She’s a housekeeper with a side job: cleaning the trashed streets of her own neighborhood
The first stop on Sabine Phillips’ three-hour inspection of her neighborhood was at Fountain Avenue and St. Andrew’s Place, where detached pieces of a sofa had been plopped onto the sidewalk as if this were an outdoor living room.
Phillips slid off her yellow Huffy cruiser, grabbed a pen, and entered the finding into her spiral notebook.
“This stretch is a common dumping ground,” she told me, eyes hidden behind sunglasses under a floppy sun hat.
Her part-time assistant, Keith Johnson, was wearing a “Trash Club Hollyood” T-shirt. He squeezed the handle of his garbage-grabbing tool to snare cookie and chip wrappers that floated near some empty Pacifico beer bottles and a Big Gulp container the size of a drum. When they report neighborhood problems to the city, Johnson said, “sometimes they’re helpful and many times they’re not, so we end up doing things on our own.”
Sabine Phillips, 66, and Keith Johnson, 71, right, ride their bikes documenting debris left on sidewalks of their East Hollywood neighborhood on April 15.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Much of the discarded furniture and other goods left on the streets ends up being used to build homeless encampments, Phillips said. That often leads to more trash, fires, drug activity and other nuisances that threaten public safety and set residents on edge.
Phillips doesn’t just take notes. She reports her findings into the city’s MyLA311 system on Wednesdays, so city crews can make pickups on Thursdays and Fridays. And they usually do respond, Phillips said. But the cycle immediately repeats, and she has typically reported 50 or more additional items, week after week, month after month.
In a quarter of a century of writing about the many plundered patches of paradise, I’ve been repeatedly impressed by those who step up and make a difference out of some combination of pride, frustration and the spirit of volunteerism. But I also understand the rage of taxpayers who wonder why Los Angeles City Hall is so incapable of managing the basics.
In the race for leadership of the city, even Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman say things have got to change, which isn’t necessarily the best commentary on their stewardship.
“Unfortunately, it’s become fairly universal across all 99 neighborhoods in this city that L.A. government isn’t working,” mayoral candidate Adam Miller said at a recent West L.A. appearance I dropped in on, and he added that he’d use his business and nonprofit experience to tackle homelessness, housing and public safety challenges, among other issues. “We pay some of the highest taxes in the country, where people feel like we’re not getting our money’s worth anymore.”
Last week, after my column about the substantial inventory of blight around City Hall — including a graffiti-scarred fountain that’s been out of operation for most of the last 60 years (no lie) — I heard from readers with their own problems.
Richard Vasquez wrote to say the Plaza de Mexico in Lincoln Heights is still a cemetery of missing statues. Richard Zaldivar wrote to say the nearby AIDS memorial was vandalized and multiple calls for help fell on deaf ears. Estela Lopez of the downtown industrial improvement district, where trash is routinely dumped illegally, wrote to say a county report warned that typhus levels downtown had reached an all-time high.
Sabine Phillips documents abandoned furniture and debris found on sidewalks of her neighborhood on Wednesday in East Hollywood.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
I also heard from Stefanie Keenan, who had a clever idea a few years ago, born of exasperation with City Hall. She hired her own housekeeper — that would be Phillips — to help patrol and clean the neighborhood they both live in, and Phillips’ work was featured by NBCLA and substacker Sam Quinones.
“It’s not getting done otherwise, and our neighborhood would have burned down,” Keenan told me.
Keenan, who has been tending to her streets for several years, has been paying Phillips $100 for Wednesday scouting forays and another $100 to fill four or five huge bags on Saturday trash patrol. Keenan, a photographer, told me she has spent tens of thousands of dollars out of her own pocket.
But Keenan doesn’t have unlimited funds, and this was Phillips’ last week on the job. Lord knows what the neighborhood will look like without her on patrol. As she pedaled along her regular route Wednesday, Phillips found several more sofas, among other things.
A freezer. A refrigerator. Rugs. Chairs. Stools. Dressers. Drawers. Bed frames. Mattresses. Box springs. A printer. Electronics. Televisions.
And heaps of trash, some of which blocked sidewalks and some of which spilled off curbs and into streets.
On Lexington Avenue she stopped to make the following entry in her log:
“3 toilets.”
Nothing surprised her, and nothing slowed her down. At a house where a construction worker dumped lumber onto the sidewalk, Phillips strode up and asked what the thought would happen to the scrap pile. He said he had no idea; she made an entry in her log.
Phillips takes a break from documenting addresses of abandoned furniture and debris.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
I tried to recruit Phillips to run for mayor, but the native of Germany wasn’t interested. She did say, however, that she was “the first female bouncer in Berlin,” and that was “at a Hells Angel discotheque.”
The Berlin bouncer kept moving, and scribbling. She filled three pages in her notebook with more than 60 notations, including sidewalk graffiti.
“I’ve seen some weird stuff,” Phillips said. “Twice I found safes outside, just on the side of the curb.”
The studio-adjacent neighborhood she patrols has an eclectic mix of upscale houses and block-long stretches of apartment buildings, with people moving in and out and leaving possessions on the curb as they come and go.
That’s not the city’s fault. But the city could do a better job of educating residents on how to arrange for pickups, and a better job of cracking down when they don’t. I reached out to the office of Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, but we hadn’t yet connected when I hit my deadline.
At the Lexington Avenue pocket park, Phillips told me she had never seen kids on the grounds.
“I will show you why I would never have kids playing here,” she said, pointing into the sandbox. “There is glass … needles, and … you will see human waste there in the corner.”
A blue tarp covered a makeshift home next to the sandbox. Someone slept on a bench. The slide had a gang tag painted onto it, and two people hovered under the slide on the edge of the sandbox. Phillips said she has seen homeless people use the water fountain to bathe, and a 15-year-old from a nearby high school died in 2022 after buying drugs here.
Jenny Carpio and her dog, Sky, walk past debris along a sidewalk in East Hollywood.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
While Phillips and Johnson were in the park, a city rec and parks employee pulled up. He said he was there to check the condition of the park, which was slated for a new playground that would cost about $300,000. He said a body had been found in the park not long ago. He guessed about 30% to 50% of the city’s parks have similar iproblems.
I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s refrain in “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
So it goes.
The insanity of investing in a new playground when a dozen festering issues make the park unsafe should be crystal clear to one and all. Surely there’s more to the plan, one would hope — something substantive and sustainable. But that’s a risky bet.
It might be better to admit defeat for now, close the park, and do something else with that $300,000.
Use it to put Phillips, and a team trained and supervised by her, on a fleet of yellow Huffys.
I guarantee it would be money well spent.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
