How dirty is Fresno? This list says we’re worse than New York, LA, San Francisco

Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer started Beautify Fresno shortly after taking office, targeting the poor curb appeal of the city, and featured on its website is a quote: “We have allowed the new norm to be one of blight, litter and debris within our business complexes, streets, neighborhoods and freeways. The trash is so visible, yet so many drive by without even noticing it …”

Mr. Mayor, someone noticed.

Fresno has been named as the eighth-dirtiest city in a nationwide survey by LawnStarter, a lawn care and landscaping startup that highlights life in the U.S. with a variety of lists.

It ranked 152 of the largest cities in the country by pollution, living conditions, infrastructure and consumer satisfaction. Fresno ranked among the worst in consumer satisfaction, with the fifth-highest percentage of residents who are dissatisfied with garbage disposal, pollution, greenery and parks and the percentage of residents who find the city to be dirty and untidy.

It trailed only San Bernardino, Alexandria, Va., Newark, N.J. and Detroit.

The overall dirtiest city? Houston. It ranked third in pollution, fourth in living conditions and 12th in infrastructure. But Houston residents apparently are more content, lending to the city ranking 34th in consumer satisfaction.

Pollution was measured by a number of factors including median air quality index and presence of water quality violations; living conditions by markers including population density, overcrowded homes and signs of mice or rats; infrastructure by tons of waste in landfills and the number of junk yards and consumer satisfaction by share of residents who find the city dirty or untidy and dissatisfied with greenery and parks.

Fresno ranked 31st in pollution, 81st in living conditions and 121st in infrastructure, so clearly there are cities out there in much worse shape. But, apparently, no one is happy about it.

Beautify Fresno, meanwhile, continues on. It has a cleanup event scheduled for Saturday at Lafayette Park.

“The City of Fresno and Mayor Jerry Dyer’s Beautify Fresno initiative have made tremendous strides in improving the overall cleanliness and curb appeal of our great city – and community pride is a big part of that,” said Sontaya Rose, director of communications for the city. “In 2022, we had 8,769 volunteers sign up to collect 11,106 bags of trash in our city (and) 1,900 of these volunteers were brand new first-timers.

“We hosted 120 clean-up events and by far surpassed our goal of collecting one million pounds of trash. In fact, we are happy to report we collected 2.1 million pounds of trash last year. Despite these achievements, there is still much to be done, and we look forward to continuing our work with this dedicated community of volunteers.”

There were three California cities in the top 10 with San Bernardino coming in at No. 3 and Bakersfield at No. 6 and seven in the top 20 with Nos. 14-17 Ontario, Los Angeles, Modesto and Palmdale. California had more cities in the Dirty Top 20 than any other state, well ahead of Florida, New Jersey, New York and Texas with two apiece.

San Francisco was ranked No. 97, San Diego No. 103 and Sacramento No. 132.

This story was originally published January 26, 2023 at 1:32 PM.