Tuesday, April 01, 2008

A different kind of spam

On the weekends around here you see a lot of real estate signs popping up on street corners, advertising open houses. When it warms up more, the garage sale signs will appear, too. The real estate folks are pretty careful about taking their signs down again at the end of the open house, and the yard sale folks generally are, too.

But there's another kind of sign that also pops up, and that's the street spam. It's not tied to a particular property or timely event, and usually appears on parkways or other public property. On Saturday, a bunch appeared in my neighborhood, including all around the school, at the park and on several corners that had empty lots or unoccupied homes for sale.

When they were still there on Sunday, I walked around with Sophie and removed as many as I could find, tossing them in the trash, then came home to look up the city code-enforcement number to file a complaint. In my search, I ran across a website for Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam and discovered there's a whole bunch of people who do the same thing!

Maybe I sound like a busybody with nothing better to do, but I live in a nice neighborhood and I want to keep it that way. Such signs are no better than empty liquor bottles scattered about, and I toss those, too.

The only bright yellow blooms I want to see on my walks look like this:
I'm glad to know other folks feel the same way and are doing something about it.

4 comments:

  1. It is cool that people are cleaning up street spam. I probably don't do as much as I could, but I can't walk by litter without picking it up.

    Love the blooms!!

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  2. We have those too and it took me forever to work it out. They aren't for houses (yet) they're for things like hot tubs that you just know fell off the back of a truck somewhere.

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  3. I've seen those everywhere in my city and they're such an annoying sight. We need to clean up our street spam too. Thanks for the great link on fighting this!

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  4. In most cities it's illegal to post signs on public property, including on phone poles, parkways, etc. We don't see a lot of it in my neighborhood, except for lost pets, and I wouldn't mess with those. But the obviously spammy stuff I have no qualms about removing.

    It's the same as litter, and if you're willing to get rid of that, more power to you!

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