💬 Introducing BetterBlockGPT

🌟 Author’s Note

Good morning to the 125 members of the Better Block Project 👋 For a long time, I’ve wanted to test how we can leverage all of the enhancements in AI to build tools to make community advocacy easier. This week I built the first version of BetterBlockGPT, a chat interface to get access to all the public 311 data NYC has. Here is the TLDR:

• BetterBlockGPT is a ChatGPT-like tool to ask questions of 311 data in Brooklyn for the last 3 months

• We’re starting with 311 data, but hope to add other NYC Open Data and public New York data sources in over time, to make this a much simpler way to access data for community advocacy

• BetterBlockGPT was built using Replit and Claude Opus 4.6, both easily accessible tools for anyone looking to vibe code for other community advocacy projects

💬 Introducing BetterBlockGPT

A core part of successful community advocacy is gathering data to understand the problem. We’ve uncovered how NYC is owed $573M in Penalties from City Violations and how there have been over 61,124 complaints over the last 12 months regarding tree maintenance to NYC Parks. NYC publishes this data in multiple places, including NYC Open Data, public reports and even all of New York’s administrative code. While this data is robust, searching it can be quite difficult. The sites are very old, scattered across many places and the categories are obtuse so it can take a very long time to get exactly what you are looking for.

BetterBlockGPT aims to change this. We built a simple ChatGPT-like interface to interact with public NYC data. The first functionality is to search 311 complaints on our blocks, only in Brooklyn, for the last 3 months. With the app you can:

1. Type in a block and cross streets you want to get 311 data on, such as “Show me 311 complaints on Van Buren Street between Tompkins Avenue and Throop Avenue”

2. The app will confirm the street and cross streets you are looking for - NYC 311 needs this to be exact

3. It will simply return all 311 complaints for that block over the last 3 months across any categories

Now, if you are looking to gather 311 data to provide evidence to the city that they need to do a better job in tree maintenance, you can simply ask the question to BetterBlockGPT and it will return the results to you in the past 3 months. This is just the beginning, over time, I hope to add:

1. Ask more detailed 311 questions, such as complaints about trash conditions across all of New York for the past 2 years

2. Add in more data sources from NYC Open Data, such as building permits and building sale data

3. Add in external data sources including NYC Administrative Code and NYC legislative history

4. Add the ability to interact with BetterBlockGPT over the phone, so you can call or text it to ask any questions and instantly get an answer

🧱 How BetterBlockGPT was built

For the vibe coders out there, I wanted to share exactly how I built BetterBlockGPT to show you how easy it is to leverage AI to build tools like this. I used a service called Replit, which is a simple all-in-one tool to build software applications. Within Replit, they have a chat interface that allows you to work with AI (in my case, using Claude Opus 4.6) to describe exactly what I wanted to build.

In order to access NYC Open Data, I had to get an API key from NYC Open Data which you can get here. From there, it was a matter of prompting in Replit and testing the app to get exactly what I wanted from the API. The hardest parts of it were:

1. 311 has very specific names for streets (e.g., 5 avenue), so I had to get the tool to figure out how to handle all versions of street names like 5th avenue, Fifth avenue and 5 avenue

2. Getting the NYC Open Data API key. NYC’s sites are very difficult to navigate, so it took some time to figure out exactly how to get this

The whole process of development probably took 5 hours end to end to get this initial site built all by myself!

2 years ago, this would have taken me weeks to build and would have required I hire a developer and a designer. It’s a great example of the new type of software AI enables since it is so much cheaper to build. I don’t think I would have ever built this otherwise.

I hope you have the chance to try it out and share any feedback or what data you would like to see in this interface. Note, it is definitely a beta, so if you come across any bugs (e.g., it not returning results for your search), let me know and I can fix it.

That’s all for this week’s update! As usual, if you like what we’re doing at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone you know that is looking to get more engaged in the neighborhood.

See you next week,

David