It’s hard to stay calm when it’s your job to rid Oakland, Calif., of trash.

Josh Rowan, the city’s acting public works director, becomes irate when he drives through the canyons of cardboard boxes, mattresses and busted appliances in Oakland.

“I stay furious, piping mad, dropping F-bombs kind of furious,” he said on a recent morning as he sifted through sour-smelling garbage beside a road. He said his anger fueled his work.

“I love this city, but what’s up with all of the trash?”

Oakland, long regarded as a scrappy, more affordable city across the bay from San Francisco, has struggled since the pandemic with crime, an enormous deficit and a civic embarrassment when its mayor was recalled and federally indicted.

But the city’s residents are especially frustrated with illegal dumping these days. Makeshift, open-air landfills choke sidewalks, sully schoolyards and anger business owners across the city.

Illegal dumping plagues cities nationwide, but Oakland has one of the nation’s worst problems when accounting for the city’s smaller footprint and population of 444,000. Based on rough estimates provided by local governments, it appears that only a handful of larger cities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, pick up more illegally discarded garbage each year.

Oakland has become so infamous for street garbage that a local artist erected a sign renaming the city “Trashland,” and a city councilman suggested that the moniker might be more apt than being named after the oak trees that once predominated.

“It is hurtful, but we are a land full of trash, and we have to own it,” said Sandra Bethune, 76, a resident who was born and raised in Oakland.

Eighteen million pounds of illegally dumped trash were collected last year, according to city officials, equivalent to about 41 pounds per resident. But Oakland residents believe those statistics don’t tell the complete story, because they don’t measure how much garbage isn’t picked up by the city.

Besides causing visual distress, Mr. Rowan said, the trash attracts vermin and poses environmental risks, such as water contamination from litter and hazardous waste, as well as localized flooding from clogging storm drains.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr. Rowan, 52, recalled telling the former mayor of Oakland before he was hired in 2024 and relocated from Atlanta.

Blessed with mild weather year-round and set along the San Francisco Bay, Oakland otherwise has the ingredients for natural beauty. At Lake Merritt, considered the nation’s first wildlife refuge, ducks and long-necked herons squawk in the center of town. To the east, hiking trails wind through cool redwood forests and reward visitors with stunning views at the top.

Trash piles are most concentrated in the western and southern corners of the city, but the problem, which spiked in 2020 and hasn’t abated, feels intractable to many living throughout Oakland. On a recent radio call-in show, Barbara Lee, the Democratic former congresswoman and Oakland’s new mayor, was asked about illegal dumping more than any other topic.

Oakland trash videos regularly go viral on social media. There was the one of children walking in the road because garbage was blocking their path to school. Another one of neighbors baffled by the 180 tires piled on the sidewalk. Yet another showing a grandmother who was forced to navigate her walker through garbage.

“It’s just gotten to the point where this is a crisis,” said Roberta Avant, 69, who lives in East Oakland. “It’s disheartening for people to come into our city, especially guests from out of town, and to have to prepare them for what they’re going to see here. Even for me to see it, it’s frightening.”

Surprisingly, city officials say that hauling away more trash isn’t the answer.

They believe that regularly clearing dump sites, perversely, has led to even more dumping, with both locals and out-of-towners relying on the city’s cleanup efforts to get rid of their residential and commercial waste for free.

The amount of illegally dumped trash that the city collects annually has increased sixfold since 2015, according to city data. And yet the problem seems as bad as ever.

“Let me get this couch and stick it on the corner, and then the city will pick it up — people have gotten used to it,” said Ken Houston, a councilman who represents East Oakland, a working-class neighborhood where dumping is particularly severe.

Some of the illegal trash is construction debris. Concrete slurry was recently poured out on a city street. And officials suspect that illegal hauling services are unloading customers’ items in empty lots to avoid paying disposal fees.

Critics often blame the residents of the city’s many homeless encampments, but much of the garbage was unlikely theirs, such as drywall, washing machines, airplane tires and upholstered furniture. Based on what city crews have observed during cleanups, Mr. Rowan estimates that two-thirds of illegally dumped material comes from city residents and businesses.

Standing by a heap of garbage under an overpass, Mr. Rowan pointed to a shattered coffee machine, takeout boxes, children’s books and other household trash. As he examined the pile with a reporter, someone drove by and threw a glass bottle from the car window onto the dump pile.

Mr. Rowan said that city residents were largely to blame, despite the narrative that people come from elsewhere to use the city as a dumping ground. Local attitudes toward littering and dumping trash have become too lax, he suggested.

The city has tried to increase enforcement in recent years, to little avail. It relaunched an investigative team that digs through trash to determine its source, and has installed dozens of surveillance cameras at dumping hot spots to try to deter offenders.

But sifting through trash and reviewing hours of footage is labor-intensive — a challenge for a city that struggles with budget problems each year. The city has collected only a small fraction of issued fines, which top out at $1,500. Securing criminal prosecution for larger fines or jail time is even harder. The district attorney in Alameda County has a backlog of violent crimes that take higher priority, Mr. Rowan said.

To tackle the mess, he said, the city needs to focus on why it exists. He hopes to stop trash from ever hitting the ground.

For starters, he wants to lower prices for large residential curbside trash cans by renegotiating the city’s waste management contract.

Many families use 20-gallon cans, most likely much smaller than what they actually need, because Oakland has some of the highest waste collection fees in Alameda County. The city charges $110 per month for a 64-gallon can, compared with roughly $50 in the nearby cities of Emeryville and Fremont.

Oakland recently upgraded 350 homes in East Oakland to bigger trash cans at no cost to test that theory and found that it drastically reduced trash on the street, Mr. Rowan said.

He also wants the city to forcibly sign up businesses for trash service to discourage them from dumping their trash in alleyways and other public spaces.

In the meantime, Oakland residents have tried to take matters into their own hands, and some have even installed their own cameras to catch illegal dumpers.

Vincent Ray Williams III, an Oakland native, started a volunteer group called Urban Compassion Project in 2020 that now attracts big crowds for its biweekly cleanups in Oakland. Mr. Williams had been recently released from prison and was shocked by how dirty the city had become. He felt inspired to buy some trash bags and clean a park that was littered with needles, broken crack pipes and beer bottles.

“When I was 9, I was homeless in that park, and it was clean,” said Mr. Williams, 38, adding, “We’re failing each other as a society.”

Andy Wang, a 30-year-old engineer, became a local celebrity after he posted time-lapse videos of his trash cleanups across the Bay Area. But he recently decided to do fewer in Oakland after realizing that about 70 percent of the sites he cleaned became dirty again within two weeks.

“It’s defeating,” Mr. Wang said, adding, “I need the city to do its part.”

While residents are losing patience, Mr. Rowan says he believes that Oakland can cut illegal dumping by half over the next year through the measures he outlined. City leaders also want residents to take more responsibility for their actions.

Ms. Lee said in her radio interview that she hoped to install anti-littering billboards in Oakland. Mr. Rowan has his own idea. He wants to ask MC Hammer, an Oakland native who rose to rap fame in the 1990s, to rerecord his hit “U Can’t Touch This.”

Mr. Rowan’s suggested title? “U Can’t Dump This.”