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Somewhere on the Upper East Side, three residential buildings have landed at the top of a ranking none of their residents are likely to frame and hang in the lobby. It has nothing to do with their architecture, their amenities, or their asking rents — and everything to do with what keeps turning up on the sidewalk out front.
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The buildings — 301 East 78th Street, 350 East 91st Street, and 515 East 82nd Street — tied for the most dog-waste complaints of any single address in Community Board 8, according to a new report from Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s office, presented this week at the board’s Sanitation and Environment Committee meeting. The report mapped every dog-waste complaint filed to 311 across Manhattan between January 2024 and April 2026.The three addresses are only part of the picture. Across the borough’s 12 community districts, CB8 — which covers the Upper East Side, Yorkville, Carnegie Hill, Lenox Hill and Roosevelt Island — ranked the fourth worst for dog poop, measured as the share of its 311 calls devoted to the problem. The densest clusters turned up in Carnegie Hill and Yorkville.
There was one ranking the Upper East Side topped outright. Of all Manhattan community districts, CB8 had the strongest overlap between dog-waste complaints and rat sightings — flagged in the report as the worst in the borough. Rats, it turns out, are known to feed on dog waste, which is part of why the two so often show up on the same blocks.
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There’s a catch the report is careful to underline: 311 data shows where people called to complain, not necessarily where the waste actually is. Most people who step around a pile on the sidewalk never reach for their phone. The map, in other words, is a floor rather than a ceiling — meaning a quiet block with no complaints isn’t necessarily a clean one. Complaints also swing with the seasons, climbing in winter and easing in summer; the report logged a major jump this past February, when snowstorms hit the city.
Enforcement, meanwhile, is close to nonexistent. The city’s decades-old Pooper Scooper law technically carries a fine of up to $100, but issuing a summons requires catching an owner in the act — feet planted, dog attached, license in hand. The report found few to no fines in recent years, with the presenter estimating perhaps two summonses citywide over the past year.
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The report points to cheaper fixes than enforcement. More litter baskets, it found, correlate with fewer complaints, as do dog-waste-bag dispensers. The city installed roughly 200 dispensers across Manhattan around 2019; today only about 25 remain.As for the three buildings at the top of the list, the report’s authors have a counterintuitive suggestion for anyone who’d rather not see their address there again: call 311. The more complaints a block logs, they argue, the more city resources it can draw — which means the blocks that look worst on the map may simply be the ones whose neighbors bothered to report it.
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