Unequal Responsiveness in City Service Delivery: Evidence from 42 Million 311 Calls Available to Purchase

We assess unequal responsiveness to citizen demands for municipal goods and services using a dataset of about 42 million 311 requests from 13 large cities between 2011 and 2019. We report three findings. First, we find no evidence that cities respond to requests from whiter and more affluent neighborhoods faster than they do the same type of request from less white and affluent neighborhoods, even after accounting for proxies of neighborhood need. On average, however, white, rich neighborhoods receive faster responses to their calls than non-white, poor neighborhoods. Additional analyses suggest that these disparities may not reflect deliberate bias on the part of cities in favor of the needs of whites and the rich, but rather that non-white and poor neighborhoods tend to ask for services that require more time and resources for the city to respond to. Our paper provides the most comprehensive and contemporary analysis to date of inequalities in U.S. city service delivery.