New Neighbors

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that some new tenants had moved in the apartment above mine and I was of course fine with that… until they woke me up at 3 am. Loud music, dancing, jumping and all of that…

But hey, I live in NYC, the city that never sleeps. Or at least this is what I thought. (Okay, maybe not the first thing that I thought…)

But is this even true? Are really people in NYC used to parties? Or in other words:

• when do typically people start to complain about noise/music?
• which are the most noisy areas in NYC?

To find an answer to these questions, I have taken a look at the enormous database of calls to the 311. The database contains information about the service requests made in NYC since 2010 (roughly 16 millions). I needed a very limited amount of information for the following exploration, but if you want to explore more, you can find the my notebook here.

Is it too early to call 311?

I pulled from the database 10^5 calls that where categorized as “residential noise”. Interestingly enough, most of the time people complain for their neighbors having loud music and dancing (70%), and only sometimes for pounding/banging (25%). Take a look

But the most important thing for my good rest is the distribution of calls over time. When is it ok to call 311?

As expected most of the calls happen at night and (to my surprise) as early as 9 pm, with a peak around 11 pm. Just for comparison, my beloved neighbors where still making a mess at 4 am! I guess I won’t feel sorrow for shutting down the party the next time!

Where is the party?

As a fun side-question, one could ask which neighborhood receive most attention. In order to find out, I used a k-means clustering with 100 centers and listed the clusters with the highest number of calls. These are the top 3

If you live in NYC and you want to sneak into a party, I would suggest to try the lower east-side!