Make California Post a Preferred Source Los Angeles has been compared to a Third World dumping ground as mountains of illegally discarded garbage pile up on its streets — with fed-up residents accusing City Hall of letting the filthy mess spiral out of control.
Now incoming Mayor Nithya Raman is facing demands to clean up the city after voting to hike residential trash collection fees by 54% last year.
City sanitation records obtained by the California Post after a four-month fight reveal crews hauled away a staggering 44.2 million pounds of illegally dumped garbage in just 16 months — and that’s only the trash they managed to collect.
The scale of the problem was laid bare when a woman casually tossed an old tire rim into a South Los Angeles alley as the California Post interviewed a community activist about the neighborhood’s mounting garbage.
“Not even India shocked me like LA,” said Juan Naula, a volunteer who has spent the past two years helping clean up the city’s streets.
“My city is clean, and we are a Third World country,” he added, referring to his hometown in Ecuador.
Naula, who moved to Los Angeles from Virginia in 2024, was so appalled by the mountains of discarded furniture, mattresses and household junk that he launched Clean LA With Me.
The group says it has since mobilized more than 800 volunteers, cleaned up over 200 neighborhoods and hauled away more than 50,000 pounds of trash.
But while volunteers are reaching into their own pockets to tackle the filth, taxpayers are footing an enormous cleanup bill.
City records show crews removed 27.3 million pounds of illegally dumped garbage in 2025 and another 16.9 million pounds through April 2026.
The cost of clearing the mess hit $42 million in 2025, with the bill continuing to mount this year.
Raman, who takes office in December, voted in 2025 to approve an initial 54% garbage collection fee hike, with additional increases scheduled through 2029.
Monthly trash bills for single-family homes have already soared nearly 64%, from $36.32 to $59.53, and are set to hit $65.93 by 2029.
Naula believes the cost of legally disposing of unwanted junk, on top of regular trash bills, is helping fuel the dumping epidemic.
“People don’t want to pay $115 to go and dump the trash,” he said.
He knows the expense firsthand, sometimes paying disposal fees two or three times a week out of his own pocket to get rid of garbage collected by volunteers.
And despite residents paying more for sanitation services, the city’s efforts to catch illegal dumpers have been crippled by staffing shortages.
Records reveal illegal-dumping investigations largely ground to a halt in July 2024, leaving 350 cases backlogged by May 2025.
The crisis is particularly acute in working-class South Los Angeles, where sanitation crews hauled away 5.5 million pounds of illegally dumped garbage from a single council district in 2025.
Two other districts covering parts of South LA and Downtown accounted for another 8.8 million pounds.
Together, the three districts accounted for more than half of all illegally dumped garbage collected citywide that year.
“The problem of illegal street garbage dumping is widespread and growing in South L.A.,” longtime community activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, told the California Post.
Hutchinson accused City Hall of allowing trash to pile up for days or even weeks despite repeated complaints from residents.
He believes some dumpers deliberately target South LA because they expect little chance of getting caught.
“A lot of it is done by those outside the area who recognize that there is no real likelihood of a penalty or prosecution if caught dumping in South L.A.,” he said.
Residents have also struggled to get the city to remove existing piles of garbage.
Naula said frustrated residents increasingly turn to his organization after repeatedly seeking help through the city’s 311 service.
Hutchinson described similar frustrations. He told the California Post his early requests for garbage removal were rejected because sanitation crews “would not collect loose trash unless it was stuffed into tied bags.”
“So we began buying the bags ourselves,” he said.
The crisis stretches well beyond Los Angeles city limits.
Los Angeles County Public Works reported hauling away more than 49 million pounds of illegally dumped waste in 2025, a 14% increase over the previous year.
County cleanup spending nearly tripled in four years, climbing from $2.3 million in fiscal year 2019-20 to $6.8 million in 2023-24.
The county also logged 14,106 illegal-dumping reports in 2025.
“Enforcement takes time,” County Public Works told the California Post.
“When evidence identifies haulers or other people responsible for dumping, our agencies pursue those leads,” officials added.
But both Naula and Hutchinson said that abandoned garbage creates a domino effect, with each pile attracting more trash as people see others getting away with dumping.
“When people see trash dumped on the street, they think it’s OK to dump theirs there too,” Naula said.
For Hutchinson, the growing cleanup costs mean little without faster service and tougher enforcement.
“Simply putting up billboards imploring residents to call and report garbage dumping is meaningless,” he said.
He urged Raman to declare an illegal-dumping emergency in South LA, deploy dedicated cleanup crews and expand enforcement.
Naula, meanwhile, hopes to raise enough money to hire more workers as residents increasingly turn to his organization for help.
But he insisted City Hall cannot solve the crisis alone.
“It’s not just the government, OK? Everybody. Also, the people have to do their part,” he said.
