Making a living from Zuckerberg’s Trash in San Francisco

One of the clearest signs of capitalism’s unraveling is the enormous chasm between the super rich and very poor in San Francisco.

The city also offers a kind of laboratory about the ways people survive off America’s waste. For The New York Times, Thomas Fuller follows Jake Orta, a military veteran who spends his days gathering discarded material from wealthy residents’ trash bins to resell later for, if all goes well, $300 a week.

He’s one of a few hundred residents who make their marginal livings this way in a city teeming with tech money and plagued by chronic homelessness. Mr. Orta has found numerous items in the bin outside Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million dollar home.

At dusk he leaves his apartment building, which is wedged between a popular brunch spot for tech workers and a cannabis shop in the heart of the Mission neighborhood. The smell of marijuana fills the vestibule.
Walking up a steep hill lined with mature trees, he passes homes that could pass for works of art: Victorians, some with stained glass and elaborate cornices and moldings painted in a soft palette of pastels, ocher, celadon and teal. A virtual tour of the neighborhood on the Zillow site shows that homes valued at $3 million and above are the norm.

But Mr. Orta doesn’t look at the architecture. He walks the streets, slightly stooped, his eyes on the ground and a flashlight in his back pocket. His friends call him the Finder.

On the six times Mr. Orta went out with a reporter, he followed a variety of circuits, but usually ended up exploring his favorite alleys and a dumpster that has been bountiful. (The first rule of dumpster scavenging, he said, is to make sure there’s no raccoon or possum in there.) In March, the dumpster yielded a box of silver goblets, dishes and plates, as if someone had yanked a tablecloth from underneath a feast in some European chateau

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https://thesmartcitizens./2019/04/09/zuckerbergs-trash-is-a-subcultures-treasure/

Source: https://thesmartcitizens./