21 years later H Street NE commercial district is still dirty

I've been amazed at how much cleaner Salt Lake City tends to be compared to DC.  

For example, a few years ago, I walked from Manor Park to Columbia Heights and back, and picked up and disposed of over 500 recyclables...

This is a query on Reddit DC, looking for people to help clean up H Street NE.  

As chair of the H Street Main Street Promotions Committee back in 2003 this is something we did too.  I wrote about it in a couple entries:

-- "Every Litter Bit Hurts," 2005
-- "Community cleanups (and other activities) as community building and civic engagement activities," 2011

I would say it gave me a much better ground-based appreciation about the nature of the trash.  In DC commercial districts, it's pretty typical for trash to flow into the first residential block on either side of the street.

So clean up programs should include the abutting residential areas where appropriate.

It also illustrates that commercial district revitalization is a never ending effort.  Perceptions of public safety are shaped by cleanliness, the presence of graffiti, etc.

-- "Updating the post The "soft side" of commercial district revitalization," 2006/2016

Decades ago, DC used to pay people to clean the streets of commercial districts, but that program ended when the city was in bankruptcy.

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This article is interesting.  Back when I did Main Street commercial district revitalization work, I used to make the point that small cities and big cities often missed the point when approaching their work.  A big city wasn't all downtown.  The neighborhood commercial districts are more akin to smaller town commercial districts.  Therefore small towns can learn from neighborhood commercial districts in cities and vice versa.

This article about commercial district revitalization in smaller towns across Minnesota illustrates the point ("From Owatonna to Red Wing, Minnesota's small downtowns see resurgence," Minneapolis Star Tribune, archive.ph copy).