago Data Portal SODA v3.