Boston building & housing maintenance 311 requests
How many 311 requests in the building & housing maintenance category residents of Boston have filed since January 2021.
Current release
Data through April 11, 2026
Data from January 2021 through April 11, 2026
Total Requests
71.2K
in the building & housing maintenance category
Latest Month
491
April 2026
Share of total
4.9%
of all Boston 311 requests
Median Resolution
8.6h
half of requests close faster
Monthly building & housing maintenance requests
How many building & housing maintenance 311 requests Boston residents file each month.
How this category is extracted
What counts as building & housing maintenance: Complaints about the physical condition of buildings and housing — blight, code violations, failing plumbing and heat, unsanitary conditions, and property maintenance concerns on both residential and commercial properties.
In Boston’s raw 311 feed, the following 5 service_type values roll into building & housing maintenance:
- Contractors Complaint
- Heat - Excessive Insufficient
- Poor Conditions of Property
- Unsatisfactory Living Conditions
- Work w/out Permit
To reproduce these counts against the raw feed
SELECT count(*)
FROM <boston_311_raw>
WHERE service_type IN (
'Contractors Complaint',
'Heat - Excessive Insufficient',
'Poor Conditions of Property',
'Unsatisfactory Living Conditions',
'Work w/out Permit'
)Analyst tip: This is where NYC's HPD-style housing complaints live: 'HEAT/HOT WATER', 'PLUMBING', 'PAINT/PLASTER', 'DOOR/WINDOW', 'UNSANITARY CONDITION'. Chicago uses the single catch-all 'Building Violation'. Baton Rouge uses 'BLIGHTED PROPERTIES' and 'BUILDING CODE/ZONING VIOLATIONS'. Expect this category to be large in cities with aggressive code enforcement.
See how building & housing maintenance is defined for every tracked city →
Source & provenance
Counts on this page are derived from Boston’s official open 311 data feed, covering January 2021 through April 11, 2026. Category assignment uses a hand-curated mapping from the city’s raw service types to a normalized cross-city category. View the underlying dataset at data.boston.gov.