Our good friends on the left like to tell us that the plight of poor people is the result of systemic racism, redlining, poor schools — though never to say that vouchers for private schools or school choice could help! — and disinvestment in poorer communities, basically blaming all of their travails on greedy capitalists, and really anybody other than the poor themselves.
Then I found this, in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Residents welcome Philly’s citywide cleanup, but complaint data show trash quickly returns
Mayor Parker’s Office of Clean and Green aimed to deep clean every Philly neighborhood this year. Halfway through the program, Philly 311 data show that trash complaints have not receded.
by Saara Ghani and Ximena Conde | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT
My Nguyen and Cloud, her big and fluffy dog, walk through their Kensington neighborhood every day. She worries that Cloud will rifle through the garbage on the sidewalk and get dirty — or worse, choke on something.
Just a week before, the area had been swarmed by city crews armed with leaf blowers, street sweepers, and water trucks — part of a citywide summer cleanup targeting every corner of Philadelphia.
“It doesn’t last, because people keep littering,” Nguyen said.
From Kingsessing to Kensington, residents have welcomed the added investment but said it is not a long-term solution. Garbage complaints keep rolling in to Philly311, the city’s reporting system for nonemergency complaints.
I certainly appreciate the alliteration the Inky’s reporters used, but it’s worth noting here that Kingsessing and Kensington are two of Philly’s poorer neighborhoods.
The story included a photo by staff photographer Tom Gralish that could be somewhat deceiving, showing the intersection of South 55th and Elliot Streets in Kingsessing, with a bunch of litter and trash in the street, but also six city workers equipped with leaf blowers, and it appears that they were blowing the trash into a smaller area for easier pick up. Nevertheless, there was a lot of trash!
Some of the problems are caused not by the residents just littering the streets, but illegal dumping, presumably from other neighborhoods, but that happens because people know that they can get away with it. Yet, just two weeks after the city cleanup crews have gone through, the system receives more complaints about trash than before the cleaning. Some of that can be attributed to people seeing that hey, someone did clean up the mess, people who might not have complained before because they thought it a waste of time and effort. I suppose that, under previous Mayor Jim Kenney, who mentally checked out of his job long before his term ended, very little got done, so almost anything getting done under the new administration is an improvement.
But, to me, it’s pretty simple: if you don’t want your neighborhood trashed, don’t trash your neighborhood. If you have some garbage in your hands, carry it with you until you get to a trash can; how hard is that? The above linked picture shows dozens of scraps of paper, some soda bottles and drink cups, the kind of thing you’d have after a trip to McDonald’s or a corner bodega. If you’re walking up to your house, and you see little stuff like that littering the sidewalk or the gutter, pick it up and take it in to your trash can. I can understand if the garbage is a used drug needle that no decent person would want to pick it up with his bare hands, but a sandwich wrapper or a drink cup? Just pick it up!
You don’t have to be wealthy to pick up a piece of trash. Just because there are a lot of poor people in the City of Brotherly Love does not mean they can’t try to keep their neighborhoods clean.
“if you don’t want your neighborhood trashed, don’t trash your neighborhood.”
Hear Hear. And it feeds on itself.
I live in an older neighborhood that has gone downhill in the 30 years I’ve lived here. A couple of high density apartment complexes have been built down the street and, on the corner in the other direction is a convenience store, a couple of restaurants and a bar.
People walking between the apartment complexes and the corner fairly regularly drop trash in front of my house.
What I’ve found is that if I keep it picked up, it’s not too bad. I end up having to pick up trash from in front of my house a couple or three times a week…which I do promptly.
If we’re on a trip or something and aren’t there to pick up as it happens, however, it quickly escalates. It seems that having trash on the ground gives permission for other people to dump their trash there too. If I let it go for a day or so, it seems everyone who walks by drops something in front of my house and after a week, it’s a mess.
You can’t just come in and do a massive cleanup effort a couple of times a year, or even once a month, and expect the place to stay clean. It’s got to be a continuous, ongoing effort, and if the residents of the area won’t do it themselves, it’s too cost prohibitive for the rest of the city to pay for their inability to pick up after themselves.
Confronting the people doing the littering when you see them can help too. Depends on the person, but some people are capable of being shamed into doing the right thing.
Actually writing citations and fining people for breaking those laws would be nice, but I don’t expect that to happen any time soon. We don’t have enough cops to stay on top of serious crimes, I don’t think they’re going to be investing much effort into littering.