An old couch, the remains of a black massage chair and a refrigerator with its door open clutter 4th Street and New Hampshire Avenue on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street.
On Berendo Street, two refrigerators, both full-sized, lay splayed out on the lawn on a sunny day in late January. Both were tagged with graffiti.
The items are unremarkable, but they speak to the volume of trash that falls into Koreatown — one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods for illegal dumping, according to the latest available data from the city.
“Every single person in my building — that’s their top concern,” said Tania Ramos, who was born and raised in Koreatown and serves on the Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council. “It’s so horrible.”
From April 1 to Dec. 31, 2025, the city received a total of 206 illegal dumping reports at 4th Street and New Hampshire in Koreatown, according to an analysis of public data by Crosstown. The next highest count in that time frame was the 117 calls on the 7300 block of Lennox Avenue in Van Nuys, which leads overall for calls for service across the city.
Los Angeles overhauled its data last March, making it difficult to compare data from previous years.
Residents say the reporting system itself can feel ineffective.
“All the city tells us is to contact 311,” Ramos said. “They redirect you, but you have to wait and wait, and we end up being the ones that have to do neighborhood cleanups.”
The most impacted neighborhood from the 9-month period of April–December 2025 was Van Nuys, with 15,671 calls for service. Koreatown received 12,640 calls. Westlake ranked sixth, and Boyle Heights stood eighth, according to the data.
A spokesperson for Councilmember Heather Hutt, who represents part of Koreatown, did not respond to requests for comment about the long wait times and the high volume of illegal dumping.
Illegal dumping is a long-festering problem in Los Angeles. While in some instances it involves an individual tossing a few trash bags on a corner, it often means discarded furniture, mounds of unsold fruit or construction detritus dumped in a vacant lot or an alley at night by someone who does not want to pay a disposal fee.
Ramos said delays can stretch into weeks.
“Recently, there was a toilet in front of my building, and it took four to five weeks for it to get cleaned up,” she said.
Pablo Cardoso, director of environmental services at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, said illegal dumping has “always been an issue.”
“For our crews, yes, there have been more requests to go and pick up bulky items,” he said.
Cardoso believes convenience and limited infrastructure both play a role.
“My personal opinion about it is that people are just lazy and the easy way to get rid of their unwanted furniture is to just dump it in front of their building,” he said. “I also don’t think that these condos or apartments where they live don’t have the dumping or trash bins for big furniture.”
Sometimes there are hazardous materials. At a Jan. 14 meeting of the City Council’s Public Works Committee, Nicholas Fuentes, with the city sanitation bureau’s Livability Services Division, said asbestos in abandoned commercial and construction material is a problem.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez chairs the committee and said during the meeting that some residents don’t use or know about the free hazardous waste drop-offs the city offers and instead resort to dumping.
“I come across buckets full of oil in my district, like on the side of the road,” Hernandez said. “That means someone got the oil, put it in the buckets, put it in their mode of transportation, drove to this place and dropped it off.”
The city offers free bulky item pick-up for residents getting rid of that old desk or mattress (it involves lugging the item to the curb on trash day). But illegal dumping is a criminal offense, and perpetrators can be fined up to $1,000.
“Do they call 311? I hope they do,” Cardoso said. “Is 311 the best system? It’s there, but I don’t know. What I know is that they’re overwhelmed with requests.”
Awareness of the service remains low, organizers say.
“When I would promote 311, which is a free service, a majority of people do not know about it,” said Pia Cadanela of No Harm KTLA, a volunteer group that does trash pickups in the neighborhood twice a month. “Even people who volunteer with us would be surprised. They did not know that there’s a free pick-up service by the city.”
The issue is not new. In 2021, then-City Controller Ron Galperin authored a report titled “Piling Up: Addressing L.A.’s Illegal Dumping Problem.” Yet the document’s suggestions on how to combat the practice have produced few tangible results.
Fourth and New Hampshire may be a dumping destination because of one corner: While apartment buildings and the Joohyang Presbyterian Church occupy three parts of the intersection, the southeast corner holds a vacant lot, with a series of tents by a retaining wall.
It’s likely already being monitored by the city. Fuentes said his team works on problem points in each of the 15 council districts.
“We have identified with the directors of each council district those chronic locations, and we know that they need to be serviced on a regular basis,” he said at the committee meeting.
Although Fourth and New Hampshire suffered more than anywhere else in the city last year, it was not the only destination for frequent dumpers in Koreatown. There were 57 MyLA311 reports at 3525 W. Third St., a strip mall. That ranked ninth in the city.
Cardoso said dumping tends to snowball after the first items are left behind.
“I drive by the streets, and there might be one or a couple of chairs,” he said. “And then later I drive by again, and it’s like, ‘Oh, now there’s a sofa. Now there’s a fridge.’”
“People see that little pile, and they’re like, ‘Oh, let’s add to that pile,’” he continued.
Ramos said residents are left frustrated by what she sees as a lack of outreach.
“I’ve never seen a city representative go door to door with resources and inform community members,” Ramos said.
She added, “It’s a combination of a lot of things — a lack of community education, lack of city outreach, lack of getting to the complaints, long response times — which can discourage people from contacting 311 because they have to wait too long.”
