Today’s University Ave Cleanup

First, thanks to all of our incredible volunteers today: Bettina, Joyce, Vickie, Lynn, Tim, John, and Danny. We were also joined by Anisa from our Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera’s office. Thanks again to Anisa for coordinating the trash bag pickup for us with Environmental Services.

This was a day to feel discouraged, frustrated, and in the end, rewarded for our work. We set up in front of the vacant lot at University/60th, a lot owned by the City of San Diego. The city does have maintenance responsibilities for its property. A Get It Done was submitted two weeks ago to get the remnants of homeless encampments cleaned up at the lot before our cleanup. Sadly, that didn’t happen.

Our community cleanups are focused on trash pickups on sidewalks and curbs. We don’t want to clean to the level that we did today. But after cleaning the sidewalks from College to 58th, except for one section at College, where a homeless fellow was proprietary about his pile of trash, we circled back to the lot. Honestly, no one felt good about our efforts to clean the sidewalks and then walk away leaving the lot looking like that. We all dug in and managed to finish cleaning it by our 10 am deadline when Environmental Services came to pick up our trash.

This lot still needs brush abatement work and more, but does it look better than it did this morning? Yes, it does!

Redwood Village Community Council leaders have made converting this lot into a small pocket park for the community a priority for this year and we’re getting some help from our D9 office and Groundwork San Diego Chollas Creek to move this project forward. Stay tuned.