NYC Environment & Health
The intersection of physical infrastructure and public health. The lead-service-line inventory exposes a data void — a third of NYC's service lines have no recorded material — that's now driving state-level legislation. The DOHMH restaurant inspection data, parsed for pest type from free-text descriptions, becomes a borough-by-borough urban-biome map. Both stories started with datasets the agencies didn't design for surveillance and ended as surveillance tools.
Stories
The unknown pipes
NYC's lead service line inventory looks like a public health story. Scroll through the density maps and it starts to look like a construction program — 231,000 properties across five boroughs, all with a 2037 deadline. The 'Unknown' classification is where the mandate gets complicated.
Mice vs roaches
DOHMH doesn't track pest type as a column on its restaurant inspection data. But it's all there in the violation descriptions, parsed by the inspector. Mice, roaches, flies — the urban biome of NYC's kitchens, mapped per borough.
The sound of the city
NYC's noise complaints have grown every year since 2010 — population is roughly flat, awareness was already high, but the calls keep coming. Epidemiologists treat the 311 noise feed as a city-scale environmental surveillance layer. The growth is a public-health signal.
NYC's decade of pipe work
231,000 properties. One EPA deadline: 2037. Framing NYC's lead service line replacement program as a construction-industry challenge — which boroughs carry the heaviest load, and what annual pace the city needs to hit.
Datasets
NYC Restaurant Inspections
Every sustained violation issued to every food establishment by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. One row per violation per inspection. The grade card hung in your favorite spot's window comes from this dataset — and the famous 1900-01-01 placeholder dates.
NYC Lead Service Line Inventory
Per-property classification of which NYC buildings are still served by lead pipes. Published per the EPA's 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements. The headline isn't the lead count — it's the staggering "Unknown" classification, the public-health data void at the heart of the city's 2037 replacement deadline.