It’s hard to stay calm when it’s your job to rid Oakland, Calif., of trash.
Josh Rowan, the city’s acting public works director, becomes irate when he drives through the canyons of cardboard boxes, mattresses and busted appliances in Oakland.
“I stay furious, piping mad, dropping F-bombs kind of furious,” he said on a recent morning as he sifted through sour-smelling garbage beside a road. He said his anger fueled his work.
“I love this city, but what’s up with all of the trash?”
Oakland, long regarded as a scrappy, more affordable city across the bay from San Francisco, has struggled since the pandemic with crime, an enormous deficit and a civic embarrassment when its mayor was recalled and federally indicted.
But the city’s residents are especially frustrated with illegal dumping these days. Makeshift, open-air landfills choke sidewalks, sully schoolyards and anger business owners across the city.
Illegal dumping plagues cities nationwide, but Oakland has one of the nation’s worst problems when accounting for the city’s smaller footprint and population of 444,000. Based on rough estimates provided by local governments, it appears that only a handful of larger cities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, pick up more illegally discarded garbage each year.
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The post How a City Awash in Garbage Is Trying to Take Out the Trash appeared first on New York Times.
