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Kate Holterhoff is an artist and volunteer teacher who works with urban kids in Cincinnati. When a boy in her summer class lets a candy wrapper fall from his hand to the ground, one of his friends snaps at him, “‘Don’t trash the ’Nati!’” Like magic, the first boy picks up his litter. Holterhoff smiles to herself. The second boy repeated the slogan that a focus group of her mother’s Keep Cincinnati Beautiful came up with to raise litter awareness among teenagers.

According to Keep America Beautiful statistics, Cincinnati litter declined about 3% citywide from 2006 to 2007. A small improvement, but it has not been easy getting there.

When the city first introduced Project 180 Degrees, a comprehensive plan to remove blight, Keep Cincinnati Beautiful’s Linda Holterhoff says the entire population was not as involved or informed as it should have been before the launch. The cart was put before the horse. That project failed because without 100% community buy-in, she says, no litter clean-up project can be sustained.

Cincinnati comprises 52 communities roughly divided by police reporting areas. City manager Milton Dohoney thought it would be more fiscally responsible to target neighborhoods where stray trash appeared most prevalent. Holterhoff acquired a crime density map of the city and compared it to a blight index detailing abandoned buildings, empty lots, foreclosures and graffiti. They overlaid perfectly.

“The city has to have the political will to focus on hotspot areas,” Holterhoff warns. “Sometimes you have to use a hammer.”

Cincinnati’s hammer is a thorough, 90-day inspection of each of the 14 most littered communities on the blight index. A task force of police, health department officials, building inspectors, community activists, a Keep America Beautiful representative and a city council member spend three months clearing litter from city property and ticketing offenders in each trouble area before moving on to the next.

As part of a Zero Tolerance Initiative, former Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls established an office for administrative hearing and citation. The civil office takes on many building, weed and litter violations that had before languished in the criminal arena where lengthy court processes could take years to impose fines. Now fines for abandoned appliances, improper trash containers, overgrown weeds and accumulated litter are levied quickly.

“Cincinnati was fairly clean—except for these hotspots—but after targeting them, litter has gone down citywide,” Holterhoff says. “And coupled with an economic development push, there’s been revitalization of some of these areas. There’s hope again.”

Two new restaurants are set to open in a section of downtown that Cincinnati Public Services Director Andrew Glenn says was practically uninhabitable a few years ago due to blight and litter.

“Our biggest homerun was forming a public partnership with the Cincinnati Central Business District,” Glenn says. “We combine with their ambassadors to keep the area clean, sweep up and collect the cans after hours instead of when everyone is downtown.”

Now Cincinnati deals with each litter issue the same way. First, it pinpoints the source of the litter. Then it uses a four-pronged approach to reduce the problem: education, technology, ordinances and enforcement.

After determining that 71% of Hamilton County’s roadside litter comes from males ages 15 to 34—many of them urban dropouts—Keep Cincinnati Beautiful was tasked with targeting that demographic. Holterhoff’s group custom fitted a van with Keep Cincinnati Beautiful logos, a basketball goal and a rim-rocking sound system. It sponsors promotional 3-on-3 tournaments and shootouts for T-shirts and prizes in urban neighborhoods, and hands out copies of compilation CDs. In between hip-hop and soul tracks from the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, young people hear PSAs about keeping the city clean and the catchy slogan that sounds like a rap chorus already: “Don’t trash the ’Nati.”

So how much is a cleaner Cincinnati costing?

City officials required that any war on litter be waged within the existing budget. That means the Ohio Department of Health and the state Buildings Inspection Division continually divert resources from other areas to focus on reducing blight in the city. In the past two years the CPD has logged overtime hours for police officers working the litter beat totaling more than $285,000, funds that existed in the budget already. Keep Cincinnati Beautiful has spent nearly $75,000 in the same span, mostly on art projects, landscaping and beautification strategies like painting garbage cans and recycling bins. A portion of that money came from a privately funded Safe & Clean grant. Since 1998, the organization has spent more than $300,000 on radio and outdoor advertising. Each year the city’s Public Services department spends more than $1 million on cleaning up its 52 neighborhoods.

Some areas of the city saw litter levels drop as much as 19% in 2007. In other neighborhoods the problem is on the rise. Cincinnati’s strategies are not perfect.

“Litter is a complex problem, a behavioral problem that crosses all socio-economic and cultural boundaries,” Holterhoff says. “And it’s about expectations. Take movie theaters for example. There was a time when you were allowed to leave your garbage at your seat for someone else to clean up. It is now expected that you take your garbage out and place it in the cans before you leave. It’s just a matter of what behavior is expected of you.”