S.F. cleanup: Volunteers help city clear trash
With graffiti sprayed on schools and cigarette butts discarded on sidewalks, overgrown bushes encroaching on pathways and weeds threatening public gardens, San Francisco’s assortment of city agencies can’t always keep the city spick-and-span on their own.
Some 300 volunteers stepped in Saturday morning to help, meeting up at Lowell High School in the city’s Lakeside neighborhood near Lake Merced.
Known as the Community Clean Team, Saturday’s project was one of 11 this year, courtesy of San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, the agency responsible for cleaning the streets, among many other functions.
As San Francisco’s population keeps growing — and as available housing has not been close to keeping pace — there’s more for Mohammed Nuru, the department’s director, and his team of 1,400 employees to deal with. More broken glass and bottle caps. More homeless people and their encampments. More mess.
“Over the years, the city’s gotten cleaner, but we’re not where we should be,” Nuru said, as volunteers swung shovels in the background. “But any extra hands we can get really makes a huge difference.”
Hundreds of volunteers spent the morning and early afternoon at work sites in nearby neighborhoods — pruning, weeding and mulching at Los Palmos Gardens, picking up litter tossed out of cars on Ocean Avenue and clearing unruly patches of brush around the area, among other projects.
The influx of homeless to San Francisco has created an enduring public health problem that’s much bigger than any one city department, Nuru said, musing on the monumental challenge of how to house the thousands of people dirtying city streets.
The homeless encampments are responsible for many of the calls his agency fields from city residents concerned or complaining about public urination and defecation. But they also can take a disproportionate amount of the blame, Nuru said.
“When you see a tent on the sidewalk, what comes to your mind is that this is not a clean city,” Nuru said. “Then you look at it and say, ‘This is the public works department not doing its job.’ But it’s much more complicated ... And the perception of dirtiness is much more than homelessness. Let’s look at cigarettes. Let’s look at chewing gum.”
Jimmer Cassiol, a community liaison for the department and the man who organizes the Community Clean Team efforts, said the volunteers make it possible to do overlooked projects, such as repainting a dozen tables and benches at Lowell High School.
“This is about taking responsibility for beautifying the community, and not just the city agencies,” Cassiol said. “It’s the people who come here to volunteer who live in these neighborhoods, who walk and work here.”
As he cleared thorny masses of brush from a walking path on Alemany Boulevard, one volunteer, Gregory White, said he was just released from prison in June, after serving a sentence of almost 26 years.
Currently in a halfway house in San Francisco, White said the cleanup was an “opportunity to give back to the community what I took from them with my careless actions years ago.”
“You always remember the impact you have on your community,” White said. “And this is a chance to change that impact.”