On a short stretch of Cadillac Drive — a few hundred feet in plain view of the cameras set up by San Jose to deter illegal dumping — TVs, refrigerators, flooring, a dishwasher, shopping carts and an assortment of debris litter the street on a recent morning. It’s one of the city’s worst hotspots for discarded trash.

Related Articles

Four days a week, maintenance worker Javier Valencia loads up the junk onto his truck and cleans up at each stop along his route. Before and after each cleanup, he snaps pictures so customers who reported the blight can see how the city responded. In about a tenth of a mile, the back of his truck is nearly filled to the brim.

But the stark reality is that at some locations around the city, like Cadillac Drive, illegal dumping happens so regularly that by the next day, there’s often a new batch of discarded items on the same street. All this despite the concerted efforts by San Jose to crack down on blight and offer more resources like dumpster days and free junk pickup that includes a long list of garage and household goods like mattresses, furniture and tires.

“For us, a normal day is chaos,” said Valencia, who has worked at the city for 10 years, including the past three years on the blight reduction team. “You see that truck right there? On average, we fill it up about two to three times a day. As far as debris or blight, it varies like this morning, I picked up a grand piano and a sofa bed.”

When he gets back to the Mabury Service Yard this particular Tuesday morning, Valencia sorts out specific items from the contents of one of his hauls and dumps out the rest on a growing mountain of garbage, mattresses and sofas. Other workers say they see him six to maybe seven times per day. Valencia is one of a team of 14 full-time workers assigned to haul away illegally dumped items, a problem the city continues to have trouble reining in.

In a report heard at the Neighborhood Services and Education Committee last week and scheduled to be discussed at this Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the BeautifySJ program removed 24.4 million pounds of trash in the previous fiscal year, including 14.3 million pounds from public spaces as part of blight reduction efforts. More than 10.5 million pounds of that trash was tied to illegal dumping — an increase of nearly 1 million more pounds from the previous year and a 132% increase over three years.

Along with trash discarded from single-family households, Valencia and senior maintenance worker Alonzo Perez said apartment complexes and multifamily developments also are culprits in the illegal dumping epidemic because “at the end of the month when they move out, everything goes on the curb.”

The city also collected 8,582 mattresses — the item Valencia said he dreaded picking up the most because of the high number of soiled ones — representing a 37% increase from the previous year.

“We are proud of what we have accomplished,” said Olympia Williams, deputy director of the community services division. “We know there is more to do, though.”

San Jose employs what is known as a three E’s model — education, eradication and enforcement — to tackle illegal dumping. While the city has focused more on eradication efforts in the past, it has placed a greater focus on the other areas after issuing a paltry number of citations the previous year that prompted elected officials to call for stricter enforcement, including more graffiti and dumping stings.

Alonzo Perez, a Senior Maintenance Worker for the City of San Jose, left, and Javier Valencia, a Maintenance Worker 2, picks up trash that has been illegally dumped on Cadillac Drive in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. Stretches of San Jose streets have become dumping grounds for unwanted household items, including mattresses, stoves, and refrigerators. But after a concerted effort to crack down on blight, city officials believe they are making progress to curb residents from discarding their unwanted junk. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group) 

Noting the previously pervasive dumping outside of 24-Hour Fitness at the Eastridge Mall and the initial lack of responsiveness by mall operators, District 8 City Councilmember Domingo Candelas said that changed once the city levied a fine.

“We can only do education to a point and sometimes, it does take that financial stick, if you will, to get them to fall in line,” Candelas said.

One of the ways the city ramped up enforcement was by installing 12 cameras — one activity camera and one license plate reader — at six high-volume dumping locations, which the city will relocate quarterly. Residents acknowledge that the new technology has had an impact.

A surveillance camera atop an “No Illegal Dumping” sign on Cadillac Drive in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. Stretches of San Jose streets have become dumping grounds for unwanted household items, including mattresses, stoves, and refrigerators. But after a concerted effort to crack down on blight, city officials believe they are making progress to curb residents from discarding their unwanted junk. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group) 

Since adding the cameras and license readers, the city’s experienced a 32% reduction in illegal dumping calls at those locations.

“I don’t know if they went somewhere else, but it definitely feels less,” resident Jorge Rodriguez said.

While Williams acknowledged that the 12 cameras were inadequate to cover the city’s 181 square miles, the department is considering partnering with the police department to use its automated license plate readers so it could expand its surveillance network.

Along with finding a somewhat fruitful deterrent for illegal dumping, the city has also made progress in curbing graffiti, arresting three prolific taggers in the process. It cleared 2.5 million square feet last year — a 14.7% decrease from the previous year, though more graffiti is now showing up on private property.

“We set up these stings and we are seeing the residual kind of impact from that work,” Deputy City Manager Angel Rios said. “This is a first in the last 10 years if you go back and look at the statistics. You will not see a 14.73% decrease, period.”

Even though illegal dumping carries a stiff penalty of up to a $10,000 fine, the city has invested in bolstering its volunteer programs and educating residents about the multitude of services, like no-cost junk pickup, available to them instead of improperly discarding their trash.

For example, 14,826 residents volunteered as part of the Neighborhood Litter Program, helping remove approximately 718,865 pounds of litter and debris.

The city also held 155 dumpster day events last year, collecting more than 2.95 million pounds of items. This marks an 87% increase in events and 60% increase in trash collected during those occasions over the past three fiscal years.

The city has tried to break down barriers by advertising its different services in other languages, such as Spanish and Vietnamese, to better educate residents; however, public officials and city workers acknowledged a portion of the population will likely continue to illegally dump items if the city doesn’t show them there will be consequences.

Valencia noted that in downtown, one of his main coverage areas, he’s seen an uptick in improperly discarded items despite the city and San Jose State University offering a bounty of resources.

“Since I came on board, it just seems that the more we collect, the more they take out,” Valencia said. “How’s that saying go: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”