In the past year and a half, San Francisco residents have filed over a million complaints with the city’s 311 hotline. A breakdown of those calls shows that some of the most common complaints were about trash, illegal dumping and graffiti — issues the city has struggled to keep up with since the pandemic as the Public Works Department faced staff shortages.
“We faced a challenge from vacancy at our street cleaning operation, which was exacerbated during the global COVID pandemic,” said Rachel Gordon, spokeswoman for the city’s building department. “But we’ve made good progress in recent months to replenish the ranks.”
Garbage complaints accounted for the largest proportion — about 16% — of all calls, according to the Chronicle’s analysis of 311 case data between January 2022 and June 2023. These requests, listed as “General Cleaning” in the database, are typically handled by the municipal building authority.
Complaints about loose litter and illegal dumping fall under the “street and sidewalk cleaning” category in the city’s database. Complaints about illegal dumping have quadrupled in the last decade and in 2022. The Public Works Office has set a goal of responding to 95% of street and sidewalk cleaning requests within 48 hours, and according to its performance rating card, responsiveness has been below target since 2021.
Requests to pick up bulky items, which are handled by municipal waste management company Recology, have been the second most common type of complaint, accounting for 15% of all calls since 2022, the data also shows.
In addition to rubbish and illegal waste disposal, graffiti removal was one of the 311 most frequent service requests. San Franciscans have filed over 125,000 graffiti-related complaints since 2022 — more than 12% of all calls. The Public Works Department’s goal, according to the scorecard, is to respond to graffiti requests on public property within 48 hours and on private property within 72 hours. However, since 2021, the department’s on-time performance rate has been below 55% and achieved in the year 2022 even a low point of 14%.
Laws requiring private property owners to remove graffiti from their properties were stopped by the board of directors during the pandemic, slowing graffiti removal, Gordon explained. The department has since resumed inspections, she added. The department also launched an opt-in pilot program late last year to allow certain private properties and businesses free graffiti removal.
If you consider where most of these complaints and service requests are coming from, the Mission District saw the highest call volume with nearly 114,000 calls between January 2022 and June 2023.
However, when looking at call rate by population, downtown San Francisco neighborhoods stand out more. The Financial District and Downtown/Union Square neighborhoods recorded the highest call rates during this period, at 6,400 and 4,300 calls per thousand residents, respectively.
The highest proportion of key complaints from these two boroughs concerned overflowing municipal dustbins, accounting for over 20% of all calls in both boroughs. Garbage calls related to garbage cans accounted for just 7% of complaints citywide.
Also, a recent survey of the city’s streets and sidewalks by the Controller’s Office found that trash and garbage disposal problems were concentrated in high-traffic commercial areas such as downtown.
Gordon said DPW increased its cleaning efforts at UN Square in March this year, visiting the site every two hours during the day and early evening and twice more at night. The department has also expanded its cleanup of illegal landfills in Bayview from four days a week to five days a week, she added.
Nearly $17 million of the mayor’s proposed budget will go toward street cleaning, Gordon said. She said that if approved by the board of directors, those funds would be used for expanded city-wide steam cleaning, additional manual sweeping of city blocks and graffiti removal.
Reach Adriana Rezal: adriana.rezal@sfchronicle.com
