Buildings and other areas defaced by graffiti vandalism can be early signs of urban blight, dwindling property values and poor quality of life for residents. Graffiti — spray-painted images often associated with gangs, but also including hate and non-threatening messages — accounts for 35 percent of vandalism cases, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and costs many communities thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars in cleanup costs. In response, local officials are creating programs to prevent and remove graffiti to restore their neighborhoods.

Until recently, the Fort Collins, Colo., Utilities Department was dispatched frequently to clean graffiti on transformer boxes throughout the city's Old Town area, spending up to 60 hours monthly. “You'll see [graffiti] on a number of different places wherever some of the taggers can basically get their mark seen from the streets or whenever you're passing by,” says Kraig Bader, standards engineering manager for Fort Collins Utilities and Electric. “They're kind of shooting for visibility of their signatures, and unfortunately, a lot of our equipment was a really nice, blank canvas for that.”

In 2006, the department teamed with the city's Art in Public Places (APP) program, which exhibits art throughout the community, to devise a plan to remove the graffiti and reduce maintenance costs that could reach $130,000 over the life of the equipment. APP and the utilities department chose local artists to paint the transformer boxes with colorful images to deter graffiti vandals. Since November 2006, 17 transformer boxes have been painted and have not been vandalized. City officials plan to expand the program in the future.

Some communities do not understand the problems that cause and result from graffiti, and the methods needed to prevent it, says Conni Kunzler, a graffiti specialist for Stamford, Conn.-based Keep America Beautiful's (KAB) “Graffiti Hurts” program. Graffiti Hurts promotes abatement programs that include cleanup, education, prevention and enforcement, and provides resources to communities to help them combat graffiti, including creating hotlines and directing youth who tag to community art programs. In some cases, police officials may not immediately respond to graffiti complaints. Other communities address graffiti through police gang units but lack a program specifically dedicated to removing and preventing it. “[Many] more are [now] engaged in the issue,” Kunzler says.

Some communities have formed coalitions of city government officials, local organizations and residents to discuss specific problems in their area and ways to prevent tagging. Crime prevention also is critical because graffiti is a key indicator of future crimes, Kunzler says. “Graffiti often tells [law enforcement officials] what's going on in other areas of the city, because in any area where you have graffiti, you're likely to have other kinds of criminal activity,” she says.

For many years, Dallas lacked a cohesive program to remove graffiti and relied on the Sanitation Department, police officials and a downtown improvement district to separately address the problem. “It was a very scattered project,” says Cecile Carson, an advisor for Keep Dallas Beautiful, a KAB affiliate. In 2005, Dallas adopted the Graffiti Hurts program to create a unified initiative to combat graffiti, including designating a single contact for graffiti complaints and creating a database to track graffiti-vandalized areas. The city also adopted an anti-graffiti ordinance that requires property owners to remove graffiti in 10 days — or request that the city remove it. Public safety officials also are educated on the new ordinance and available resources.

In 2006, Dallas officials organized the city's first annual city-wide graffiti cleanup, Graffiti Wipe-Out. A second cleanup this year recruited hundreds of volunteers to clean graffiti in each city council member's district. Carson says neighborhoods organize their own cleanups. “It becomes more educational, although there's a lot of graffiti that's being removed at the same time” she says. “Some of the sites that we painted during that first Graffiti Wipe-Out in 2006 are still graffiti-free. So, I think that means that we really made a difference.”