She is a domestic worker with a side job: cleaning the streets of her neighborhood

The first stop when Sabine Phillips explored her neighborhood for three hours was Fountain Avenue and St. Andrew’s Place, where separate pieces of sofas were set up on the sidewalk as if this were an outdoor living room.

Phillips got out of his yellow Huffy boat, grabbed a pen, and entered his findings in his notebook.

“This stretch is a common dumping ground,” he told me, eyes hidden behind sunglasses under a shiny sun hat.

His part-time assistant, Keith Johnson, wore a “Trash Club Hollyood” T-shirt. He squeezed the handle of his garbage disposal to scoop up the cookie and chip wrappers floating next to empty Pacifico beer bottles and a drum-sized container of Big Gulp. When they report neighborhood problems to the city, Johnson said, “sometimes they’re helpful and most of the time they’re not, so we end up doing things ourselves.”

Most of the discarded furniture and other goods left on the streets end up being used to build shelters for the homeless, Phillips said. That often leads to more litter, fires, drug use and other disturbances that threaten public safety and put residents in trouble.

Phillips doesn’t just take notes. He reports his findings to the city’s MyLA311 program on Wednesday, so city staff can take photos Thursday and Friday. And they usually respond, Phillips said. But the cycle quickly repeats itself, and you report 50 or more additional items, week after week, month after month.

In the quarter of a century I’ve been writing about the many stolen pieces of paradise, I’ve been impressed time and time again by those who step up and make a difference in some combination of pride, frustration and a spirit of volunteerism. But I also understand the anger of taxpayers who wonder why Los Angeles City Hall can’t handle the basics.

In the race for city leadership, even Mayor Karen Bass and Council Member Nithya Raman say things have to change, which means that their management work should be noted.

Last week, after my column about the large amount of vandalism around City Hall — including a graffiti-scarred fountain that has been out of service for most of the last 60 years (no lie) — I heard from students with their own problems.

Richard Vasquez wrote that the Plaza de Mexico in Lincoln Heights is still a graveyard of missing images. Richard Zaldivar wrote that a nearby AIDS memorial was vandalized and many calls for help fell on deaf ears. Estela Lopez of the industrial development district in the city, where garbage is dumped illegally, wrote that a district report warned that typhus levels in the city have reached a very high level.

Sabine Phillips documents discarded furniture and trash found on the side of her neighborhood Wednesday in East Hollywood.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

I also heard from Stefanie Keenan, who had a brilliant idea a few years ago, born out of anger at City Hall. He hired his housekeeper – who would have been Phillips – to help navigate and clean the place where they both lived, and Phillips’ work was shown by NBCA and under Sam Quinones.

“It wasn’t done any other way, and my neighborhood would have burned down,” Keenan told me.

Keenan, who has been maintaining his streets for years, has been paying Phillips $100 for a Wednesday inspection trip and another $100 to fill four or five large bags on a Saturday trash patrol. Keenan, a photographer, told me he spent tens of thousands of dollars out of his pocket.

But Keenan doesn’t have unlimited money, and this was Phillips’ last week on the job. God knows what the neighbor will look like without him. As he was walking his usual route on Wednesday, Phillips found several sofas, among other things.

A refrigerator. A refrigerator. Rugs. The seats. Excrement. They don’t wear it. Drawers. Bed frames. Mattresses. Box springs. The printer. Electrical. Televisions.

And a lot of debris, some of which blocked the side roads and some spilled on the roads and streets.

On Lexington Avenue he stopped to add the following to his check-in list:

“3 bathrooms.”

Nothing surprises him, and nothing slows him down. At the house where the builder dumped the logs on the side of the road, Phillips rode up and asked what was going to happen to the pile. He said he had no knowledge; he put his bag.

Phillips takes a break from writing the addresses of discarded furniture and junk.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

I tried to persuade Phillips to run for mayor, but the German was not interested. However, she said she was “the first female bouncer in Berlin,” and that was “at the Hells Angel discotheque.”

The Berlin bumper kept moving, writing down. He filled three pages of his notebook with more than 60 writings, including roadside drawings.

“I’ve seen some strange things,” Phillips said. “Twice I found safes outside, just by the side of the road.”

The neighborhood around the studio he travels to is a mix of high-end houses and high-rise apartment blocks, with people coming in and out and leaving belongings on the curb as they come and go.

That is not the city’s fault. But the city could do a better job of teaching residents how to schedule pickups, and a better job of demolishing them when they don’t. I reached out to the office of Council Member Hugo Soto-Martinez, but we had not been in touch when I reached my deadline.

At the Lexington Avenue pocket park, Phillips told me he had never seen children on the grounds.

“I’m going to show you why I will never have children playing here,” he said, pointing to the sandbox. “There’s glass … needles, and … you’ll see human waste over there in the corner.”

A green tarp covers the temporary home next to the sandbox. Someone fell asleep on the bench. The slide had a gang symbol painted on it, and two people hovered under the slide on the edge of the sandbox. Phillips said he saw homeless people using the well 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 through trash on the sidewalk in East Hollywood.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

While Phillips and Johnson were in the park, a city and parks employee showed up. He said he was there to check the condition of the park, which was supposed to have a new playground that would cost about $300,000. He said that a body was found in the park not long ago. He estimated about 30% to 50% of city parks have similar problems.

I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s words “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

So it goes.

The folly of investing in a new playground when ten growing problems make the park unsafe should be clear to everyone. There is certainly more to the program, one would hope – something important and ongoing. 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 place Phillips, and the team trained and supervised by him, on the team of yellow Huffys.

I guarantee it will be money well spent.

steve.lopez@latimes.com