Selecting The Indicators

With incarceration mapped at the neighborhood level, the next step was to identify the community well-being indicators to test against those incarceration patterns. The Framework guided that search. Rather than starting with available datasets and working backward, the analysis started with the question the Framework asks: which neighborhood conditions, across which domains, most plausibly shape community well-being and public safety? The search for data followed from that question.

This analysis examined whether community conditions across NYC neighborhoods are associated with incarceration patterns — not whether any individual’s characteristics or experiences explain who enters custody. Of the four ecological levels in the Framework, this phase drew on two: daily settings (home, school, work) and neighborhood conditions (the institutions and infrastructure that shape daily life). Indicators capturing those settings were measured at the neighborhood level so they could be compared across the city.

Domains of Community Well-Being

Community well-being is broadly defined — it covers everything that makes daily life stable or unstable. To make it analytically tractable, the analysis focused on five domains that together capture the conditions most directly tied to whether neighborhoods support or strain the people who live in them: health, education, economic security, housing, and civic infrastructure.

Each domain reflects a different way neighborhoods shape everyday life. Health captures access to care and the cumulative toll of neighborhood conditions on physical well-being. Education captures the opportunities available to children and the strength of the institutions that serve them. Economic security captures material stability — whether families can meet basic needs and weather setbacks. Housing captures whether people can stay in stable, safe homes. Civic infrastructure captures the condition and responsiveness of the shared neighborhood environment, from sanitation to street safety.

From Domains to Indicators

Within each domain, indicators were tested for three qualities: conceptual clarity, meaningful association with incarceration, and minimal redundancy with other indicators. The indicators examined within each domain are listed below. The next section describes how the analysis narrowed them to the final indicator set.

Health: health insurance status and life expectancy at birth
Education: school enrollment and degree attainment.
Economic security: poverty rate, public assistance rate, unemployment rate, median personal earnings, and median household income.
Housing: eviction rate (residential instability), rent burden (housing affordability), and 311 housing and building complaints.
Civic infrastructure: 311 calls related to sanitation, cleanliness, and noise (quality of life in the shared public realm).

These indicators capture present-day conditions, but those conditions are themselves products of longer histories — patterns of investment and disinvestment, redlining, and unequal access to opportunity that have shaped neighborhoods over generations. The data make today’s conditions visible; the deeper forces that produced them are part of the context, even when not directly measured.

Three Data Sources

Three publicly available data sources supplied the community well-being indicators: the American Human Development Index, the American Community Survey, and NYC Open Data. New York City’s open data laws made this cross-domain approach more feasible than it would be in many jurisdictions — by requiring agencies to publish administrative data through a single citywide portal, the city has built a common infrastructure for accessing data across domains. External sources like the Census and published neighborhood indexes extend that foundation, making it possible to assemble a meaningful cross-sector dataset without building new data infrastructure.

The American Human Development Index (AHDI), produced by Measure of America, was especially useful because it is available at the NTA level and its dimensions can be examined separately. This phase tested all three of AHDI’s sub-indexes: the Health Index (life expectancy at birth), the Education Index (school enrollment and degree attainment), and the Income Index (median personal earnings).

The American Community Survey (ACS), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, provided neighborhood-level information on social, economic, and housing conditions. Because ACS data is available for small geographies and the Department of City Planning translates ACS estimates into NTAs, these data fit directly into the analysis.

NYC Open Data supplied the 311 service-request data — a citywide record of non-emergency complaints routed to city agencies, with complaint type, responding agency, and geographic location attached. The 2025 311 dataset contained more than three million service requests citywide. From these, the thirty most common complaint types — together accounting for over 80% of all calls — were retained and tested against the neighborhood incarceration rate. Only complaint types with a meaningful association were kept.¹ The surviving complaints were grouped into three thematic categories: Housing & Buildings, Sanitation & Cleanliness, and Noise. Housing & Buildings was assigned to the Housing domain alongside rent burden and eviction rate. Sanitation & Cleanliness and Noise were assigned to the Civic Infrastructure domain.

References

Endnotes

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