All topics / Basic Services for All New Yorkers / Department of Sanitation
Lots cleaned citywide
Clean streets, sidewalks, and vacant lots and address quality-of-life issues. — Increase street and sidewalk cleanliness.
The steady decline in vacant lots cleaned is mostly a resourcing story: DSNY's own reporting attributes the FY22-to-FY23 dip partly to its new Targeted Neighborhood Taskforce providing more regular upkeep of these properties (shifting some work out of this count), and it explicitly attributes the much larger FY24-to-FY25 drop to City budget cuts to the lot-cleaning program.
Researched July 16, 2026 — DSNY, Fiscal 2023 Mayor's Management Report, DSNY, Fiscal 2025 Mayor's Management Report
* Year to date — this fiscal year isn't complete, so it's not compared against prior years in the target/trend status above.
View as table
| Fiscal year | Actual | Target |
|---|---|---|
| FY22 | 1,652 lots | 3,200 lots |
| FY23 | 1,440 lots | 3,200 lots |
| FY24 | 534 lots | 3,200 lots |
| FY25 | 101 lots | 3,200 lots |
| FY26 (YTD) | Not available | 3,200 lots |
Why this is tracked
Before the 1890s, New York's streets were littered with horse manure, garbage, and human waste, conditions that contributed to disease and were long tolerated under patronage-driven city government. When Colonel George E. Waring Jr. became Street Cleaning Commissioner in 1894 after a brief ouster of Tammany Hall, he built a disciplined, uniformed cleaning force (the "White Wings") and organized systematic street sweeping and garbage sorting, reforms that reshaped city sanitation practice. Today DSNY continues this mission through routine street and sidewalk cleaning, a dedicated Lot Cleaning Unit for vacant City-owned lots (which prevents them from becoming eyesores or pest habitats), and enforcement against illegal dumping and litter.
George Waring - Colonel, Sanitation & NYC - HISTORY, How to Successfully Reform a Bureaucracy: George Waring & the Department of Street Cleaning, Oversight of Street Cleanliness in NYC - NYC Council Data Team
Source: Bureau of Cleaning & Collection — via NYC Open Data: Mayor's Management Report, Agency Performance Indicators
Coverage shown: FY22–FY26, reported pmmr/mmr.
Definition: Total City-owned and private lots cleaned by DSNY.