San Francisco's empty tree basins, on the record.
An empty tree well is not just a gap in the canopy. These are open craters in the pedestrian right-of-way — up to a foot deep — that collect litter, trap water, and trip people. Every one of them was reported to 311 by a resident.
This tracker pulls every empty tree basin report from San Francisco's open 311 data and puts the photographs beside the outcome, so residents and city leaders can see what actually happened after the report was filed.
Visual evidence
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That's every matching report.
Circles mark individual reports — still open, closed. Supervisor district outlines are drawn from the City's own boundary files; selecting a district or neighborhood highlights it. Reports filed at an intersection carry no coordinates in the 311 feed and cannot be mapped.
| Location | District | Neighborhood | Reported | Closed | Days | Outcome |
|---|
Showing first 500 rows — narrow the filters to see more.
No reports match these filters.
Try widening the date range, or clearing the neighborhood filter.
What happened to these reports
How 311 recorded the resolution of every matching report, grouped from the closure note City staff typed. A closed ticket does not mean a tree was planted — and a report with no planting recorded is a statement about the record, not proof that nothing was done. See the note on record-keeping below.
Method and sources
Where the data comes from
Every record is a real 311 service request from the City's
311 Cases
dataset, filtered to requests whose service detail is EMPTY_TREE_BASIN.
Supervisor district and neighborhood boundaries come from the City's
district and
neighborhood files,
so supervisor names stay current without anyone editing this site.
About the photographs
Photos submitted with a 311 report are held in the City's Verint portal, which does not serve them as plain images. They are unwrapped server-side, then cached, so the page does not stall while they load. A small number of older reports link to social-media posts or retired photo pages that no longer resolve; those are counted as reports but not shown as photographs.
How closure notes changed over time
This is the most important caveat on the page. Before roughly 2015, Public Works recorded detailed closure notes that often named the action taken — including explicit plantings. Modern records are far terser: almost every report closed in the last 18 months carries only “Cancelled — Planned Maintenance”. So “no planting recorded” means exactly that — the 311 record shows no planting — and is not by itself proof that no tree was planted. It is evidence about the City's record-keeping as much as about its tree planting, and the honest reading is that residents cannot tell from the public record what happened to their report.
Counting rules
Reports are de-duplicated by service request ID. “Days” is the gap between the report date and the closing date; for reports still open it is counted to today. Outcome labels are grouped from the free-text closure note 311 staff entered, so they are an interpretation of that text, not an official category.
Corrections
If a record looks wrong, the underlying 311 ticket is linked from every card and table row — that ticket, not this page, is the source of truth. Data refreshes automatically; the timestamp below shows the last successful pull.