Commentary: She's a Hollywood housekeeper with a side job: cleaning the trashed streets of her own neighborhood

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

The first stop on Sabine Phillips’ three-hour inspection of her neighborhood was at Fountain Avenue and St.Andrew’s Place, where detached pieces of a sofa had been plopped onto the sidewalk as if this were an outdoor living room.Phillips slid off her yellow Huffy cruiser, grabbed a pen, and entered the finding into her spiral notebook.“This stretch is a common dumping ground,” she told me, eyes hidden behind sunglasses under a floppy sun hat.Her part-time assistant, Keith Johnson, was wearing a “Trash Club Hollyood” T-shirt.

He squeezed the handle of his garbage-grabbing tool to snare cookie and chip wrappers that floated near some empty Pacifico beer bottles and a Big Gulp container the size of a drum.When they report neighborhood problems to the city, Johnson said, “sometimes they’re helpful and many times they’re not, so we end up doing things on our own.”Much of the discarded furniture and other goods left on the streets ends up being used to build homeless encampments, Phillips said.

That often leads to more trash, fires, drug activity and other nuisances that threaten public safety and set residents on edge.Phillips doesn’t just take notes.She reports her findings into the city’s MyLA311 system on Wednesdays, so city crews can make pickups on Thursdays and Fridays.

And they usually do respond, Phillips said.But the cycle immediately repeats, and she has typically reported 50 or more additional items, week after week, month after month.In a quarter of a century of writing about the many plundered patches of paradise, I’ve been repeatedly impressed by those who step up and make a difference out of some combination of pride, frustration and the spirit of volunteerism.

But I also understand the rage of taxpayers who wonder why Los Angeles City Hall is so incapable of managing the basics.A tour of the grounds around City Hall reveals several monument...