UN Data Commons × NYC Open Data · Builders' Day, Google NY, 22 Sep 2026
New York published the world's first Voluntary Local Review in 2018. The UN now holds the authoritative global series. Joining them is the easy part. Knowing which joins are legitimate is the whole job — and most of them are not.
Every figure below carries its source, its vintage and its unit. Hover any chart to read the year.
6.60 µg/m³ in 2019, against 7.57 for the US city aggregate — and the gap has widened every year since 2016.
The UN publishes a degree-of-urbanisation slice, so this compares NYC to the city parts of the US rather than to the country. Only five indicators have it.
Only four countries' cities breathe cleaner air than New York's — Iceland, Guadeloupe, Finland and Estonia. This is the one comparison here that is like-for-like: Tier 1 means NYC is measured against other countries' city aggregates, not against whole nations.
Units agree (µg/m³) and both are annual means, but the methods differ: NYC's figure comes from NYCCAS ground monitors, the UN's is a population-weighted modelled estimate. Comparable in level, not interchangeable.
UN undata/sdg/EN_ATM_PM25.URBANIZATION--DOU_CITY · 10 obs 2010–2019 · unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
NYC c3uy-2p5r Air Quality and Health Impacts · citywide annual mean · updated 2026-06-18
NYC ran above the national rate until 2013, then below it — and stayed below through the 2021 spike. Invisible from either dataset alone.
There is no ACS 1-year release for 2020, so there is no denominator and no rate — on the year NYC's count jumped to 456. We left it empty.
Against the United States, NYC looks like a success story. Against the world it sits in the bottom half — between Pakistan and Montenegro, with 84 countries reporting a lower rate. Same number, different comparator, opposite conclusion.
NYPD records murder & non-negligent manslaughter, which tracks the UNODC intentional-homicide definition closely. NYC publishes a count, not a rate — the denominator is Census ACS annual population. Pre-2006 rows in the NYPD file carry junk incident dates (17 murders in 1990) and are excluded.
UN undata/sdg/VC_IHR_PSRC · 21 obs 2000–2023 · per 100,000 population · unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
NYC qgea-i56i NYPD Complaint Data Historic, offence code 101 · updated 2026-04-28
Denominator Census ACS 1-year B01003_001E · place 51000 / state 36
NYC recycles 17.2% against 23.6% for the US in 2018 — a six-point gap, and an easy headline.
The two numbers do not cover the same waste. The gap is real but overstated, and by an amount nobody has quantified.
Between Bahrain and Greece, and behind Japan and Germany. Only 63 countries report this indicator at all, so the field is thin — and the definitional caveat below applies to every one of these comparisons, not just the US one.
And one figure here is impossible. Malaysia reports 147.7% of its municipal waste recycled in 2019 — in the authoritative UN database. We left it in the data and clipped it off the axis rather than deleting it, because a silent drop is how a dataset launders its own errors. It is marked in red at the right edge.
DSNY tonnage covers residential collection only. The UN municipal-waste definition includes commercial waste. Same units, same period, same apparent shape — and the comparison is still not apples to apples. Every automated check passes here. Only a person reading both definitions catches it.
UN undata/sdg/EN_MWT_RCYR · 19 obs 2000–2018 · percent · unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
NYC ebb7-mvp5 DSNY Monthly Tonnage Data · rate derived from tonnage · updated 2026-09-10
Note the published Recycling Diversion & Capture Rates dataset has not updated since 2020
We first marked road deaths blocked because the UN holds a single observation. That is true of a trend and irrelevant to a ranking — WHO publishes one global round, and 195 countries in one year is more than enough to place a city. The blocker was our framing.
NYC: 11 years of rates, every fatality geocoded, updated daily. The UN: 1 point, 2021. One line, one dot — on the same axis.
3.53 in 2013 down to 2.75 by 2018, then back up to 3.51 in 2021 and 3.16 in 2024. Visible only because NYC keeps the series the UN does not.
NYC's streets are as safe as Spain, the Netherlands and Germany, and roughly four times safer than the United States as a whole (14.2 per 100k). That finding is invisible while the comparator is the country NYC sits in — which is the argument for this card existing at all.
A rank is not a trend. NYC can be placed among 195 countries in 2021 and cannot be tracked against them in any other year. NYC counts deaths from collision records; WHO's figures are modelled estimates. And this is Tier 3 — a city set against whole nations, which is context rather than a peer comparison.
UN undata/sdg/SH_STA_TRAF · 1 obs 2021 · per 100,000 population · 195 countries reporting · unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
NYC h9gi-nx95 Motor Vehicle Collisions — Crashes · persons killed by year · updated 2026-07-31
Denominator Census ACS 1-year B01003_001E · no 2020 release, so no 2020 rate
A blocked pair is not a failure of the pipeline. Recording why two numbers cannot share an axis is the product; a crosswalk showing only the easy pairs would be the thing we are building against.
| Indicator | Verdict | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Maternal mortalitySDG 3.1.1 | Blocked | The UN rate is per 100,000 live births, not per population — the denominator lives in a different NYC dataset. NYC also publishes pregnancy-associated deaths, a deliberately broader definition. |
| Child mortalitySDG 3.2.1 | Context only | UN counts deaths under five; NYC's series is under one. Both are raw counts, so the units "agree" — which is exactly the trap. The chart would look perfect and compare different populations. |
| PovertySDG 1.2.1 | Context only | The UN series is the international extreme-poverty line (~$2.15/day), near zero for any US city. NYC's own measure is an order of magnitude higher. Two numbers sharing a name and measuring nothing alike. |
| Deaths from air pollutionSDG 3.9.1 | Context only | UN reports a national death count from ambient air pollution; NYC reports an age-adjusted rate for ages 30+ from PM2.5 specifically. Different measure, age base and pollutant scope. |
| Inadequate housingSDG 11.1.1 | Context only | UN measures the share of urban population in slums. NYC's nearest analogue is a count of hazardous housing violations — an enforcement output that tracks inspection rates as much as conditions. |
| Built-up area per capitaSDG 11.7.1 | No NYC source | Tier 1 UN data with city-level slices across countries, 2000–2025. No NYC equivalent identified yet. Recorded so the gap stays visible rather than forgotten. |
| Safely managed drinking waterSDG 6.1.1 | No signal | Sits at ~100% for the US across the whole window, as it would for NYC. Two flat lines at 100 tell an analyst nothing. Excluded deliberately — a ceiling effect is a reason not to build a view, and that judgment belongs written down. |
We expected the UN to be the rich side and NYC the patchy one. On the city's flagship street-safety programme it is the other way round — and the consequence is not that the comparison fails, but that it only works in one direction.
So NYC can be placed and cannot be tracked. We can say the city sits 18th of 196, beside Spain and the Netherlands. We cannot say whether it is closing on them, because the world has one snapshot and NYC has eleven years.
That asymmetry is the argument for city data flowing toward the UN system rather than only the other way. The cities already hold the series. What is missing is the route by which it reaches the statistics everyone else compares against.