CleanStat Street Cleanliness Index

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Crews drive some 22,000 miles a quarter grading every block for litter and dumping. They work for the department that does the cleaning, and nobody has ever checked the grades.

Outcome📉 Scaled back

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byLA Sanitation and Environment (LASAN); corridor inspections since 2025 run by the Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA)

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 12 more in Los Angeles · 🗑️ Waste & recycling guide · 🏛️ Governance projects

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.

Live 📅 since 2016

📊 Impact

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.

🏛️ Governance Waste & recycling Open data GIS & cadastre Public space

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.

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↗ 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.

↗ Los Angeles City Controller — Piling Up: Addressing L.A.'s Illegal Dumping Problem (March 2021)The independent audit of the problem CleanStat scores. The Controller's site returns 403 to automated fetch; the finding is carried sentence-level by NBC Los Angeles below.

↗ 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.

↗ Crosstown LA — Illegal dumping in Los Angeles hits highest level in three years (14 October 2024)Independent data journalism on the same problem, and on its geography: 32,145 dumping reports in July-September 2024, the highest quarterly count in three years, against 95,732 for all of 2023; Van Nuys highest with 3,172 reports, Florence in South LA with 2,187.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 GeoHub Open Geospatial Data Platform · Los Angeles The scores go out through the city's open-data platform as quarterly map layers, one record per street segment. 🇹🇭 Traffy Fondue: Bangkok's LINE-Based Problem Reporting · Bangkok Complaints versus patrols: Bangkok waits for a LINE report, LA drives 22,000 miles a quarter — and nobody checks either city's numbers. 🇺🇸 CityScore Performance Dashboard · Boston Two 2016 self-scoring programmes: Boston scored data it already held, LA sent crews out to create it, block by block.

Explore the wider context

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📎 Cite this project

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.

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