This doubles as a joke about NYC's abysmal garbage collection policies. They just leave bags of rubbish on the sidewalk for collection and it fuels NYC's notorious rat population. I think some parts of NYC started using bins and dumpsters like, a year ago? Two years ago? Whenever there's a labor dispute with the trash collectors NYC would be full of giant mounds of trash until it was resolved.

Ah yeah this tracks, and it ties in with my observation that in many other, more fascist pieces of media from the late 20th century the fact that the big city is dirty and full of trash is presented as shorthand for social decay. In the fifth element it's sort of part of life, there's no heavy handed value judgement, even if it could've been easy to include in the film