San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
FINE LINE IN TREASURE OR TRASH
S. F. a bonanza for the discerning street scavenger
Rents are down, apartments are vacant, people are fleeing the city. That’s sad for the rush of modern prospectors who hoped to find gold in the provisioning, housing and care of tech billionaires, but it’s a bonanza for the dogwalking scavenger.
One sunny morning at the corner of Lyon and Haight streets, where there’s a city garbage can on a sidewalk bulbout, a Department of Public Works pickup truck pulled up to the corner. Its driver got out and started cleaning up a pile of stuff someone had thrown out next to the garbage can. He wasn’t emptying trash cans, only collecting debris, household stuff apparently abandoned.
“People leave so many things on the sidewalk these days,” I said. “Yeah,” he answered. “It’s unbelievable.”
“In all the time I’ve been doing my job,” said the DPW man, picking up a stack of mismatched saucepans, “I haven’t ever seen so much stuff.”
The staple of the typical pileup is a carton of kitchen castoffs — cookie sheets encrusted at the corners, mismatched glasses, heatscarred plastic ladles — cast out on the sidewalk with a tangle of clothes hangers, orphaned when unenchanted residents moved on, or when those who were staying finally found time to clean their closets. Mattresses dot city streets like sails dot the bay; sofas and desk chairs ( has anyone ever taken her desk chair with her when she left?) are placed on corners as though they were benches in Golden Gate Park.
I don’t have what seemed to be the DPW worker’s long professional experience. My huntinggathering instinct really kicked in when we got the dog, a little more than a year ago, and suddenly, I was walking, walking, walking. Eyes down, I scanned the sidewalks for treasures.
Local trash pros don’t seem as entranced as I am by the notion of sidewalks as a nocost flea market. I promised I would pass along details of the EZtouse official procedures:
DPW works hand in hand with Recology to pick up what people have left behind. For Bulky Item Recycling, citizens can contact Recology directly, by telephone or online through Recology. com, and Recology will do one or two pickups a year ( depending on whether you have a house or apartment) free. It’s also possible to make a request through 311, the city’s service hotline, which is then transferred to Recology. In fiscal year 2018, there were 62,373 such calls. The next year there were 92,129.
The call for service “gets beamed out right to the computer,” which establishes routes for the 10 or so Recology trucks picking up stuff around the city. “It’s probably the most efficient system in the country,” says Recology PR man Robert Reed.
The DPW worker had loaded about half of the sidewalk pile of debris into the truck when my eye was drawn to something among the mismatched silverware and stained dish towels: a neatly folded quilt.
“A quilt,” I said, as an expression of amazement rather than handicraft expertise. I kicked it with my toe and then bent down, took it by one corner and unfolded it to see if it had an ugly stain or gaping hole in the middle. It was machinemade, but it looked like homemachinemade.
The driver continued loading other stuff into the back of his pickup.
“It’s pretty nice,” I said, only a little selfconscious that he might think me a ragpicker,
The DPW truck I saw was part of that department’s roving crew, which travels through the city making such pickups, tidying up the sidewalks and streets. DPW also does what it calls “proactive illegal dumping cleanups” twice a week in BayviewHunters Point, in partnership with Recology.
“Please encourage people to utilize the system,” said Reed. “We don’t want to encourage people to dig through those piles and spread it out. … We’re trying to keep the city as clean as possible.”
I have the same goal. In pursuit of it, for example, I have scooped up a rug I thought so nice that I rang the doorbell of the house it seemed to have come from, to make sure the owner wanted to give it away. “Take it,” he said. “We just wanted to get a new rug.” He smiled at me as though he were a volunteer at the SPCA and I had just adopted a kitten.
The trash “differs from neighborhood to neighborhood,” says DPW Communications Director Rachel Gordon. “In the Mission, it’s furniture from people who have moved out. In the Bayview, there’s a ton of building materials and debris left by contractors. In Chinatown, there is lots of household waste, because many of the living spaces have no adequate garbage disposal means.”
The area with the highest percentage of service requests ( 20%) is District 9, the Mission and Bernal Heights. The lowest ( 3%) is District 3, Chinatown/ North Beach.
There are many reasons, but “the problem comes down to behavior,” says Gordon. “People can choose whether to blight our neighborhoods or do the right thing by disposing of their unwanted items appropriately.” Freelance trashcollectors like me see ourselves as elves of the street, simply helping to lighten the load of the official collectors at DPW and Recology.
The upholstery was rotting and the wood was dried out on a rocking chair I extracted from a briar patch of furniture on Buena Vista East. But the chair, jumbled with three dressers, a pair of kitchen chairs and another rocker, had good bones. In the few minutes between the time I spotted it and the time I walked home to get the car in order to retrieve it, someone had removed a woodtrimmed mirror from the top of one of the dressers. This reprehensible scavenging among the scavengables was like taking the tusks from an elephant. The frame of the chair I adopted has been massaged with oil, its seat covered in leopard print. It looks happy in its new home.
“People need to realize that whether they’re depositing a bag of household trash next to the city trash can or leaving an old TV or broken dresser on the sidewalk,” said Gordon, “that they are part of the problem and hurting the livability of our neighborhoods.” The pandemic may have given them, at long last, time to Marie Kondo their homes, but it doesn’t give them license to pluck the Ikea dressers from their bedrooms and leave them on street corners.
The situation, said Gordon, is getting worse in residential neighborhoods. “As the city gets more and more developed, there are fewer and fewer places to dump stuff.” Stakeouts have been used to catch illegal dumpers in the past, and it’s possible that solution will be tried again.
Walking past a drummer’s highhat stand and cymbals, I put my foot down on the pedal and made a kind of soft crashing noise. By the time I got home, a block away, I’d decided it would delight a grandchild. But when I returned to fetch it, someone else was inspecting it. I started laughing, telling the other guy that I’d had my eye on it, but it was all his if he wanted it. He laughed, too, and insisted that, no, he didn’t need it, and I should take it. We were two vultures competing for some leftover crumbs; two neighbors sharing a pleasant and civil moment in a year when people in the street are screaming at each other over masks. Nobody at DPW or Recology has cited any regulation that would negate the law of the streets: finders keepers.
“Don’t you want it?” I asked the driver about the quilt as he climbed back into the cab of his truck. “Naah,” he said. “My wife has forbidden me to bring anything else home.”
“My husband, too,” I said. And then I picked it up, carried it home and threw it into the washing machine, an official welcome to the household.