It doesn’t take a megaphone to send a message, and litter, whether intentionally strewn or haphazardly distributed, can broadcast feelings about community care.
By Lindsay Crudele, The Boston Globe
When the neighbors moved in next door, they were “nice — at first,” a former Rhode Island resident told the Globe.
But when he put the house where he’d lived since 2003 up for sale while planning to move the family to Massachusetts, everything changed.
One of those neighbors became “openly hostile,” he said, dumping trash in his yard and on the sidewalk and flipping cigarettes toward the house. And when realtors showed up with prospective buyers, he said, the neighbors made signs disparaging the neighborhood, painting the sidewalk and shared driveway with violent slogans, and yelling at them through a megaphone.
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“The stress was so bad I could feel it physically,” said the homeowner, who requested anonymity due to the nature of the harassment that ensued.
It doesn’t take a megaphone to send a message, and litter, whether intentionally strewn or haphazardly distributed, can broadcast feelings about community care. The city of Boston has issued 23,894 citations for trash and litter-related categories so far this year, according to 311 data, and closed 2023 handing out just short of 56,000.
But does littering really affect home values? According to a 2020 survey by Keep America Beautiful, “Large majorities of US residents (75 percent to 97 percent) recognize that litter negatively affects the environment, waterways, property taxes, home values, tourism and businesses, quality of life, and health and safety in their communities.”
But while it can have a big impact ― the good news is that litter is one of the easiest things a property owner can address.
As rent rises, so do expectations, said Al Norton, a real estate agent with Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty in Boston and a property manager.
“If we’re paying, you know, $300 more than we were for a two-bed four years ago, then we want it to be better,” Norton said, and litter management is one easy way owners can signal that they are responsible landlords.
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“Owners are looking for responsible tenants, and tenants are looking for responsible landlords,” Norton said. Owners may not be able to add space or update a unit’s kitchen, but cleaning up the front steps can be a simple way to signal to potential tenants that a home is cared for and maintained.
But whose responsibility is it?
“I think some owners just assume that the tenants will clean that stuff up,” Norton said, “but that’s not true and also really not their responsibility.”
Norton said he and other agents pick up trash, arriving early to showings. And if it’s a pattern, he’ll start a conversation with the owner about instituting strategies for litter management. Hiring someone to tidy up on a monthly basis can be more cost-effective and have a better visual impact, he said.
“People judge on any number of things, and that is their immediate first impression,” Norton said.
“How do I feel when I get out of my car or walk down the street to walk up to my house?” said Norton. “Do I feel happy because everything looks nice and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I live here and I like that.’ Or am I like, ‘There’s a Red Bull can’?”
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Linda Burnett, an agent with Insight Realty Group in West Roxbury, said she makes sure everything is pristine before photographing locations.
“When I’m showing properties to buyers in areas where litter is more plentiful, it always strikes me as a pretty serious negative, especially when the listing agent could easily have arrived a few minutes ahead of time to pick those candy wrappers out of the shrubs or to scoop up that dog poop left by a careless passerby,” she said.
The appearance of litter can perpetuate a longer-term cycle, said Neil Rhein, executive director of Keep Massachusetts Beautiful, a nonprofit devoted to fighting litter in communities and a state chapter of the national organization Keep America Beautiful.
“Clean areas tend to stay cleaner,” Rhein said. “When you come to an area and it’s already highly littered, you kind of get the message that, ‘Oh, I guess it’s OK to litter here.”
While municipalities manage weekly trash pickup, very few public works departments dedicate themselves to the task of picking up scattered litter, Rhein said. Preventing the individual act of littering, and its collective impact, is a behavior-change effort that can start with early education and continue with community-based public information campaigns, he said.
Rhein said Keep Massachusetts Beautiful has distributed 1,600 litter cleanup kits across the state, containing a grabber tool, gloves, trash bag, and T-shirt. Local groups use the kits during community cleanup days, and chapters such as Keep Framingham Beautiful maintain active online organizations.
Enforcement is another tool, Rhein said.
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“People kind of litter with abandon in Massachusetts, and then there’s no real consequences,” he said.
While Keep America Beautiful does not track litter’s relationship with real estate transactions, Rhein said the presence of trash could play a role in such a search.
“It’s basically Curb Appeal 101, right?” he said. “And most people are going to say, ‘I don’t really like this neighborhood — let’s look somewhere else.’”
Lindsay Crudele can be reached at [emailprotected]. Follow Address on Twitter @globehomes.
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