Code enforcement & blight, neighborhood by neighborhood

How these measures work

Columbus has no separate code-enforcement feed — the city routes code enforcement through its 311 system, so this map counts the 311 service requests whose type is code enforcement: weeds and high grass, trash and debris, illegal dumping, vacant and distressed structures, exterior maintenance, rental-inspection complaints, work without a permit, and habitability issues (no heat or water). It uses exactly the same definition as the property-watch alerts elsewhere on the site.

Cases per 1,000 parcels is the default because a raw count just re-draws a map of neighborhood size — the normalized rate is what lets a small neighborhood’s pressure show. The drawer breaks each neighborhood’s cases into categories. Share of all 311 asks a different question: of everything a neighborhood reports to the city, how much is blight? An area can log few cases in absolute terms yet have code enforcement dominate its civic activity.

These are complaints and cases routed through 311, not adjudicated violations. Source: Columbus 311 service requests (city open data), refreshed nightly; trailing 90-day window. Neighborhood boundaries are the city’s area commissions, grown to cover the whole city — see methodology for boundary and suppression details. Neighborhoods with too few cases show as “insufficient data” rather than a noisy number.