Fair or not, that leaves Goodman responsible for cleaning it up.

The city requires homeowners and landlords to keep the sidewalk in front of their property trash-free — even if they didn’t cause the mess — or face fines. Plenty of people don’t know that, though. Or, for that matter, how to get help.

A few stray pieces of garbage can easily become a magnet for a bigger mess and make people more inclined to litter.

MICHAEL BOREN / Staff Trash surrounds a tree in Strawberry Mansion in November. "That trash over there by that tree has probably been sitting there for weeks," Ronata Lewis-Oglesby said.

“Throw it right on the ground — I’m not gonna lie to you, I have,” said Ronata Lewis-Oglesby, 38, who lives in Strawberry Mansion. Coffee cups and soda bottles usually, she explained, as she skirted a pizza box left on the sidewalk of West Cumberland Street near 33rd, where nine trash bags and an empty takeout container surrounded a nearby tree. “You might walk for a few blocks and still not see a trash can. You’re like, ‘Ah, well, I’m not gonna keep walking with it forever.’”

But even municipal trash cans can cause headaches — people often fill them with household garbage, not the smaller items they’re meant for.

“As soon as we put one [out] we have neighbors saying, ‘Come get it, because now there’s more trash than ever,’” Williams said.

Overall, even as complaints have risen, the city has gotten better at addressing them.

In 2010, the city took an average of 23 days to resolve complaints about illegal dumping, trash and recyclables collection, and vacant lots in need of cleanup. In 2017, the city took an average of 15 days.

Citywide Avg. 311 Complaint Resolve Time 2010 2017

The Streets Department had no substantial increase in staffing levels or budget during that period. It has just gotten better at preemptively responding to known dump sites, Williams said. Employees dub these sites the “Dirty 30” and regularly patrol them to check for litter.

The department has a team of 37 investigators, known as SWEEP officers, who respond to 311 complaints and issue warnings or tickets — if the violators can be found. The officers will literally weed through piles of trash to search for items listing addresses or names. Depending on the size of the mess, the city sometimes dispatches complaint trucks — there are 13 citywide — to clean it up.

Vincent Mason “We always want to tidy up after we come out.” JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographers

A separate agency, CLIP, is responsible for cleaning vacant lots. The agency added eight people to its cleanup team in 2017, bringing the total to 50, and shuffled resources so it could respond faster to neighborhoods with the most vacant lot complaints. Of all trash-related complaints, these take the longest to resolve — sometimes two months or more — because the city gives property owners time to address the violations and clean up their lots.

Forbes and other magazines have called Philadelphia one of the nation’s dirtiest cities, but those rankings took into account air quality and water pollution. Experts say it’s difficult to isolate trash as a single factor and accurately compare cities.

Philadelphia officials say the city is getting cleaner. It launched a “Zero Waste and Litter” initiative last year, with the goal of becoming litter-free by 2035, and recently published sanitation scores for every block — 1 being the cleanest and 4 being the dirtiest — to help identify the most troubled areas. Thousands of volunteers also participate each year in a citywide spring cleanup, which former Mayor Nutter started a decade ago.

Citywide Litter Index Scores City employees canvassed Philadelphia block by block to determine litter scores on a scale of 1 to 4. The surveys will be conducted annually. Click on the map for more information. SOURCE: City of Philadelphia

But Philadelphia still has a lot of work to do.

Of the nation’s 25 largest cities, Philly is one of only five to not perform regular sweeping on residential streets. Budget cuts ended that in 2009; the city now only sweeps commercial corridors, where some, but not most, residents live. (The Center City District and University City District also have sidewalk sweepers that come through at least three times a day).

DAVID MAIALETTI / Staff Photographer Bags of trash along the 5600 block of Grays Avenue near a sign for a commercial dump.

Bringing back weekly citywide street sweeping would cost $5.2 million annually and require a one-time $12 million purchase of equipment, the Streets Department estimates. Its 2017 budget was $98.9 million.

While Mayor Kenney said he would “love” to bring back street sweeping, he says car-owning residents feel otherwise. “We brought weekly sweeping to South Philadelphia and [former Councilman] Frank DiCicco got so much grief from people having to move their cars every week he actually asked for it to be suspended,” Kenney said.

The solution, he said, is for people to stop “trashing our streets.”

“It doesn’t fall from the sky. Litter is not a natural occurrence,” Kenney said. “It’s something that happens when people don’t respect their communities.”

The 6,500 citywide block captains, who sign up with the city as volunteers, can make a huge difference in determining whether a block stays litter-free. But only a quarter of blocks have a captain. The city also keeps their names private, so identifying your captain is difficult.



JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer Clean block officer Diane Oliveras inspects the 2400 block of West Sedgley Street as part of the city's litter index survey.

That leaves some civic groups pooling money to pay for street-cleaning services or taking care of the blight themselves.

West Philly resident Dave Brindley created Not in Philly, which allows people to claim a block via an interactive map. Brindley raises money to buy and distribute supplies to members who promise to clean their adopted street once a week for six months.

Brindley, who started the program because he was aggravated by seeing his young kids play around wind-blown garbage, said about 1,000 people have registered since Not in Philly started in October 2016.

“There’s a lot of issues in our city that we feel helpless towards and we give that ‘Philly shrug,’” Brindley said. “...but just by taking care of my own block, I’ve realized we don’t need to feel powerless toward litter. We can put a dent in this problem that we all hate.”