We’ll spend days loading the dumpster again and again, to finish up as quickly and efficiently as possible. We don’t take breaks. There are many days when I don’t go to the bathroom. I don’t eat or drink anything, partly because there’s no working bathroom and with all that grime, you just want to get home and take a shower. In the summer, the heat brings out the smells, which alerts people to the hoarding. Those are the busiest times, and the worst days, working in places with narrow stairs and no air-conditioning or running water.
What have been some reactions from the hoarders when you’re there?
This industry requires a lot of compassion. For hoarders, it’s a very harsh situation, to see what they’ve been holding onto being ripped away from them. We don’t want to just take everything, shovel it away and leave the person dry. They’ve been looking at the hoard for so long, that’s all they can see; they don’t see a way out. Sometimes they’re buying books about getting organized and more containers for organizing their stuff.
My crews make decisions quickly. They know how to put the obvious valuables aside when they’re clearing out a room. I don’t have to micromanage them while I’m working with the hoarders, keeping them on track, asking them: “Do you want this? Do you want this?” I’m trying to convince them to move fast, make decisions, create piles of what to save and what to throw out.
Inevitably, something they care about ends up in the dumpster. They get stuck and fixated on that one thing, and we have to go look for it. One time, it was some free concert tickets that had been attached by a magnet to a roach-filled, disintegrating metal file cabinet. Or it could be a hairbrush or scarf. We’ve even been asked to go wandering around the dump — maybe for a lost diamond, I’d go that far.
The family is usually on my side, but they’re also the ones dealing with the upset hoarder calling them in the middle of the night. The hoarders sometimes love me at the beginning, but by the end they just want me out. At the end there’s bittersweet sorrow.
Are certain neighborhoods more prone to hoarding?
We see a lot of hoarding around Queens and the Upper East Side; along East End Avenue, I think I’ve been in every single building. The hoarder can be the last rent-stabilized tenant left in a building that’s gone co-op.
