The pace of street cleanup has picked up this summer, according to Mayor Eric Garcetti. A new Skid Row Clean Team has started using homeless people to help pick up their neighborhood. The team pays current or homeless people $15 an hour or more to pick up the area.

So far, crews in Los Angeles have cleared more than three thousand pounds of hazardous waste from homeless encampments. Garcetti says there were about five hundred cleanups last month and nearly 3000 needles were removed from the public spaces. However, the mayor did not blame the homeless entirely for this issue.

"As we've seen time and time again, the vast majority of trash that our crews picked up last month came from illegal dumping not from homeless Angelenos."

He says crews also cleared 15 hundred tons of trash that was blocking sidewalks.

"Everytime we walk around to pick up the trash, people will be like, 'Oh thank you for keeping the community better,'" one woman told KFI's Andrew Mollenbeck.

"We made an additional 376 visits to encampments to ensure sidewalks were passable removing 1,500 tons of solid waste," Garcetti stated.