Why Does This Exist?

Four data points frame the conditions that have driven cities to create clean team programs.

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).

Three existing systems handle public space maintenance.

Municipal Sanitation

City public works departments pick up trash, sweep streets, and empty public bins on scheduled routes. San Francisco’s data documents the gap between these systems and current conditions. The city spends roughly $60 per resident on street cleaning annually, about twice the rate of Los Angeles. A 2025 city audit found that $15.2 million in cleaning funds had gone unspent and $3 million in illegal dumping fines had not been collected over the prior decade (SF Budget and Legislative Analyst, 2025; Mission Local, October 2025). The audit found that the Department of Public Works does not track or report spending “in a meaningful way” (BLA audit, 2025).

Police Response to Environmental Disorder

The International Downtown Association describes a category of conditions — illegal dumping, drug paraphernalia in parks, encampments blocking sidewalks — as falling in “the gap between no response and emergency response” (IDA). A 2024 meta-analysis by Anthony Braga, Christopher Schnell, and Brandon Welsh, covering 56 studies, examined what happens next. Community-based interventions that changed the physical and social environment produced consistent crime reductions. Aggressive order-maintenance policing — the zero-tolerance approach — did not produce statistically significant reductions (Braga, Schnell, and Welsh, Criminology & Public Policy, 2024).

Business Improvement Districts

Business Improvement Districts emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a private-sector response to urban decline. Property owners within a defined district vote to assess themselves an additional tax, and the revenue funds supplementary services: cleaning, security, streetscape improvements, marketing. The International Downtown Association counts 2,500 place management organizations in North America (IDA, downtown.org). New York City alone has 78 BIDs investing $207 million annually (NYC Department of Small Business Services, nyc.gov/sbs).

A 2024 systematic review in Crime Prevention and Community Safety examined every quantitative study of BID effects on crime: eight of nine found reductions, all six studies measuring property crime found significant decreases, and crime displacement was rare. Three separate cost-effectiveness analyses concluded BIDs produced net fiscal benefits. Leah Brooks at George Washington University found that Los Angeles BIDs reduced crime by 5 to 9 percent, at a cost of approximately $21,000 per violent crime averted, compared to the estimated $57,000 social cost per violent crime. John MacDonald at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues found that robbery reductions in Los Angeles BIDs saved roughly $757,000 annually, nearly matching the BIDs’ own budgets of $736,000 (BID systematic review, 2024; Brooks, GWU; MacDonald et al., UPenn).

BIDs operate only where commercial property owners have enough density, organization, and resources to self-assess — downtowns, commercial corridors, and entertainment districts. Residential neighborhoods, low-income communities, transit corridors between commercial zones, and small cities without a critical mass of property owners do not have access to BID services. Washington, D.C.’s Department of Small and Local Business Development created a government-funded Clean Teams program covering 17-plus commercial corridors that lacked the density to form their own BIDs, providing cleaning, beautification, and small business support funded through the city budget rather than self-assessment (DC.gov). The D.C. model operates across neighborhoods where commercial density cannot support a BID, using general fund and special program dollars to fill the geographic gap (DSLBD program description, DC.gov).

The Documented Consequences of the Gap

Boston ran a syringe buyback program that collected 5.2 million needles over three and a half years and enrolled 3,738 participants. When the ARPA funding expired in June 2024, the city chose not to replace it with general funds. Since the program ended, 311 needle complaints have roughly doubled (Boston Globe, July 2024; Boston Globe, January 2025).

Portland, Maine launched a needle buyback with $52,000 in opioid settlement money in January 2025. In the six weeks after launch, the city collected 120,793 syringes, compared to 76,554 in the six weeks before — a 52 percent increase. By year-end 2025, syringe return rates reached 86 percent, up from 66 percent the prior year (Maine Wire, March 2025; NEWS CENTER Maine, February 2026; Press Herald, February 2026).

The Branas randomized controlled trial (2018) found that simple environmental remediation of vacant lots reduced gun violence by 29 percent (Branas et al., PNAS 2018). The BID systematic review (2024) found crime reductions in eight of nine quantitative studies. The Braga meta-analysis (2024) found that community-based environmental interventions outperformed enforcement-based approaches across 56 studies.

The Bottom Line

Gallup and PPS data document that a substantial share of Americans feel unsafe in public spaces (40 percent feared walking alone at night in 2023, per Gallup) and that more than two-thirds prefer root-cause investment over additional law enforcement (Gallup, 2025). The BID systematic review (2024), the Branas trial (2018), and the Braga meta-analysis (2024) document crime reductions associated with environmental maintenance and community-based interventions. Boston and Portland, Maine document that syringe collection programs produce measurable results while funded and that conditions deteriorate when funding ends (Boston Globe, July 2024; Boston Globe, January 2025; Maine Wire, March 2025). No single clean team program has been independently evaluated on its own terms (see Q05)