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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

> First, why do people throw away tennis shoes, unopened food etc? Why not take with them on to their next destination?

It's very possible for the cost of transport to exceed the value of the goods, especially if one is flying to one's next destination.

> Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?

This I can't help with. As far as I have seen, this is a common practice everywhere in the northeast US. The police don't always love it, but that doesn't really prevent people from doing it.

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Can confirm it's common in the upper Midwest as well. My college apartment was furnished mostly with stuff we got from curbs. Never heard of the police taking issue with it.

common practice in san francisco too. i always feel good when i see something that was just taking up space in my house and not being used has been picked up and rehomed.

How is this something the police are concerned with? I mean municipal authorities, maybe, but police? Wouldn’t be the case in most of Europe at least.

In most places just dumping stuff in space you don’t own isn’t allowed.

Somewhere there is a line between setting an unopened box of high-end sneakers on the street and putting a rusty mattress frame on the street, and dumping like the latter situation is illegal.

If you mean, why police would ever be involved, the answer is that there are a lot of police and not a lot of municipal workers walking around. The only way municipal workers would do anything here is if a resident of the area contacts them with 311 to inform them. And even then it can take months (if ever) if it's something like a blocked sidewalk or broken bollards rather than something important like a pothole.

If you mean why would "authorities" care, there's a lot of people that put what amounts to trash on the sidewalk and then move to a new apartment without cleaning it up, or else just ignore that they left it in front of their house until "someone else" takes care of it.

Where i live, people tend to use the word "police" as a catch all for any type of enforcement including by-law officers.

Who's your target audience for those items left on the curb? Everyone just left town.

me! not everyone who lives in a college town goes to the college.

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