Fires fell 11 percent citywide. Some blocks went the other way.

Hannah Bonestroo, a PhD student in urban systems, and assistant professor Augustin Guibaud studied FDNY data from 2013 to 2023, tract by tract. The paper appears in the Fire Safety Journal. Citywide the story looks simple: structural fires fell 11.3 percent over the decade. Underneath, eastern Queens and Staten Island were among places where fires rose.

Response time moved differently. The citywide average rose from 4 minutes 6 seconds to 4 minutes 36 seconds, past the National Fire Protection Association’s four-minute standard, and almost the whole city followed that pattern, with northwestern Queens seeing the sharpest deterioration. Reviews by the FDNY and the State Senate point to traffic congestion and rising call volume, and the researchers’ analysis agrees: fixed neighbourhood factors explained only about a quarter of the differences between tracts.

The second finding is that fire frequency and response time capture largely different dimensions of risk. Areas with the most fires tended to have faster response, not slower. If resources are allocated at neighbourhood scale, Bonestroo says, citywide numbers can hide places with different patterns.