Have you ever noticed how Philly doesn’t have a lot of graffiti versus other U.S. cities or even towns — and this is true in nearly all parts of the city, rich or poor?

Honestly, I had never noticed it until a few weeks ago.

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I was doing follow-up research on my prior work on Philly311, where I had discovered differences in service speed based on living in richer or poorer zip codes. To my surprise, I discovered that there are several City agencies who do an absolutely amazing job at providing high quality services to everyone, rich or poor.

Of the seven large city departments that I looked into (Office of Homeless Services, Parks & Rec, CLIP, Streets, Fire, Police, Licenses and Inspections), three have impressive performance stats when it comes to responding to residents’ 311 requests.

Philadelphia’s 311 system publishes a target Service Level Agreement (SLA) for when an issue will be looked into. Some of the SLAs are completely unrealistic (e.g., shoveling snow within one business day, which is obviously unreasonable to do citywide in the middle of a snowstorm when this service is needed).

The Office of Homeless Services is ranked first at 93.3 percent of tickets meeting the SLA, but it handled only 3,973 tickets over the two years of data in my analysis.

By comparison, CLIP, the Community Life Improvement Program, closed 91.3 percent of its 40,043 tickets within the SLA. I’d never heard of CLIP before doing this research into 311; their website says in the first sentence their mission is to “make the City a nicer place to live.” And they do this primarily through cleaning graffiti and litter (sometimes with the help of residents doing community service hours).

CLIP’s 91.3 percent on-time performance score is an aggregate, but it’s worth deep-diving into their biggest service: graffiti removal, code SR-CL01, which comprises 21,533 closed tickets since the start of 2024. What’s more, their median close time for graffiti is 4.9 days.

Moreover, that 4.9 day median is the same for rich and poor zip codes (4.84 days for lower-income zips and 4.70 days, a practically insignificant difference of 3.4 hours). Having previously written that most departments have measurably worse service levels in lower income zips, it’s pleasant to see CLIP breaking that pattern in its handling of graffiti, and treating all Philadelphians the same.

To put a bow on it, if you submit a Philly311 graffiti ticket on Monday, there’s a 50-50 chance that, by Friday, they will not only have cleaned it up but also will have updated the tracking status in the 311 system.

How CLIP achieves success

“CLIP has always taken a proactive approach to tackling quality-of-life issues by inspecting entire blocks rather than simply reacting to isolated complaints,” says Tom Conway, Deputy Managing Director of CLIP.

In other words, when you report a problem, their crews don’t just solve the problem but also look around for related problems, since quality of life issues arise in clusters. Graffiti occurs adjacent to litter and overgrown grass on empty lots. To make it even more tangible, when a CLIP crew shows up to clean the graffiti you reported, they may also cut the grass and clean up the nearby litter, knowing that these issues are all concomitant. Aside from making your block look nicer, CLIP’s approach also gets closer to solving a root cause of urban decay: neglect.

When we were talking through my research, Conway was ruefully aware both of how good his department is – and how little it’s known amongst normal Philadelphians.

He was not nonchalant when I joked I’d never heard of them before this research, but, conversely, when talking about his team’s impressive performance, he was proud to explain, “The cultural connection to communities throughout Philadelphia makes CLIP employees strive to be the most efficient and effective as it is their neighborhood they are cleaning. This dedication is clear and shines through in the data highlighted in [your research].”

Conway has been with CLIP and its predecessor agencies for about 30 years. The program began as a graffiti cleanup initiative under Mayor Ed Rendell in the late 1990s and still handles roughly 20,000 complaints a year.

Now here’s the cool part … I was able to rigorously test five hypotheses for what we can learn from the higher performing departments CLIP (and Streets & Parks & Rec), and it turns out there are three operational behaviors that can be copied and implemented in other departments to improve both their overall performance and equity.

There are several City agencies who do an absolutely amazing job at providing high quality services to everyone, rich or poor.

First, high performing departments have a realistic target close date. If your goal is absurdly easy or absurdly hard, it ceases to be a goal and you ignore it. If you set a goal to walk 20 miles a day, you will most likely end up ignoring that number every day, as it’s unrealistic to walk 140 miles in a week. If instead the goal were to walk one mile per day, you’d likely work to achieve it. That’s human nature, and applies to large organizations as well as individuals.

Second, high performing departments use job-specific ticket types for each kind of work they do, rather than having “catch all” categories. Specific tickets means you can create specialized crews and procedures, and then also measure each type of work against its own (fair) benchmark. This increases accountability and expertise. It’s the same basic principle underlying the Ford assembly line or Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Specialize, and get really, really good at one thing.

Third, treat all people the same. This sounds trivial and philosophical. It is not. In performing departments, the gap between how they serve richer zips versus poorer zips is essentially zero. For example, the difference in like-for-like work between richer and poorer zips at Parks and Rec is -0.13 days, Streets is 0.8 days, and CLIP’s graffiti work is 0.15 days. By comparison, two lower performing departments are not close. The Department of Licenses and Inspections has a 28.4 day gap and the Philadelphia Police Department at 41.0 days.

There is evidence that equity is a cause of high performance, not a symptom of it. When a department operationally, culturally and procedurally treats all residents the same, it humanizes all residents more. CLIP is not cleaning graffiti from a Kensington alley or a Society Hill mansion: They’re simply cleaning Philly for Philadelphians.

This article is based on an analysis of nearly 1.5 million Philly311 tickets spanning 2024 to early 2026.

Nick Jain is a Philly resident who has been CEO of both trucking and software companies. He now co-leads Eagle Rock AI. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and writes the blog Looking Closer, from which this was adapted. He previously lived in Strawberry Mansion and now lives in Fairmount.

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