Press releases/appearances don't help much with graffiti abatement

The Chronicle's Tom Manning writes about a man in the Heights who has assumed graffiti-abatement duties because of the inability of the city to handle the task:

ON Sunday mornings, when most people are relaxing and enjoying the weekend, Paul Luccia is hard at work.

Armed with an industrial-sized sprayer, a generator and about 40 gallons of paint, the Heights resident is out on the street, covering every piece of graffiti he can find.

It's something Luccia, 43, has been doing since May, when he finally got fed up enough with the increase in graffiti he'd seen in the Heights to do something about it.

"I just got tired of looking at graffiti in my neighborhood all the time," said Luccia, a contractor and seven-year Heights resident. "I noticed a sharp increase last fall in the Heights. I had always seen it in Montrose and it had been a problem there for years, but it was starting to spread into our neighborhood."

So Luccia made a few phone calls, first to Keep Houston Beautiful, which gave him a power generator for his cleanup efforts.

He then contacted the Houston Police Department's Neighborhood Protection Corps, which gave him the green light to abate graffiti in his neighborhood.

Whether it's hiring private policing or handling neighborhood graffiti, it seems citizens and neighborhood groups are increasingly going to have to take on tasks that the city simply isn't handling well.

Graffiti abatement is a particular area of concern. Mayor White frequently appears on television or issues press releases talking about graffiti abatement, but the fact is that the city continues to do a really poor job with the task. As an example, it took about a dozen emails to 311 and Councilmembers for me to get action on a simple neighborhood graffiti request first made at the end of May -- and after all that effort (the interaction with 311 was a trip), the graffiti on private property that I reported was abated the first weekend of August. The graffiti that I reported on adjacent city property (traffic signals) STILL has not been handled.

Maybe I'll just buy some paint and do it myself.

UPDATE (08-13-2006): I stopped at Sears, bought a clearance gallon of gray exterior deck/metal flat paint and some throwaway brushes for under $10 total, and painted over the graffiti this afternoon. It felt good after looking at that garbage for a couple of months.

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 08/10/06 10:46 PM | Print |

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