Clean Teams

It is 5:30 in the morning in downtown Seattle, and a three-person crew is already working. One operates an all-terrain litter vacuum along Third Avenue. Another runs a pressure washer over a sidewalk stained with something no one wants to identify. The third collects used syringes with a grabber tool and a puncture-proof container, checking doorways and bus shelters methodically, block by block.

In a 2023 Gallup survey, 40 percent of Americans said they feared walking alone at night in their own area — the highest level since 1993. Nearly a third reported avoiding their own downtown (Gallup, October 2023). San Francisco’s 2023 city survey found 54 percent of residents believed street cleanliness had gotten worse (SF city survey, 2023). Project for Public Spaces, a national nonprofit that studies how people use shared spaces, reported in 2025 that homelessness was the second-most-cited challenge facing public spaces, behind funding and aging infrastructure, in a survey of 700-plus respondents across 57 countries (PPS, State of Public Space report, March 2025; pps.org). By 2025, Gallup found the night-fear number had moderated to 31 percent, but more than two-thirds of Americans said they believed more money should go toward addressing root causes like drugs, homelessness, and mental health rather than toward additional law enforcement (Gallup, October 2025).

Speed and Responsiveness

The Core Scope: Environmental Conditions in Public Space

No published, peer-reviewed evaluation of a specific named clean team program has been identified in the research literature. The 2024 systematic review in Crime Prevention and Community Safety, which examined every quantitative study of BID effects on crime, acknowledged that “the tactics adopted by each BID area are complex and not easy to approximate in a statistical model” — and even that review examined BIDs generally, not clean teams specifically. Three bodies of adjacent research are cited in clean team policy discussions. None studied a clean team directly.

Clean team programs are operating in cities across the United States, from Seattle ($18 million annual budget, 300 blocks) to Lowell, Massachusetts (one full-time coordinator, $0 dedicated budget beyond salary). At least 15 new programs launched between 2023 and 2025, funded through Business Improvement Districts, municipal general funds, ARPA, and opioid settlement dollars.

Two categories of data bear on public support for clean teams: national polling on related topics, and documented political outcomes in specific jurisdictions. No national poll has asked Americans specifically about clean teams as a public safety strategy.

Six stakeholder groups appear repeatedly across documented clean team programs: business improvement districts, municipal officials, labor unions, clean team workers, law enforcement, and community advocates. Their positions and documented actions are mapped below.

Four named program failures, a documented funding cliff, worker safety incidents, a wage gap under legislative challenge, and the absence of any independent evaluation define the risk landscape for clean team programs.

Every city that launches a clean team makes a series of design decisions. Seattle’s MID has operated since 2013 with an $18 million annual budget funded through BID assessments (DSA). Portland’s Clean and Safe has operated since the 1980s with a five-year, $58 million renewal in November 2024 (Portland.gov Ordinance 191960). Boston’s syringe program collected 5.2 million needles and ended when ARPA funding expired in June 2024 (Boston Globe, July 2024). Downtown Streets Team operated for 20 years and collapsed when multiple contracts were lost simultaneously (KTVU; Mercury News). What follows maps 10 design decisions, drawing from the documented experience of more than two dozen programs.

Clean teams are funded through BID assessments, municipal general funds, ARPA, opioid settlement dollars, federal grants, and private philanthropy. Each source has documented coverage and documented gaps. This card maps both.

The rhetoric around clean teams is quieter, less ideological, and more bipartisan than the language surrounding other alternative public safety programs. Nobody calls clean teams “defunding the police.” Nobody stages protests against picking up trash. The political dynamics are real but they operate below the national media radar, in city council chambers, Business Improvement District (BID) board meetings, and labor negotiations rather than on cable news.