What Are the Risks?

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.

Named Program Failures

Downtown Streets Team (California, 2005–2025)

Downtown Streets Team shut down on October 31, 2025, after 20 years of operation across 16 California locations. At its peak, the organization had $17 million in annual revenue. Lifetime outcomes included 2,211 individuals housed and more than 2,100 connected to jobs. The organization cited a “shift in financial and political landscape” and the loss of multiple contracts that created a “multi-million-dollar loss” (KTVU; Mercury News). Before the shutdown, the organization had faced sexual harassment allegations against former CEO Eileen Richardson and paid a $170,000 class-action settlement for wage theft in 2021 (KTVU; Mercury News).

Boston Community Syringe Redemption Program (2020–2024)

Boston’s needle buyback program collected 5.2 million syringes over three and a half years, enrolled 3,738 participants, and distributed 3,781 doses of naloxone. It was funded entirely through ARPA dollars. When that funding expired on June 28, 2024, the city chose not to replace it with general fund revenue. The program ended. Since then, 311 needle complaints have roughly doubled (Boston Globe, July 2024; Boston Globe, January 2025; ARR program page).

Urban Alchemy Worker Safety Failures (San Francisco, ongoing)

Urban Alchemy, San Francisco’s largest cleaning and ambassador contractor with $84.9 million in total organizational revenue in fiscal year 2024 (IRS Form 990, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer), has experienced at least three shooting incidents involving its workers. In September 2025, Joey Alexander was killed after asking a person using drugs to move from a doorway outside the San Francisco Main Library. DA Brooke Jenkins acknowledged that “this was not the first time an Urban Alchemy street ambassador had been assaulted” (KQED, September 2025). A 450-plus employee class-action settlement in July 2023 addressed wage theft and denied breaks. A second lawsuit was filed in October 2023. A UCLA report in March 2023 found the organization had not honored its wage commitments. Urban Alchemy was placed on San Francisco’s nonprofit “watch list” in August 2025 and subsequently lost its BART contract (KQED; KRON4; SF Standard; Courthouse News; UCLA; SF Examiner).

Ahsing Solutions, another San Francisco contractor that received $3.5 million in the December 2025 contract round, was under state investigation as of January 2026 (SF Standard).

Portland Clean and Safe Accountability Gap (Oregon, ongoing)

Portland’s Clean and Safe Business Improvement District (BID) has operated since the 1980s and expanded to roughly 270 blocks in November 2024. A 2020 city auditor report found “very little city oversight” of BID operations. The Portland Business Alliance CEO’s $333,030 salary and the fact that 45 percent of Clean and Safe revenue funds the CEO’s organization were focal points of criticism. An organized “End Clean and Safe” campaign gathered over 600 signatories opposing the BID’s renewal. The BID expanded despite this opposition (Portland city auditor, 2020; End Clean and Safe; Portland Mercury; Street Roots, February 2024; Portland.gov Ordinance 191960).

The ARPA Funding Cliff

The American Rescue Plan Act provided $130.2 billion to local governments. The obligation deadline passed on December 31, 2024; all obligated funds must be fully spent by the expenditure deadline of December 31, 2026 (Treasury.gov).

Documented clean team programs launched on ARPA dollars include Eau Claire, Wisconsin ($200,000 for a four-person team), Spokane’s supplemental cleaning (expired March 2025), portions of Denver’s initiative, Harris County’s Employ2Empower (which pays $15 per hour to 79 participants and has housed 19 individuals), and the Boston syringe program. The National League of Cities found that 69 percent of city leaders expect ARPA expiration to negatively affect their budgets (NLC survey). Eau Claire Councilor Jessica Schoen asked the question these programs face: “What happens after year two?” (Eau Claire council proceedings).

No federal program specifically funds clean teams. There is no Medicaid pathway, no dedicated HUD stream, no DOL formula grant, and no CDC allocation for environmental maintenance. This distinguishes clean teams from mobile crisis teams, where Medicaid reimburses clinical encounters and provides a pathway to self-sustaining revenue. Clean teams cannot bill Medicaid for picking up trash (see Q11 for the full funding landscape).

Worker Safety

Clean team workers encounter active drug use, mental health crises, discarded syringes, biohazardous waste, and occasionally violence during their shifts. In September 2025, Urban Alchemy worker Joey Alexander was killed after asking a person using drugs to move from a doorway outside the San Francisco Main Library (KQED, September 2025). At least two other Urban Alchemy workers have been shot in separate incidents (KQED; KRON4).

Seattle’s MID deploys workers from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. across 300 blocks; workers administered roughly 300 Narcan doses in 2023, indicating the frequency of overdose encounters (DSA; KING5). Arlington deploys teams of three, providing backup for worker safety (Block by Block/DAMC). Lacey, Washington’s Rapid Response Team members were recognized for “reviving a man suspected of overdosing on drugs” during their first year of operation (The Olympian, via Clean Teams Newsletter).

No standard training curriculum for clean team work has been published. No national certification exists. No OSHA-specific guidance for clean team operations has been issued. Block by Block provides a standardized program across its 190-plus districts that includes active shooter response, protest management, missing children protocols, and report writing (Block by Block). Individual programs develop their own training based on local conditions.

Syringe collection involves specific hazards: hepatitis C transmission risk from a needlestick is approximately 1.8 percent per incident (CDC). The CDC classifies community needlestick HIV transmission as extremely unlikely, with no confirmed cases in published literature (CDC). Workers performing syringe collection require sharps-specific training, puncture-resistant containers, PPE, and post-exposure protocols.

No published data on worker injury rates across the field has been identified. The Urban Alchemy incidents, the class-action wage theft settlement (450-plus employees, July 2023), and the Ahsing Solutions state investigation (January 2026) are the only documented labor condition data points for the contractor model (Courthouse News; SF Standard).

The Labor Exploitation Risk

San Francisco Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s Clean Streets and Fair Pay Act, introduced January 27, 2026, targets a documented wage gap: ambassador workers earn $52,000 to $62,400 annually while comparable city street inspectors earn up to $134,000 plus benefits (SF Standard, January 27, 2026). Dolores Huerta endorsed the legislation: “A city that tolerates exploitation is a city that abandons its values” (SF Standard).

The wage range across documented programs spans from $9 per hour (Cincinnati Jobs Van) to $22 per hour with benefits (Seattle MID). Kansas City’s Clean Up KC pays $18 per hour (Hope Faith). Portland’s GLITTER pays $20 per hour (Ground Score, 2025). The Beyond Chron analysis found contractor supervisor rates ranging from $84 to $183 per hour billed to the city of San Francisco (Beyond Chron, via SF Standard).

AFSCME has maintained a national anti-outsourcing position. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, AFSCME Local 369 blocked a clean team outsourcing proposal by a 7-to-4 council vote (AFSCME blog). Charlottesville Councilor Michael Payne cast the sole dissenting vote on a Block by Block contract: “Any time we outsource work, I’m very concerned we’re undermining unionized workers” (29News).

The Evaluation Gap

Cities are investing documented sums — $18 million annually (Seattle), $32 million in the latest contract round (San Francisco), $58 million over five years (Portland Clean and Safe), $3.1 million (Gainesville), $1.2 million (Charlottesville) — in programs that have not been independently evaluated. No randomized controlled trial, no quasi-experimental study, and no independent evaluation of any named clean team program has been published. The 2024 BID systematic review in Crime Prevention and Community Safety found 13 evaluations of BIDs generally, but acknowledged that “the tactics adopted by each BID area are complex and not easy to approximate in a statistical model.” No study has isolated the cleaning component from security, marketing, and other BID services (BID systematic review, 2024).

Programs report operational metrics. Joe Rudemiller of 3CDC told WCPO that Cincinnati’s GeneroCity 513 achieved in its first year: “Cleaning 674 miles worth of streets, filling 5,566 bags of trash, paying out $70,155, connecting 125 [people] to other social services for assistance, linking 34 people with permanent housing; and helping 18 people get permanent employment” (WCPO, September 2019). Seattle reports 10 million gallons of trash and 94,000 syringes collected since 2013 (DSA). Portland Clean Start reports 6.02 million pounds of trash and 92,150 syringes in 2024 (CCC). These are output metrics — volume removed, services connected — not outcome metrics connecting cleaning to crime reduction, fear reduction, or economic change.

San Francisco’s 2025 audit documented the gap between spending and outcomes. The Budget and Legislative Analyst found that the Department of Public Works does not track or report spending “in a meaningful way.” The audit found $15.2 million unspent and $3 million in illegal dumping fines uncollected over a decade. The city spends approximately $60 per resident on street cleaning, roughly twice the Los Angeles rate, while the 2023 city survey found 54 percent of residents believed street cleanliness had worsened (SF BLA audit, 2025; Mission Local, October 2025; SF city survey, 2023).

The Displacement Critique

Portland’s “End Clean and Safe” campaign, with over 600 signatories, organized around the argument that BID-funded cleaning serves commercial property owners at the expense of vulnerable populations. The 2020 city auditor report found “very little city oversight” of BID operations. The campaign’s framing: complaint-driven deployment sends crews wherever complaints originate, which may not correspond to where need is greatest (End Clean and Safe; Portland city auditor, 2020; Street Roots, February 2024).

Opposition critics argue that clean teams “just push problems to other neighborhoods without solving anything,” that removing needles “doesn’t stop drug use,” and that cleaning graffiti “doesn’t prevent vandalism.” The criticism extends to arguing that clean teams “enable bad behavior” by removing consequences (Clean Teams Q&A, citing opposition messaging). Critics have called clean team workers “fake cops who can’t do anything when real crime happens” and “glorified security guards,” framing the programs as “social experiments” and “feel-good nonsense” (Clean Teams Q&A, citing opposition messaging).

SeeClickFix, a citizen-reporting platform acquired by CivicPlus, had roughly 300 municipal clients and more than 3 million cumulative reports by 2017 (GovTech, January 2017; Street Fight Magazine, January 2017).

Programs that employ homeless individuals on cleaning crews partially address this critique. Cincinnati’s GeneroCity 513, Portland’s Clean Start, and Portland’s GLITTER all hire from the populations that displacement critics worry about displacing. Gerald Cooper, who coordinates Cincinnati’s program and was once homeless himself, takes workers to City Gospel Mission at the end of each cleaning day (Spectrum News 1, via Clean Teams Newsletter). Lori Gilbert, who joined Cincinnati’s Clean Team after a year of homelessness, told WCPO: “It kind of gave me a purpose in life again” (WCPO, via Clean Teams Newsletter).

The Broken Windows Association

A 2024 meta-analysis by Braga, Schnell, and Welsh, synthesizing 56 studies, found that community-based environmental interventions produced crime reductions while aggressive enforcement interventions did not produce statistically significant reductions (Braga, Schnell, and Welsh, Criminology & Public Policy, 2024). Clean teams operate on the environmental side of this distinction. Portland’s “End Clean and Safe” campaign and critics in San Francisco have raised the concern that programs operating near encampments function as informal enforcement regardless of stated protocol.

The Bottom Line

Four named program failures are documented: Downtown Streets Team collapsed after 20 years when multiple contracts were lost simultaneously (KTVU; Mercury News). Boston’s syringe program ended when ARPA funding expired despite collecting 5.2 million needles (Boston Globe). Urban Alchemy has experienced at least three shooting incidents including one worker fatality, a class-action wage theft settlement, and nonprofit watch-list placement (KQED; KRON4; Courthouse News). Portland’s Clean and Safe BID expanded despite a city auditor finding “very little city oversight” and over 600 signatories opposing renewal (Portland city auditor, 2020; End Clean and Safe). The ARPA expenditure deadline of December 31, 2026 affects every program launched with pandemic relief dollars (Treasury.gov). Melgar’s Fair Pay Act targets a documented wage gap of $52,000–$62,400 (ambassadors) versus up to $134,000 (city employees) in San Francisco (SF Standard). No clean team program has been independently evaluated (BID systematic review, 2024).