The City of Dallas clocked tens of thousands of code compliance violations related to litter and junk in 2023.
According to the City’s code compliance performance dashboard, some 35,525 offenses have been documented by officials so far this year after receiving 22,756 service requests from residents. The violations were categorized as “litter on private property, alley or parkway.”
While the dashboard was updated in December, it is currently unclear exactly when. However, there have already been more violations logged than in all of 2022, which saw 34,692 violations and 23,667 service requests.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, polling indicates residents have been displeased with “the amount of trash, litter, or junk” they have seen in their communities and “elsewhere in the City of Dallas.”
Council Member Adam Bazaldua’s District 7 had the most violations with 6,438, followed by Council Member Carolyn King Arnold with 5,734, and then Council Member Omar Narvaez with 3,578.
Local businesses and civic groups have recently been trying to fill in the gap and rectify the situation as best they can. The Metroplex Civic & Business Association (MCBA) launched its own “Adopt-a-Block” program in which affiliated companies take responsibility for cleaning up some parts of Dallas.
“As we looked around this last year, it seemed clear that in the city of Dallas … there [are] parts of the city where people are coming in from out of town, and frankly, they’ve just been really dirty,” he said, adding that trash gets strewn about in public places and not picked up,” MCBA CEO Louis Darrouzet previously told The Dallas Express.
Relatedly, polling shows that 76% of residents are frustrated with homelessness, vagrancy, and panhandling. While the City is engaged in several homelessness response initiatives, it has yet to try out the “one-stop-shop” model, which concentrates homeless services in the same location as emergency housing. However, some local stakeholders are working to bring such a model to Dallas. The model has polled favorably among Dallas residents, but whether officials will adopt the model remains to be seen.
“If the City is not taking charge of this [and] keeping our roads and streets and sidewalks clean … it’s our community, it’s our responsibility at the end of the day,” Darrouzet said.
