This story aired in the July 10, 2023 episode of Crosscurrents.
This story was made to be heard. If you are able, press the play button above to listen.
Standing on Fairfax Avenue, Bayview resident Deon Witmore enjoys the view and lists the buildings on the horizon. “Salesforce Tower,” he says. “The Transamerica building…”
When we walk into his fifth-floor apartment, it gets even better. Sunlight glints off the bay. Ships line up. “When they had the bridge lit up at night, it looked like diamonds,” he says.
The skyline is orderly, just like Deon’s apartment. But I see a discarded plastic cup tumbleweeding across the road. Deon joins me at the window and we look at the random garbage dotting the vacant lot across the street.
“This is where I usually make my decision and make my stand far as Okay, where do I start, you know, picking up trash,” he explains.
He picks up trash many times a week. Deon tells me he starts with the obvious stuff, on the sidewalks. But then sees more between the cars. He just can't stop. He keeps at it until he can look back and say “Okay, things are looking a lot better now. I did my part.”
And, so on the regular, he grabs his picker, a garbage bag, and he confronts the constant drip, drip, drip of stuff around his home.
“When one piece is there, then overnight, something else comes up,” he says. “Then another piece is there.”
Deon focuses on litter, picking it up one piece at a time. So do the neighbors who sometimes join him. We run into a young woman named Ri’key Symone on the sidewalk.
“Just seeing how dirty our living space … I didn’t like it,” she says. “It was just disgusting – I didn't even want to walk my dog around this, like, area. Cleaning it up really made me feel better.”
But after a cleanup, the trash returns. And it’s often more than these neighbors can handle. Deon points to an old dresser and other cast-off furniture someone has ditched on the corner. “When one piece is there, then overnight, something else comes up,” he says. “Then another piece is there.”
Trash that weighs more than five pounds is considered illegally dumped material. And there are street corners and vacant lots all over the Bay Area that have become de facto dumps. But this kind of dumping is really common in many parts of the Bayview, especially in industrial zones and on dead-end streets.
Brian Johnson sees a huge assortment of it from the air – from a vantage that’s much higher than Deon’s apartment window.
Brian and his wife were sick of navigating trash as they walked with their kids to a nearby playground.
“They both have little scooters, and little like wheeled things. And they were just wheeling over a lot of garbage,” he says. He and his wife were constantly on guard, worried the kids would encounter litter that could cut or otherwise harm them. “Please don't pick that up. Please don't pick that up. Please don't pick that up,” they’d yell, over and over. It was a lot of work, so they started thinking about other approaches.
“A lot of this garbage that's blowing around, it's coming from like garbage bags that are sitting on the corner that get ripped open by like a raccoon or somebody comes by and kicks it or tries to move it and it splits open,” Brian says.
So they began to regularly pick up litter on their block. And noticed that it often drifted from the corner, a common dumpsite.
“A lot of this garbage that's blowing around, it's coming from like garbage bags that are sitting on the corner that get ripped open by like a raccoon or somebody comes by and kicks it or tries to move it and it splits open,” Brian says.
He and his wife started using 311 to report dumping on the corner. It’s kind of like customer service for the city government. Those reports get routed to the Department of Public Works, which is responsible for keeping streets clean. The couple both work in tech, and they got curious about how many similar dumpsites get reported to 311.
Brian’s wife suggested he look into the public 311 dataset to see if he could find out. Brian wasn’t hard to convince. “I'm like, okay, yeah, you know, it doesn't take much for me to like, have an excuse. Okay, you take care of the kids. I love playing on my computer, I love doing stuff like that,” he says with a chuckle.
Brian, a software engineer, had left his job at Zillow in 2021. So he had time. And when he started digging into 311 data for the Bayview, it surprised him.
“The number of garbage piles reported seemed really low to me,” he says. “And in fact, there were a lot of other neighborhoods where the numbers were much higher. And it was confusing to me at first. I thought, well, our neighborhood just seems so much dirtier.”
He came to learn two things. One: Lots of people think they live in the dirtiest neighborhood in the city. And two, the 311 data doesn’t reflect the ground-truth when it comes to trash on the streets.
“It's all sort of ad hoc reported,” Brian says. Someone has to happen to see garbage, they have to know about 311 and how to use it: either by using the app or calling 311 and reporting garbage to an agent.
“And that’s when the drone idea hit me,” he says.
What if, instead of relying on people to report trash, he could dispatch a drone to fly around his neighborhood, collect images and coordinates, and then use that data to automate reporting?
Take Off
Brian and I climb to the roof using a ladder that he keeps in the light-well of his house. After days of rain, the skies are mostly clear. Fluffy clouds and soft light. And within minutes, the drone is in flight. It hovers around 150 feet above, and then starts off on its programmed route.
As the drone controller broadcasts its actions “starting task!” “arrived at waypoint!” Brian explains that the drone is spacing out the photos it takes so that it gets perfect coverage of the roadways, without any gaps.
In 20 minutes of flying, the drone collects a staggering 800 images. In Brian’s office he runs the images through his machine learning model, which scans for garbage piles. It spits out 144 images. Then he has to manually weed down images of the same trash piles.
In the end, he files around 20 reports of garbage, adding to the hundreds he’s filed over many months. We scroll through the archive on his computer, looking at a three-by-three grid of photos of garbage from the air. One pile of garbage that has a door. And the door is around one-eighth the size of the garbage pile. Another shows a couch on top of a massive pile of debris. The couch looks very small in comparison.
We count 20 garbage piles.
“This is from one day within a square mile within a square mile of this house,” Brian says. It’s gobsmacking.
From a Curiosity to a Corporation?
Brian is turning this into a business. He wants to fly drones for San Francisco and other cities, to help efficiently track and clean up illegal dumping.
“[Cities] could get the work done faster, I could route them to the garbage every morning, and give them a very efficient route to pick it up in much less time,” he says.
And he’s been talking to the folks at the Department of Public Works (DPW) for months. They helped him plug into the back-end of the reporting system, which saves him a ton of time.
They haven’t paid him…yet. But, DPW says it’s pulling together a request for proposals for a pilot drone program. Brian will definitely throw his hat in.
Since 2021, DPW has been running a special Bayview collection, four days each week, just for street trash. In 2022 it collected 373 tons of garbage – that’s north of a ton for each day of that year.
Brian’s sympathetic to what DPW is dealing with.
“This is not safe, fun, or easy work ... that is nasty garbage,” he says.
It’s heavy. It’s messy. There’s rats. DPW clears the site, but then the dumping resumes.
It’s expensive, too. DPW spends nearly $2 million each year on its special Bayview runs. If the city was prosecuting dumpers, it could be refilling those coffers. It has increased fines for illegal dumping—they’re now up to $1000 per. But enforcement is really low. DPW said in 2021 that it would install surveillance cameras in Bayview hot spots. None have been installed so far.
So, for now, Brian keeps flying his drones and filing reports through the 311 app.
And over on Fairfax Street, Deon keeps walking around outside his apartment building, picker in hand.
These Bayview residents are refusing to let this problem pile up.
You can also join these Bayview residents cleaning up their streets — more information at this link.
