On a short stretch of Cadillac Drive — a few hundred feet in plain view of the cameras set up by San Jose to deter illegal dumping — TVs, refrigerators, flooring, a dishwasher, shopping carts and an assortment of debris litter the street on a recent morning. It’s one of the city’s worst hotspots for discarded trash.

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Four days a week, maintenance worker Javier Valencia loads up the junk onto his truck and cleans up at each stop along his route. Before and after each cleanup, he snaps pictures so customers who reported the blight can see how the city responded. In about a tenth of a mile, the back of his truck is nearly filled to the brim.

But the stark reality is that at some locations around the city, like Cadillac Drive, illegal dumping happens so regularly that by the

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