For reasons I won't get into here, 2016 was a pretty crappy year. Adding a little more muck to our misery, a new study by apartment search website RentHop found that the city of Chicago registered more complaints of neglected (that is, uncollected) dog poop last year than any other on record.
Using city data on sanitation code violations requests, RentHop also determined which neighborhoods had the most issues with dog waste. "The first thing we noticed were correlations between neighborhood and the number of complaints," the report states. "Neighborhoods further from downtown had a significantly higher number of complaints."
North of the Loop, Humboldt Park and Hermosa were the worst offenders with 19.19 and 21.86 poop complaints per 10,000 households. As for the total number of complaints, West Town (44), Logan Square (43), Lake View (40) and Humboldt (35) were among the leaders. On the South Side, the most complaints of uncollected dog waste came from West Englewood (26.5 per 10,000 households), West Pullman (22.24) and Washington Heights (20.55).
The neighborhoods with the fewest complaints per 10,000 homes were the Near North Side (0.63), the Loop (1.05), O'Hare (1.06), Hyde Park (1.15) and Kenwood (1.24).
There were some other interesting takeaways from the study, as well. Apparently, March is the busiest month for reported instances of poop malfeasance. The busiest day of the week? You guessed it: Monday. Chicago is also on track to have even more dog waste-related complaints in 2017 than it did during last year's record-setting clip.
And if you're wondering about your own neighborhood's crap index, check out this map that RentHop created using data it, uh, collected for its study.
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