What’s Breaking in Charlotte? A Data Dive Into 311 Reports

Mitch Wolverton

Charlotte residents filed more than 360,000 requests with the city’s 311 line in 2025, everything from missed trash pickup to potholes to code violations. Most of that volume is routine: about 83% of all requests are scheduled garbage and recycling collection issues, the ordinary churn of a growing city.

Strip that out, and two distinct stories show up in the data. One is physical: roads, sidewalks, signals, and streetlights that are actually broken. The other is about neglect: overgrown yards, junk accumulation, boarded-up structures, and zoning violations that residents are reporting on their neighbors and, in some cases, on the same property over and over again. Together, these two categories account for nearly 30,000 reports, roughly 8% of everything Charlotte 311’d about in 2025, and they paint a much more specific picture than the raw complaint volume alone.

We pulled the full 2025 dataset from the City of Charlotte’s Open Data Portal to dig into both.

The headline numbers

  • 360,125 total 311 requests filed in Charlotte in 2025
  • 8,005 were physical infrastructure problems: potholes, sidewalks, signals, streetlights, signs, flooding, graffiti
  • 21,961 were neglect and blight complaints: overgrown yards and junk accumulation, zoning violations, housing code issues, boarded-up structures, illegal parking
  • 2,874 pothole repair requests to the city alone (another 168 potholes were on state roads and routed to NCDOT)
  • Providence Road drew more pothole reports than any other street in Charlotte (81), followed by Tryon Street (66)
  • One property, on Youngblood Road, generated 57 separate zoning complaints in a single year, more than any other address in the dataset
  • Zip code 28205 (Plaza Midwood, NoDa, Elizabeth) led for infrastructure complaints; zip code 28208 (west Charlotte, including Enderly Park and Camp Greene) led for neglect and blight

What’s physically breaking

Potholes dominate the infrastructure category by a wide margin, more than twice the volume of the next-largest type. Street signs and sidewalks round out the top three, followed by traffic signals, flooding, streetlights, and graffiti.


At the street level, Providence Road and Tryon Street stand out as the two most-reported corridors for potholes specifically, both high-traffic arteries that see heavy daily use.

Infrastructure complaints also follow a clear seasonal pattern, climbing through late winter and peaking in March as freeze-thaw cycles do their damage to road surfaces.

It’s not just roads: neglect and blight

The infrastructure numbers only tell half the story. The single largest non-routine complaint category in the entire 2025 dataset isn’t potholes, it’s neighbors reporting overgrown yards, junk accumulation, and general property neglect: 15,322 reports, more than five times the volume of pothole complaints. Add in zoning violations, housing code complaints, boarded-up structures, and illegal or on-lawn parking, and the total climbs to nearly 22,000 reports for the year.

Unlike infrastructure complaints, which peak in March, neglect and blight reports build steadily through spring and peak in mid-summer, which tracks with growing-season yard neglect becoming visible and irritating to neighbors.

Geographically, the pattern shifts too. West Charlotte (28208) generated the most neglect and blight complaints of any zip code, followed by Plaza Midwood/NoDa/Elizabeth (28205) and University City (28269), a different ranking than the infrastructure list, where 28205 topped the chart.

One property stood out above every other address in the dataset, for either category. A parcel on Youngblood Road in southwest Charlotte generated 57 separate zoning complaints over the course of 2025, all filed against the same address. No other property in the city, for any request type we tracked, came close to that number. (This particular record didn’t include zip code or coordinate data in the public export, so it isn’t reflected in the maps below, but the raw repeat-complaint count is unambiguous.)

Repeat offenders

Beyond Youngblood Road, several other addresses generated double-digit repeat complaints over the year, both for infrastructure and for neglect and blight. A property on Milton Road drew 20 separate neglect-related complaints; a commercial suite on Brookshire Boulevard drew 18 infrastructure-related reports.

Patterns like these are easy to miss complaint by complaint, but they stand out once a full year is mapped at once. A location with double-digit repeat reports for the same category of problem usually points to something more persistent than an isolated incident, chronic drainage issues, an unresponsive property owner, or a location the city’s own follow-up process hasn’t been able to resolve.

For context: raw volume vs. real problems

It’s worth separating genuine complaint volume from routine city business. University City and NorthLake (28269) generates more total 311 traffic than any other zip code in Charlotte, but the overwhelming majority of that is scheduled trash and recycling collection, not a sign of anything going wrong. Once routine service requests are filtered out, the zip codes that actually lead in infrastructure and neglect complaints are different, and arguably more revealing.

Methodology

This analysis is based on the City of Charlotte’s public “Service Requests 311” dataset, available through the City of Charlotte Open Data Portal. We used the full calendar year 2025 (360,125 total requests).

Two custom categories were built for this analysis, neither is an official city classification:

  • Physical Infrastructure combines pothole repair (city and NCDOT-routed), sidewalk repair, traffic signal repair, streetlight repair, street sign repair, flooding, and graffiti.
  • Neglect & Blight combines the “Health and Sanitation” request type (predominantly overgrown yards and junk accumulation, per the request titles in the underlying data), zoning complaints, housing code complaints, boarded-up structures, and illegal or on-lawn parking.

The mapped visualizations (zip code maps, repeat-address maps) reflect only requests with valid location coordinates in the public dataset. Roughly 73% of pothole reports and a similar share of other categories included usable coordinates; the rest, including the Youngblood Road outlier, are reflected in the citywide and category totals but could not be placed on a map. The public dataset also does not include a resolution or closed-date field, so response times by neighborhood or district could not be calculated from this data.

This analysis was compiled by PivIT Strategy, a Charlotte-based managed IT and cybersecurity provider. Have a data story you’d like to see us dig into? Get in touch.

Mitch Wolverton

Mitch, Marketing Manager at PivIT Strategy, brings over many years of marketing and content creation experience to the company. He began his career as a content writer and strategist, honing his skills on some of the industry’s largest websites, before advancing to specialize in SEO and digital marketing at PivIT Strategy.