LA Sanitation crews have driven every city street and alley since April 2016, scoring each block 1 to 3 for litter, weeds, bulky items and illegal dumping — about 22,000 miles a quarter — and publishing the result as open map layers by street segment and by operational grid. Scoring continues, but public publication thinned to roughly one dataset a year after 2018.
In the last quarter of 2016 the city rated 87% of street segments clean and 1% unclean, and said CleanStat's first year had cut level-3 (unclean) streets by 82% and level-2 streets by 84%. These are the city's own figures from its own survey, published nine months after launch; no audit has tested them.
🎓 Lesson
A driven survey scores every block whether or not anyone complains, which a complaint line cannot do. But the crews who grade the streets work for the department that cleans them, and nobody has ever checked the grades: while CleanStat reported streets getting cleaner, the City Controller found illegal-dumping reports up 300% between 2017 and 2020.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ GovTech / Harvard Data-Smart — Turning Dirty Streets Clean through Comprehensive Open Data MappingCarries the method and the impact figures sentence-level: Executive Directive No. 8 (April 2015), CleanStat launched April 2016, 'LASAN's five two-person crews drive over 22,000 miles every quarter to assess the cleanliness of 42,000 blocks', the 1/2/3 scale, and 'During the last quarter of 2016, unclean streets made up only 1% of the total street segments and 87% of the streets were rated clean' plus the 82%/84% reduction claim.
↗ Smart Cities Dive — Clean Streets: the data project creating a litter-free Los Angeles (13 April 2017)Independent confirmation of the method — 'sanitation inspectors visited every street and alley in Los Angeles to document conditions, snapping smartphone photos and sending them to a central database' — and the provenance of the headline number: 'The city said there has been a 82% reduction in level 3 streets and a 84% reduction in level 2 streets.'
↗ Los Angeles GeoHub — CleanStat Grids Index (authority)The public map itself, owned by LASAN's GeoHub account and last modified 15 May 2025. City metadata states the 1-3 scale, the four factors and quarterly reassessment. Its claim that this is 'first-of-its-kind' and that Los Angeles is the only major U.S. city doing regular citywide cleanliness evaluations could not be verified and is not repeated here. licenseInfo is empty; accessInformation reads only 'The City of Los Angeles' — the data is downloadable but no open licence is granted.
↗ Los Angeles GeoHub — Clean Streets Index Segments 2024 Q2 (dataset)One of the quarterly layers. An inventory of the City's ArcGIS content shows the published series running quarterly in 2016-2018, then 2019 Q4, 2020 Q4, 2021 B1, 2022 B1, 2023 Q4, then 2024 Q1, Q2 and Q4 — the last created 15 May 2025. This is the basis for the snippet's statement that public publication thinned after 2018.
↗ StreetsLA — CleanStat Streets Q3 2025 (operator dataset)Currency check: the newest public layer carrying the CleanStat name, created 7 August 2025 and described as 'Clean Stat information per street segment, provided by Streets LA' — the Bureau of Street Services, not LASAN. The same account holds 'Clean Corridors Initiative 2025-2026' ('Clean Streets Initiative, August 2025 to present') and 'Clean Streets Inspections Q4 FY25-26 (April - June 2026)', a corridor-scoped successor tied to the 2026 World Cup and LA28.
↗ Harvard Data-Smart — Driving Clean Streets with Data (2 October 2024)Confirms the index was still in use in 2024 and describes the scored items as litter, illegal dumping, mattresses, white goods, shopping carts and weeds, scored 1 (clean) to 3 (not clean). Also the boundary this entry keeps: encampment cleanups are a separate LASAN function under the Livability Services Division, formed June 2019, and are not what CleanStat scores.
↗ NBC Los Angeles — City of Angels becomes city of trashCarries the audit figure used in the lesson: under Controller Ron Galperin's March 2021 audit, 'reports of illegal dumping have been skyrocketing, up 300% from 2017 to 2020'. A widely repeated '450% from 2016 to 2020' variant could not be verified sentence-level and is not used.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “CleanStat Street Cleanliness Index” — Los Angeles, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/la-cleanstat/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
