A 500-square-foot apartment rents for $3,400 here. Leggings are $100. Seafood curry is $43. And parking in this high-end slice of the Seaport? Well, that’s oftentimes worth a complaint to 311.
During 2025, a stretch of Congress Street was the most complained about address in Boston, and just about every call was about parking, according to a Boston Globe analysis of available city data.
The parking strategy of Isabella Bachman, a 28 year-old who was at a nearby dog park with her Australian shepherd, hinted at why.
She estimates that it would cost her at least $400 a month for a parking spot. But, if she simply parks on specific streets in the neighborhood she knows to have relatively scant parking enforcement and eats the tickets she does get, she pays on average about $120 a month.
“I take a gamble,” she said.
Last year, 373 complaints were made to the city’s 311 system for 391-397 Congress St., making it the most complained about address in Boston for that time frame. Ninety nine percent of the gripes were related to parking.
Paige Maling, a 26-year-old who works in medical sales who was also at the dog park with her golden retriever that day, said she lives in a building that features $600 a month parking. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee her a spot, Maling said, as the parking garage is a mix of private and public parking. Sometimes there are no spots available. She’s not surprised that part of the Seaport is home to the most complaints in the city, and the vast majority of them deal with where people put their cars.
“Very frustrating,” she said of the parking situation in the Seaport.
For Khaled Eltokhy, an economist and PhD candidate at City University of New York whose research focuses on city governance, such grousing matters. When people know what their neighbors are complaining about, it deepens their understanding of their community, he said.
Eltokhy has collected 311 data from major American cities, organizing it into a website that displays neighborhood level statistics, including response times and complaint types. Put simply, the 311 data paints a portrait of a city’s day-to-day grind, including the difference in how quickly the city responds to problems neighborhood by neighborhood.
In Boston, according to Eltokhy, the fastest median response time to a 311 complaint came in the South End, at 2.2 hours. The complaints can run the gamut, from unshoveled sidewalks, to uncovered garbage cans, to potholes, to rodent activity, to, yes, drivers parking where they shouldn’t.
A spokesperson for Mayor Michelle Wu said the city is in the midst of upgrading and modernizing the 311 system, which means that the data set on Eltokhy’s website “doesn’t account for the full number of cases due to transitioning to the new platform beginning spring 2025.”
“Making Boston the best city for families means getting the basics right and delivering excellent city services every day,” said the spokesperson.
Median response times for Beacon Hill, downtown and the Financial District, and Back Bay all came in under 4 hours, according to Eltokhy’s analysis.
The slowest median response time was in Hyde Park, with 15.7 hours, followed by West Roxbury at 15 hours.
The Wu spokesperson said City Hall holds “departments accountable to specific standards for response time for each type of constituent service request based on the complexity of resolving an issue.” For instance, 80 percent of pothole cases should be closed within 24 hours. The expectation is the same for missed trash pick-ups.
Compared to other major American cities, Boston fares decently in how long it takes on average to respond to a complaint, ahead of Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, but behind New York and Baltimore, according to Eltokhy. (Each city has its own criteria for 311 complaints.)
Parking complaints drive many of the grievances, but not all. An intersection near the area known as Mass. and Cass, the center of the city’s opioid crisis, had 201 complaints last year, with many of them involving requests for the disposal of syringes.
At 4-6 Greendale Road, a residence less than a five minute walk off Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, there were 156 complaints, most of them for poor conditions of the property.
Another address, 62 Kirkwood St. in Brighton, which historically has had a reputation as a party house for Boston College undergraduates known as Club Kirk, had 152 complaints, the data show. A review of that list shows neighborhood annoyances such as poor conditions of the property were the reason for the bulk of the 311 complaints, not partying. BC does not own the property. No one answered the door at that address one recent morning.
The second most complained about address in the city is 1138 Washington St., a Dunkin’ in the South End. Last year, 360 complaints were made. Almost all of them dealt with parking.
Stephanie Barbosa, a 45-year-old teacher, has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years and goes to the cafe every day. The staff know her food order: a toasted English muffin. She usually drives and described her parking calculus.
She will double-park in the bus lane or live-park at a meter without paying if she thinks she can get away with it. It’s often a call made purely on gut instinct, she explained. It helps if someone can stay in the car to move it if need be while she ducks into the Dunkin’.
There are some spots available on the other side of the street, but it’s residential parking only.
“If you don’t have a sticker, you’re getting a ticket,” she said.
On a recent day, small vignettes of city life unfolded as she exited the Dunkin’. Two large moving vans were parked nearby. With their ramps down, they took up six meter spots. A guy in a RAV4 parked in a spot directly in front of the Dunkin’. He threw on his flashers and didn’t pay for the meter.
Behind him, a work truck with a ladder on its roof double-parked. That vehicle was soon joined by a white pick-up truck, which pulled up behind the truck and also double parked.
Less than a block away, a driver idled in a Boston Transportation Department vehicle. Waiting.
“They’re ready to pounce,” said Roxanda Lockett, 42. She was there for her daily order: a butter pecan coffee. Iced, no matter the weather.
About a half-mile away in the same neighborhood is another block that is among the top frequent fliers for the 311 system. On Chandler Street in between Berkeley and Clarendon streets, parking also drives the complaints. For one address here, 311 received 257 complaints. Next door, there were 173 complaints.
In both instances, the vast majority of grievances dealt with parking. Here is a stately block of brownstones fit for a postcard. One condo is on the market for $1.3 million. It’s listed as a studio.
Diane Sutty, 67, lives across the street. She has called the neighborhood home for more than 30 years. She hasn’t had a car in decades, she said. She enjoys city living. She’s retired now but used to walk to her office where she worked in payroll.
“It’s not worth the hassle,” she said of owning a car.
She does occasionally rent a car. She recalled being dinged twice for briefly double-parking on the street. It’s maddening, she said. One time, she simply had to run up to her home to pick up a suitcase and bring it down to the car. She returned to a ticket waiting for her.
“Somebody is up there with binoculars, on the hotline,” she said, gesturing to the upper floors of the homes across the street. That morning, Sutty was walking around the corner, on her way to breakfast: pancakes at Thornton’s.
As if on cue, a white Transportation Department car pulled up across the street. A woman got out, took a photo of the license plate of a Honda HR-V, and slipped a ticket under one of its windshield wipers.
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald. Neena Hagen can be reached at neena.hagen@globe.com.