Complaints of trash dumping along East Oakland street fall on deaf ears
For decades, the city of Oakland has struggled with a huge illegal dumping problem. People seemingly come from all over the Bay Area to dispose of their trash on the streets and sidewalks.
The city has set up a citizen hotline to report the incidents, but one East Oakland resident says, in his Hegenberger neighborhood near the Coliseum, it feels like it's all just for show.
"People pull up, dump their trash, and as you can see, anybody that wants to use the sidewalk, it's impossible. It's eliminated," said resident Ansel Troy.
He lives just a few blocks from 71st Avenue, but he's become something of a crusader for the narrow, one-way street.
"So, what happens is, they just pile more onto the trash that's already there," Troy said, pointing to a mountain of junk and garbage covering one side of the street. "And I've been documenting this for the entire month of September."
Troy thought his social media posts for the past month would embarrass City Hall into removing the mess. But another neighbor named Steve said the garbage had been here a lot longer than that.
"This trash has been here for, like, almost two years," he said. "And I've tried reporting it on the 311. That doesn't help."
Oakland set up a citizen hotline - Oak 311 - to report such problems, and Troy did that. He received a response on Monday saying, "The City of Oakland addressed this issue on 09/21/2025" and marked his service request as "closed."
But the trash was still there.
"I guess I'm wondering, are they lying to me intentionally?" Troy said. "Did somebody make a mistake? I don't see how you can miss all this?"
But he's really disgusted by what happened on Friday. As part of a newspaper article touting the success of the county's anti-dumping efforts, a city crew was photographed removing debris from the corner of 71st and International Boulevard.
But after the photo-op was over, the crew left without touching the trash on 71st Ave, just 30 feet away.
"They want us to highlight the Farmer's Market, and the lake, and the soccer games. But they don't want to really address this," he said, pointing to the mountain of debris.
Some homeless people are living on the block, but they said they want it cleaned up as well, since they usually get the blame for it. One woman named Star said people arrive in trucks to unload the trash.
"We clean up all the time, but they just put more garbage," she said. "My other little friend, she's homeless too, she's cussing 'em out, 'No, you ain't going to put that right there!' And I'm saying, 'Calm down, calm down. We can't stop them people.' But they do it even more and more!"
Troy is fed up. He said this is happening in a largely Black and Latino neighborhood, and it's absurd to think that it would be allowed to exist in any wealthier part of town.
"We deserve our neighborhoods to be just as clean as any other area," he said. "And for a city that talks about 'equity,' where is the equity when it comes to addressing this?"
No one from the city responded to our request for comment on Tuesday. But Troy said allowing the pile of trash to linger sends a message that it's ok to dump there. And he thinks a lot of his neighbors have also been convinced that they don't deserve anything better.