What Vancouver Complains About: 1.3 Million 3-1-1 Calls, Mapped by Neighbourhood

If you live in Kerrisdale and water your lawn on the wrong day, there's a decent chance a neighbour reports you. Water-conservation complaints make up 3.1 times as big a share of Kerrisdale's 3-1-1 requests as they do across Vancouver.

That's one thing I found going through every request the City of Vancouver's 3-1-1 line has logged since January 2022: 1,307,184 of them, through October 11, 2026. The City publishes them as open data, tagged by type and by neighbourhood. Each neighbourhood turns out to have a personality. The West End complains about noise. Mount Pleasant has rats. Kitsilano wants its neighbours to trim their hedges. Oakridge is sick of jackhammers.

Below: an interactive map of what each part of Vancouver reports more than anywhere else, when the city's noise complaints spike, the moving-day mattress problem, a short quiz, and what any of this is worth if you're shopping for a home.

The map: each neighbourhood's signature complaint

How this works: for every neighbourhood I took the share of its 3-1-1 requests that fall into each request type, and compared it with that type's share across the whole city. A type that's 2× means it takes up twice as much of that neighbourhood's complaints as it does city-wide. It's about what a neighbourhood complains about relative to everything else it complains about, so big and small neighbourhoods compare fairly. The "signature" is the type with the biggest ratio (with at least 150 requests, so a handful of reports can't win).

Source: City of Vancouver Open Data, 3-1-1 service requests, Jan 1, 2022 to Oct 11, 2026. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver. Analysis by EstateBlock. Nicknames are ours and meant as a joke. Neighbourhood links go to the closest EstateBlock neighbourhood page; the boundaries don't match the City's local areas exactly.

Four neighbourhoods share the same signature: Kerrisdale, Shaughnessy, Arbutus Ridge and Dunbar-Southlands all report water-conservation violations more than anything else. That's the West Side lawn watch. Under Metro Vancouver's current Stage 1 rules, in force every year from May 1 to October 15, lawns can be watered one morning a week, and in big-lot neighbourhoods with big lawns somebody is clearly keeping track.

Downtown's signature is overflowing street litter cans (4.0×), with short-term rental complaints right behind at 3.5×. Fairview's is bridges and structures: 266 requests, 5.1× the city share, the most lopsided ratio on the list. Kitsilano's is hedges and trees spilling onto city property (1,080 requests). Kensington-Cedar Cottage is the most average neighbourhood in Vancouver: its most over-represented complaint, missed green bin pickups, is only 1.4× the city share.

Noise: the 11 pm Saturday problem

The City logged 24,000 noise-on-private-property requests over the period. The heat map shows when they came in. The pattern is exactly what you'd guess, which is what makes it funny: quiet all week, then Friday night warms up, and Saturday night lights up from about 9 pm until 1 am.

Saturday logged 4,688 noise requests over the period and Sunday 4,062, with a spike in the hours just after midnight. Thursday was the quietest, at 2,857. By hour, 4,181 requests were opened between 10 pm and midnight, more than any other two-hour stretch.

Summer is noise season. July had 3,201 requests over the period, against 1,049 in December, partly because 2026 hasn't had a November or December yet but mostly because windows are open and patios are full.

Relative to everything else it reports, the West End is Vancouver's noise capital by a distance: 2,856 noise requests, 2.6× the city-wide share. (Downtown logged more in raw numbers, 4,209, but it logs more of everything.) My read: it's wall-to-wall apartment buildings, so more people live on the other side of every wall. At the quiet end, noise is a much smaller share of requests in Kerrisdale, West Point Grey and Dunbar-Southlands.

Moving day, measured in mattresses

Here's my favourite chart in the whole set. Reports of abandoned mattresses, averaged per calendar day, by day of the month:

The first three days of the month average 9.4 mattress reports a day. From the 10th to the 25th it's 6.6. The peak is the 3rd. My read: that's moving day. A lot of moves happen at the turn of the month, and the old mattress doesn't always make the trip. (Reports also drop on weekends: 2,315 on Saturdays and Sundays combined, against 2,211 on Tuesdays alone. Maybe people only notice the mattress on the walk to work.)

Mattress reports are most over-represented in Strathcona, West End and Grandview-Woodland. My read: these are dense, renter-heavy parts of town. Yearly totals went from 2,472 in 2022 to 2,887 in 2025.

The Sprinkler Patrol

Water-conservation complaints are almost entirely a May-to-September thing: 28 in all the Aprils combined, then 704 in the Mays as the watering rules kick in May 1, peaking in August at 1,638. 2023 had 1,941 of them, about three times 2024's 649. That was the summer the City moved to Stage 2 restrictions on August 4, which banned lawn watering entirely. Apparently everyone noticed. And 2026 has already beaten it: 2,329 so far, mostly from May to July.

Rats, and the rest of the list

Rats and rodents got their own request type in the City's 3-1-1 system in 2022 (the system was upgraded that August), so the early numbers are low. Since then: 265 requests in 2023, 421 in 2024 and 468 in 2025. Marpole has the highest rat share (2.2×, though only 125 requests), with Mount Pleasant right behind at 2.0× (188 requests) and Sunset at 1.7×. Rats are Mount Pleasant's signature on the map because Marpole's count falls under my 150-request cut-off.

Short-term rental complaints are a Downtown thing (1,507 requests, 3.5×) and a West End thing (2.0×). Graffiti reports are most over-represented in Strathcona, Downtown and Fairview. Construction noise belongs to Oakridge (2.7×). Use the buttons on the map to see each one.

Is any of this useful if you're buying?

For the numbers that do move prices, see my Greater Vancouver market update and the Vancouver condo market breakdown. To look around a specific neighbourhood, start with West End listings, Kitsilano or Kerrisdale on the EstateBlock map, or get an instant evaluation of your own place.

How I did this

The City of Vancouver publishes every 3-1-1 service request as open data: the request type, when it was opened, and the local area (one of the City's 22 official neighbourhoods). I pulled counts for all 1,307,184 requests opened from January 1, 2022 to October 11, 2026, grouped by type and local area, through the City's open data API, with times in Pacific time. 281,515 requests (22%) have no local area, so the neighbourhood comparisons use the other 1,025,669.

For the "signature complaint" I only considered everyday, mostly light-hearted request types: noise, water, garbage, streets, critters, graffiti and the like. I left out administrative types (licences, tax and billing questions, feedback to council) and anything tied to people in crisis or public health, such as needle and feces clean-up or emergency referrals. Those aren't a joke, and they say more about where services are located than about the neighbours. All six graffiti request types are combined into one. The City notes that its case system was upgraded on August 17, 2022, so some request types start partway through 2022.