Sure, we love ranking as the one of the best cities in the world, or one of the best U.S. cities for quality of life. But to not rank at number one on the nation’s dirtiest cities list—we’ll gladly take that feat.
NYC ranked as low as 17th on the dirtiest cities of America, according to a study from HouseFresh. This independent website on air quality measured dirtiness based off a city’s amount of sanitary complaints.
More specifically, HouseFresh looked at 12.3 million sanitation-related complaints to 311 over the last year to determine the ranking. The sanitation-related complaints varied across 644 categories, including keywords such as garbage, waste and recycling.
So whether we ranked so low because New Yorkers have become so accustom to our own filth, that’s not for us to wonder—a win is a win!
In fact, the dirtiest city in America came out to be Baltimore, Maryland, with nearly 50,000 sanitary complaints per 100K population over the last year. Six out of the 10 dirtiest zip codes in America belonged to Baltimore. For comparison, Los Angeles received 21,616 complaints per 100K population and NYC only received 3,728 per 100K population.
Inversely, the cleanest city in America proved to be Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with only 309 complaints. Meanwhile, the cleanest zip code in America was 77546 in Houston, Texas.
NYC’s dirtiest zip code was none other than 11216 in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. That zip code alone saw over 7,600 311 complaints per 100K population within the year.
The study documented the cleanest zip code as 11040 in New Hyde Park, though this neighborhood is technically part of Long Island. Here, only 176 311 complaints per 100K population were made.
HouseFresh noted that Brooklyn’s population has steadily rose 6.8% since 2020. Therefore, “with such a high turnover of people using the borough as their base, it’s no surprise that its cleanliness has suffered as a cost of its hospitality.”
You can explore the study’s full ranking online now. Not to mention, there’s a search function that lets you input any U.S. city you’d like so you can find the dirtiest and cleanest zip codes in that area.