The folks taking San Francisco’s trash into their very own palms

After Manuel Montejano lost his restaurant job due to a pandemic shutdown over a year ago, he came across a Craigslist ad for a job that offered to pay almost double the minimum wage.

The part-time gig consisted of walking around the mission collecting trash on the sidewalks. He needed to make some money, but also realized that this would be a good opportunity to set an example for his children by doing work that made his community cleaner.

A year later, Montejano is still sweeping and collecting trash for a few hours three days a week, covering 40 blocks of the mission, and making well over $ 1,000 every month.

His employer is a pandemic-born Mission District organization called Clean Streets, made up of people in the neighborhood who pooled their money to pay to clean their block.

“Yeah, sure, that should be the city’s job, but … why wait for an official solution?” Asked James Thompson, the resident of the mission who founded Clean Streets as a solution for his block and then expanded it to other areas.

“The pandemic had just really taken root and things were all closed. And in those first months the city stopped sweeping the streets. And so the neighborhood garbage problem got really bad, ”said Thompson, who lives on Capp Street.

Many people had lost their jobs at this early stage of the pandemic too, and Thompson thought he would try to address both issues at the same time: he posted an ad on Craigslist offering to pay someone out of his own pocket to use his pad to sweep.

Montejano answered. When the neighbors realized what he was doing, Thompson said they were eager to do their part and bring the service to their blocks too – and the rest was history.

While Montejano is happy with its work, it may come as a surprise that in a city with a $ 350 million public works budget, residents are pooling financial resources to have their streets privately cleaned.

But that begs the question: Whose job is it to clean San Francisco’s notoriously filthy sidewalks?

While mechanical sweepers clean the asphalt, the law (and the San Francisco Public Works) technically claim that the maintenance of the sidewalks, be it garbage, leaves, or graffiti, is done by the vendors or the downstairs residents. The city hauls away bulky items like furniture or cleans feces or needles (if reported to 311), and cleans sidewalks in commercial corridors every few months.

Though official responsibility is denied, Public Works targets sidewalks, but mostly high-visibility commercial corridors and certain areas known for excessive illegal dumping – often leaving quieter residential areas to fend for themselves.

It takes everyone

And Clean Streets is just the latest version of residents doing just that: The San Franciscans were never satisfied with just letting the city keep its streets clean. It just doesn’t work that way.

Kim-Shree Maufas, a longtime mission resident, is part of Fix 26, a neighborhood association of residents and merchants on or near 26th Street.

“It takes everyone,” said Maaufas, a former member of the education committee. She views Fix 26 as being in partnership with the city, but coordination between her neighbors was crucial – and the city alone cannot be responsible for this. “Individuals, myself, my neighbors, we are all doing this effort together. It’s not just one thing. ”

Fix 26 members managed to get the Salvation Army, which has a donation center near 26. Fix 26 set up a neighborhood watch and encouraged companies to put up lights and cameras, which Maaufas says discourages dropping and dumping.

Another Fix 26 member, Aisling Ferguson, found out about Clean Streets on the Nextdoor app and introduced her neighbors to Thompson from Clean Streets last year. Several members started contributing to Clean Streets – both Maufas and Ferguson said they started paying before their own blocks could be served.

The city also quietly admits it can’t do it on its own: San Francisco Public Works provides rubbish collection tools, brooms, and metal bags to any resident who calls for supplies as part of its Adopt-A-Street program. If someone has collected a lot of rubbish, they can call 311 to have it picked up.

And so people like Ferguson and Maufas still spend a few days a week picking up near their homes at neighborhood clubs, private cleaners and city sweepers.

The problems they see

During their time cleaning the mission sidewalks, people like Montejano, Maufas, and Ferguson learned a thing or two about what to expect.

For example, streets like Bartlett and Albion, which are near the multitude of restaurants on Valencia and 16th Street, are littered with takeaways.

Manuel Montejano cleans rubbish in a block in the Mission District. Photo courtesy of Montejano.

Montejano believes that during the pandemic, people ordered food to eat in their cars, which contributed to more rubbish than usual on these residential streets. When people realize that the nearest public garbage can is nowhere in sight, Montejano speculates, “They’ll probably give up and say, ‘Instead of walking three or four blocks away, let’s just leave it here.'”

He sees a similar phenomenon with dog waste bags: people take the time to collect the rubbish, but then throw the bag under a tree.

Many, including Montejano, believe that a shortage of trash cans (a situation created by a failed experiment to reduce garbage disposal by removing trash cans) is primarily responsible for the spread of trash, as people simply don’t have space have to throw away their rubbish.

But even in blocks where the city’s rubbish bins are located, Montejano sees rubbish swirling around. He mentioned that the Covid-19 test and vaccine site is on 24. But right on that corner is a city trash can.

The disposal of larger items is also an issue. San Francisco is a majority renter city that is constantly biking with people moving in and out, and if you don’t plan ahead, you may not always get a convenient large item pickup date from Recology. It is common for the furniture of an entire apartment to be displayed on the street.

By the end of the month, when the people move out, Montejano knows he will encounter these types of scenes all over the mission. On the blocks around the Salvation Army, Montejano and the members of Fix 26 still know how to expect bulky items, regardless of the time of year. These are things that are donated outside of business hours or simply left around to avoid the hassle of official donations.

Maufas even spotted a property developer from Bernal Heights in their neighborhood.

And it’s important to note that dumping isn’t just a problem with bulky items. Rachel Gordon, a Public Works spokeswoman, said some people end up throwing household trash on the street because they either don’t pay for garbage service – or, in many cases, because their home doesn’t have enough bins to hold all of the trash Accommodate residents.

Cooperation with the city

When it comes to such a complex problem, residents have found that there is no one cure-all.

Maufas mentioned a couple of notorious alleys in their area of ​​the mission that Public Works regularly sends in the middle of the night what looks like a “spaceship” to wash down the blocks.

“It’s exponentially better,” she said of the blocks near her home. In the past, Maufas said, she and another family member walked on the sidewalk next to her granddaughter. “We had to accompany her to the car just because the streets were so disgusting. And we just never knew what would be out there. ”

Even Montejano himself, who takes his children with him on weekends to collect garbage on a voluntary basis, said that the dirtiest streets on some days are just too many for young people. “I don’t want to expose her to any of this,” he said.

And with the efforts of the city, community organizations, and individuals being disjointed and sporadic, it’s no surprise that the job of cleaning up the mission feels Sisyphus.

Montejano saw public works postpone the effort. “They just clean … where there isn’t even any garbage on the street,” said Montejano. “Sometimes we bring them some garbage bags and tell them, ‘Hey, we’ve collected these garbage bags, can we put them in here?'”

He laughed and went home to tell his wife about the day he saw workers cleaning the town’s garbage can on 16th and in the church, knowing the parking lot in the alley around the corner was full of trash and rubble was.

“This is money that the city can probably put elsewhere, where it really needs it [it]“Said Montejano.