How New York got dirty
New York is a dirty place. An unshakable layer of grime hangs over everything. During the summer months, the smells of loose garbage and raw sewage mix under the damp heat. Wrappers and cigarette butts pile onto subway tracks. In New York, you can find streams of cockroaches swarming out of drainpipes, rats’ nests so big they sink entire city blocks and human waste strewn across busy sidewalks. It’s the dirtiest city in America, according to Travel and Leisure.
In an aging city of over 8 million people, it’s hard to keep everything clean. But New York’s situation seems extreme: The city produces 33 million tons of waste a year, according to a 2015 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s the highest amount in the world. And because Manhattan was planned without alleys to maximize living space, much of its trash ends up stacked high on curbs or littered throughout the city.
The filth continues down into New York’s sprawling subway system. Chipping paint and dirty tracks plague stations as dwindling MTA cleaning staff struggle to keep up with the mess.
With the city projecting a population of 9 million people by 2040, conditions will only get worse. But how did they get this way to begin with?
That story is actually one of drastic improvement. Before the municipal government put comprehensive sanitation programs into effect, New York suffered from much more threatening waste problems. A report from the 1860’s, “Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens Association of New York Upon the Sanitary Condition of the City,” details horrible living conditions, where sewage fumes rose straight into apartments and disease spread rapidly. Take this passage on the sanitation problems presented by slaughterhouses, of which there were 173 in the city: “It is known that a large proportion of the animals slaughtered in the city have to endure for days such treatment as seriously deteriorates the quality and healthfulness of their flesh; and that animals variously diseased and injured are daily crowded upon the markets of the city.”
Other animals caused worse problems. Horses were the primary means of transportation, and horses produce a lot of manure. With no way to drain the stuff — gutters often got clogged with garbage and stagnant water — people shoveled piles of it wherever they could. Empty lots and excavation sites filled with horse excrement. Contained waste flowed straight into the larger sewer system, with no way to filter it out.
At times, garbage piled three feet high in the streets. The “garbage-boxes” placed outside tenant buildings for waste collection overflowed, spreading disease and filth into standing water. The scarce available space became collecting ground for an absurd assortment of discarded items. A section of the 1860’s report titled “Cemeteries, Church-yards, and Vacant Grounds” inventories all the trash in one empty lot alone: “Stagnant water, stones, bricks, pieces of old tin and mats, human excrements in large quantities, stable manure, old boots and shoes, pieces of old hoop-skirts, dead cats, decomposing potatoes, ashes, and chickens.”
As the city’s sanitation infrastructure improved — New York’s Department of Street Cleaning was founded in 1881, and wastewater treatment went into effect soon after — conditions got less dire. But population exploded through the first half of the 20th century and brought more trash with it. And in the second half, sanitation strikes added to the problem. Two lengthy walkouts — in February 1968 and December 1981 — each resulted in around 100,000 tons of trash piled up around the city. Mayor Ed Koch called the 1981 incident “a decidedly unpleasant experience” for the city.
But unpleasant is a relative judgment, and the bar for sanitation has risen since those incidents. As thousands of young, gentrifying knowledge workers flock into New York, they bring new expectations with them. Case in point, street cleaning. Dirty roads and sidewalks are a common complaint, outpacing concern over many other city issues. And yet, New York’s own survey found that 95 percent of streets across boroughs are “acceptably clean.” How is this possible?
A defensive blog post published in 2012 by the city’s Independent Budget Office, titled “Whose streets you calling dirty?,” floated some possibilities: Ratings are compiled on weekdays and don’t capture tourist traffic, or chosen samples aren’t representative of the city. But one that stands out: The rating system was devised in the 1970’s, when the definition of a “clean” street was a lower bar.
Today’s New York City residents place high stock in cleanliness and sanitation. The same blog post outlines a survey by the Mayor’s budget office asking community boards to rank important issues for their residents. Street cleaning, it said, “ranked 17th citywide, ahead of other efforts such as economic development initiatives, housing code inspections, and services for the homeless.”
As conditions get better over the years, it might seem frivolous to prioritize cleanliness over social services and housing code enforcement. But dirty streets are a visible problem. They affect everyone who travels around the city, and they reflect on the nature of the community. Dirty streets could also have social and economic repercussions: A 2009 study from the Journal of Public Health Policy found that poorer areas of New York had fewer street-level amenities, like cafés and trees, and higher levels of crime and traffic accidents.
That gives the city a real incentive to clean up after itself, and New York expends a lot of resources doing so. The city spends $2.5 billion in public funds collecting trash, or a relatively costly $251 per ton. That’s $20 higher than Chicago and $69 higher than Washington, D.C.
Despite the inefficiencies, New York is able to haul an incredible amount of garbage. In partnership with private collectors, the city deploys 7,200 uniformed sanitation workers with over 2,200 trucks to collect and haul over 23,000 tons of garbage every day, according to the city’s Department of Sanitation website. Initiatives like replacing trash bins with solar compactors in heavy traffic areas of the city help keep trash off the streets, and the city is expanding recycling and composting to stop contributing to out-of-state landfills by the year 2030.
But there are signs infrastructure won’t be able to keep up. New York’s comptroller found that, while the MTA’s revenue grew 34 percent from 2008 to 2013, its sanitation workforce was cut by almost half. As a result, subway cleanliness has fallen by the wayside: 97 percent of tracks weren’t cleaned on schedule in fiscal 2014. The MTA rarely has the resources for cosmetic restoration, leaving chipped paint as the norm. And when the city does clean tracks, using specially-equipped vacuum cars to suck up trash, their efforts are so ineffective that before and after photos are impossible to tell apart.
The city government projects New York will grow to over 9 million residents by 2040. If city services are struggling to pick up after the residents here already, that’s a cause for concern. Whether New York will be able to adapt will be seen over the next couple decades. Recycling is ticking up slowly, up 5 percent from 2014 to 2015, and billions of dollars have been designated for city services and infrastructure spending over the next 10 years. But with the coming challenges of climate changed and overcrowding, will that be enough?
