Every 311 call is a small act of civic participation — a resident saying this needs attention. In 2017, Koreatown residents made that request 28,350 times. This is what they were asking about, where, and what happened next.
Two issues account for 80% of all requests: bulky item pickup and graffiti removal. This is not a Koreatown-specific pattern — these are the dominant 311 categories citywide — but the volume here is striking. One in four residents in this neighborhood submitted at least one request in a single year.
The Homeless Encampment category (1,288 requests) represents a persistent, unresolved pressure that 311 alone cannot address — it reflects a need that a cleanup request cannot fulfill. The high volume of illegal dumping (1,544) alongside bulky item pickup suggests residents may be using both channels when furniture and appliances are abandoned on the street.
Requests are distributed fairly evenly through the year, but August is consistently the highest month (3,002 requests) and December the lowest (1,994). Summer heat correlates with higher outdoor activity and, likely, more visible street conditions. The spring dip in April may reflect seasonal patterns in city staffing and community attention.
The mobile app was the most common submission channel (39.8%), followed by phone calls (27.6%) and Driver Self Report (18.5%) — a channel where city drivers report issues they observe while on route. Self-service online accounted for 13.3%. The mobile-first pattern reflects the neighborhood's demographics and the app's accessibility across language settings.
Nearly 40% of requests came through a mobile app in 2017 — before smartphone adoption peaked in this demographic. That number is almost certainly higher today.
ZIP code 90004 accounts for nearly half of all requests (44.5%), followed by 90020 (21.8%) and 90005 (18.3%). The top streets by raw volume tell a clearer geographic story: Western Ave and Normandie Ave are the two highest-volume corridors, reflecting their density, commercial activity, and role as through-routes where dumping and graffiti accumulate fastest.
The concentration of requests along north-south residential streets (Kenmore, Mariposa, Oxford, Berendo, Ardmore) alongside the major commercial corridors suggests two distinct patterns: commercial-corridor graffiti and dumping, and residential-street bulky item abandonment.
97.1% of requests were closed — a high resolution rate. The median time to close was 2 days; the average was 7.9 days, reflecting a long tail of harder cases. Only 2.9% were cancelled, and fewer than 10 requests remained open or pending at the time of data export in August 2024.
The resolution rate is encouraging as a baseline. It does not mean every underlying issue was resolved — Homeless Encampment requests, for example, are "closed" when the immediate site is cleared, not when the broader situation is addressed. But it shows the city was responsive to logged requests in this neighborhood during this period.
97% resolution with a 2-day median suggests the 311 system was functioning. The question is whether the right things were being called about — and whether the hardest problems can be solved through a service request at all.
This dataset is a single year (2017) and a single channel (311). It captures what residents chose to report, not the full picture of neighborhood conditions. Still, it reveals a community that was actively engaged with civic tools, filing at high rates, primarily through mobile, and receiving responses.
The concentration of requests around waste removal (bulky items, illegal dumping, appliances, e-waste) points to a gap between the density of the neighborhood and the infrastructure serving it — not enough scheduled pickup frequency for the volume of waste being generated. The graffiti volume points to a different gap: the tempo of removal versus recurrence.
For Ktown Team, this dataset is a baseline. As newer 311 data becomes available, trends over time will reveal whether conditions improved, whether specific corridors got better or worse, and whether community advocacy and city engagement made a measurable difference.
Source: MyLA311 Service Request Data, export dated 2024-08-25. Dataset covers requests created in 2017. All 28,350 rows fall within the Wilshire Center–Koreatown Neighborhood Council boundary. Analysis by Ktown Team Data, March 2026. Raw data and analysis scripts available at github.com/ktown-team.