A New ‘Sanitation First’ Pilot Borrows from a Portland Program that’s Moved Most of its Workers into Permanent Housing
Oakland’s new “Sanitation First” policy, unveiled by Mayor Barbara Lee earlier this year, will offer payments to homeless individuals for cleaning up areas surrounding encampments.
“I established the Office of Homeless Solutions so we’re looking at out-of-the-box solutions that are working in other areas to try to put pilots here in our own city to see if it works,” Lee said. The proposed pilot program draws its inspiration from Portland’s GLITTER project, which operates similarly.
Portland’s Successful GLITTER Program
GLITTER, which stands for Ground Score Leading Inclusively Together Through Environmental Recovery, is an innovative program led by the Ground Score Association.
The program focuses on hiring people who are currently experiencing or have recently experienced homelessness to provide specialized waste management services tailored to the needs of their homeless neighbors. Each worker is paid between $20 and $29 an hour to pick up waste along designated routes within the city and provide tent-side trash collection for people living outside.
The results have been remarkable. From 2021 through 2024, the GLITTER program removed 2,590,417 pounds of trash, including 177,521 sharps, significantly reducing biohazard risk in the city. In 2024 alone, workers picked up over 110 pounds of cigarette butts and diverted 84,834 pounds of collected waste from landfill.
At the time of the city’s program evaluation, the program employed 63 people, 95% of whom have experienced homelessness. 81% of workers report that their physical health has improved since joining the program, and 52% report that their mental health has improved.
The program may also have a positive impact on substance abuse recovery efforts, as it’s seen a 75% reduction in workers who reported active substance abuse addiction from their first shift until now. Overall, the percentage of workers who said they were in active addiction fell from 48 to just 12.
83% of workers who lived in tents during their first pickup shifts are now in permanent housing. The other 17% are in temporary housing. This program is working for the people in it, and it’s working for the city at large, with only a minimum investment required for such noticeable improvements.
Although the city shares the costs for this service, the program seems well regarded for its high impact with relatively low investment and is likely to be prioritized even amid upcoming budget cuts.
“We value this highly effective program and have no plans to make any cuts to GLITTER,” city spokesperson Laura Rude told The Oregonian. This combination of efficacy and political expediency may make it a great fit for Oakland, where a spinoff pilot program is soon to be implemented.
Will It Work as Well in Oakland?
When this pilot program was first proposed earlier this year, it met with resistance from Portland City Council. Opponents imagined the program could create a perverse incentive that would encourage homeless people to make more of a mess to be paid to clean it up.
Advocates pointed to the successful Portland program, citing its hourly rate rather than a “by the bag” payment structure and its unique tent-side pickup component as mitigating factors that could prevent that kind of abuse. Now, Mayor Lee has reintroduced the proposal and is confident a pilot program will move forward, though the timeframe has yet to be announced.
At the same time, the city is facing major issues with illegal dumping, often from commercial sources, which Mayor Lee is also trying to address. Residents have even suggested that homeless encampments in the city have become target locations for illegal dumping operations, since extra waste either goes unnoticed there by the general public, or its presence is blamed on the homeless people living nearby.
The trash left behind by illegal dumping often consists of bulky items that may be difficult for individual workers to dispose of properly. Because of this, the illegal dumping issue will likely need to be solved separately for Mayor Lee’s “sanitation first” strategy to see drastic changes in Oakland similar to Portland’s results.
To Have ‘Sanitation First,’ Oakland Must Curb Illegal Dumping
The housed people of Oakland are not immune to making a mess of the place, though it’s often the homeless people who get the blame for that. While much of the illegal dumping seen in Oakland is carried out by commercial contractors, a new city report has found that the majority of illegal dumping in the city actually stems from residential sources.
Oakland City Auditor Michael C. Houston expressed his surprise at the report’s findings. “I’m well aware that we have unscrupulous contractors that dump in our city, people who don’t even live in Oakland dump in our city,” he said. “To learn that a lot of our illegal dumping problem is homegrown from residents dumping onto our public rights of way, that was a bit of a surprise.”
A new local ordinance has gone into effect that raises the penalties for illegal dumping to $1,500 for the first offense, $3,000 for the second offense, and $5,000 for any further offense thereafter.
At the state level, Mayor Lee is supporting SB 1218, a bill that will stop people from renewing their vehicle registration if they have unpaid illegal dumping fines. The city is also looking at installing cameras to catch illegal dumping and identify local hotspots and increasing the size of residents’ trash cans to accommodate more household trash in the existing waste stream.
But the crown jewel in Oakland’s multi-faceted campaign against illegal dumping is the purpose-built, heavy-duty dump truck equipped with a hydraulic crane and a mechanical claw. This beast of a vehicle has already been deployed across the city to tackle some of the city’s bulkiest trash, with the mayor posting before-and-after shots of newly cleaned city streets on her Instagram.
The grappling truck, known as the “Lightning Loader,” is making a noticeable difference for communities in Oakland, and hopefully soon, its new trash-picking pilot program will be, too.
