A short stretch of Cadillac Drive shows TVs, refrigerators, flooring, a dishwasher, shopping carts and other debris in plain view of deterrent cameras. Illegal dumping recurs so frequently at some locations that new discarded items often appear by the next day. San Jose offers resources such as dumpster days and free junk pickup for a long list of household goods including mattresses, furniture and tires. A 14-person full-time blight removal team hauls away dumped items. Maintenance worker Javier Valencia works multiple times per day, photographing cleanups and filling his truck repeatedly with large items.
On a short stretch of Cadillac Drive - a few hundred feet in plain view of the cameras set up by San Jose to deter illegal dumping - TVs, refrigerators, flooring, a dishwasher, shopping carts and an assortment of debris litter the street on a recent morning. It's one of the city's worst hotspots for discarded trash.
Four days a week, maintenance worker Javier Valencia loads up the junk onto his truck and cleans up at each stop along his route. Before and after each cleanup, he snaps pictures so customers who reported the blight can see how the city responded. In about a tenth of a mile, the back of his truck is nearly filled to the brim.
'For us, a normal day is chaos,' said Valencia, who has worked at the city for 10 years, including the past three years on the blight reduction team. 'You see that truck right there? On average, we fill it up about two to three times a day. As far as debris or blight, it varies like this morning, I picked up a grand piano and a sofa bed.'
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