ST. LOUIS, Mo. — The pile of debris sat at the end of the alley behind Ben Thomas’ rental. Torn mattresses. Stacks of vinyl house siding. Disintegrating cardboard. And too many trash bags to count. The pile has been there, in some form, since he moved in eight and a half years ago.
Thomas tries to keep it tidy by his unit. But the alleyway trash just keeps coming back.
“The city will come to clean it up,” said Thomas, 71, gesturing to the pile. “It’ll be clean for one to two weeks or a month, but after that, it’ll look just like that.”
Trash in St. Louis isn’t a new problem, but it doesn’t seem to be improving this year. The city has fielded more than 13,000 trash complaints so far in 2020, more than any year in a decade. Officials blame it on perennial problems — like contractors illegally dumping construction waste behind Thomas’ home — and also on new wrinkles: The coronavirus pandemic has led to more mail-order shopping, more takeout dining, more people at home, which means more bags, more boxes, and fuller garbage bins.
The effect is clear. Across the city, illegal dumping and careless trash-tossing leave residents looking at piles of other people’s debris every time they take out their own garbage, tend to their gardens, or go for a walk. The trash provides habitats for rats and pests to hide. And it makes St. Louis neighborhoods look unkempt, driving down property values and discouraging investment. Who wants to invest in a place that looks like a landfill?
Trash complaints were declining 10 years ago. The numbers fielded by the city’s Citizens’ Service Bureau fell from 12,900 in 2010 to 8,600 in 2013. But then they began a steady climb. And while complaints dropped by about 1,400 last year, this year’s total, measured with a few weeks left in the year, crested 2010’s peak by about 200.
The extra trash is adding work to an already-strained refuse department.
City operations director Todd Waelterman blamed a combination of people shopping online, preparing and eating more food at home, and embarking on long-procrastinated home improvement projects. “You can build and design a city, but how do you design it for a pandemic?” Waelterman said.
When routes aren’t caught up and bins aren’t all emptied by the end of Friday, Waelterman said, employees will work the weekend to get everything caught up by Monday.
“It’s not what we want to do, but it happens,” he said. He has already budgeted $650,000 in overtime pay for trash workers next year.
From July to November, or one-third of the way through this fiscal year, the city’s trash trucks collected almost half of the solid waste and recycling picked up in all of last year, said Mayor Lyda Krewson’s spokesman, Jacob Long.
‘It’s not OK’
But aldermen and residents aren’t complaining about their neighbors.
Yes, there are St. Louisans who don’t know the proper protocols for throwing away garbage, said Alderman Pam Boyd, of the city’s 27th Ward. But they’re not the bulk of the problem.
Boyd’s ward abuts Jennings at the county line. And county residents generally have to pay for trash service; they avoid that if they use the city dumpsters.
“A lot of them are coming in,” Boyd said. “And they’re construction companies literally dumping construction materials.”
Alderman Jeffrey Boyd, of the 22nd Ward, just south of the 27th, said the city is catching illegal dumpers on alley cameras, but not enough people know about it.
“We need an aggressive campaign with the alley cameras, and we need to catch people, and shame them,” said Boyd, no relation to Pam Boyd. “You have to make people know it’s not OK.”
The city’s Trash Task Force, which works out of the police department, issued 108 citations in 2017, Krewson’s first year in office. It handed out 243 the next year, Long said, and bought 100 more cameras, doubling the number in city alleys. The city gave out 460 citations last year, and 427 through mid-December this year. It also awarded more than 100 rewards of $100 this year and last to people who reported illegal dumping when it led to a prosecution. Callers also submitted photos.
“Those pictures are so valuable to the detectives working on this,” Long said.
Jeffrey Boyd, who heads the aldermanic Streets, Traffic and Refuse Committee, suggested a regional approach to illegal dumping.
Trash has long been a problem in St. Louis, and it’s long been worse in neighborhoods north of the infamous Delmar Boulevard racial divide.
In 2009, Joseph Goeke Frank, a researcher at Washington University at the time, found that trash complaints were resolved more quickly in white neighborhoods and more slowly in Black neighborhoods. The study, his Ph.D. dissertation in political science, controlled for variables such as indicators of political influence, socio-economic status and housing conditions.
The percentage of Black residents in a neighborhood was the strongest predictor of response time, Frank’s dissertation said. For each 1% increase in Black-American population, his analysis predicted a half-day slower average response time.
“This finding suggests institutional racism is at work in Saint Louis,” Frank concluded in the paper.
Pam Boyd says it’s getting better. When she calls in a complaint, like the one near Ben Thomas’ rental, it’s cleaned up quickly.
Citizens’ Service Bureau data bear that out: In 2018, it took the city 48 days on average to respond to trash complaints. In 2019, it took 28 days, and this year, 23.
But it’s still more of a problem in north St. Louis. South side neighborhoods such as Dutchtown, Tower Grove South and Bevo Mill all have a high number of total trash complaints. Per capita, however, the neighborhoods with the most complaints are in north city.
Residents are frustrated, even disgusted by the mess.
A row of new concrete street bollards protects the freshly repaired sidewalk in front of Mess Pat’s Daycare, 7901 North Broadway Avenue. Along the street behind it, while a string of abandoned properties and piles of debris dot the landscape, so too do Christmas decorations and neatly trimmed lawns. A bright blue “Stayin’ In Baden!” sign stands alone in one front yard.
Nancy Mason, 39, a daycare employee, says it’s hard to keep the neighborhood safe for kids. Cars speed down Broadway, and often hit the curbs. Trash piles up in vacant lots behind the daycare. Sometimes they find hypodermic needles in the piles.
They put on gloves and clean it all up.
“We try to keep it out of the kids’ view,” she said. About three dozen children, from 6 months to 12 years old, are enrolled.
A few blocks over, Kayla Bush, 49, was babysitting on a recent December day. She leaned out from a second-story porch to ask Post-Dispatch reporters if they had arrived to clean up what she suspected to be a mess left by illegal dumpers.
“They’re trifling,” Bush yelled from the porch. “They come at night, and they really don’t care.”
It’s a problem at her Dutchtown home, miles to the south, too, Bush said.
“Why?” Bush asked. “Because no one cares.”
