Pulling off the highway Sunday, I saw a sign for CAUSS — Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam.
The purpose of CAUSS is to eliminate unsightly and illegal street signs. These signs are also known as street spam, bandit and snipe signs, vertical litter, illegal signs and utility pole advertising. Examples include got junk?, single?, single in (your city), (your city) singles, looking for love, I buy houses, we buy Houses, I buy homes, rent to own, lease purchase, avoid foreclosure, sell your house in 9 days, sell your home in 7 Days, CEO income, cash for your home, real estate apprentice wanted, work at home, work from home, I lost 40 pounds, have a pc, and quality affordable health insurance. CAUSS emphasizes working with Code Enforcement in dealing with the blight of ugly, illegal signs.
An interesting idea — though aside from the Code Enforcement, there’s also a more “direct action” element, as the CAUSS sign was tacked to another sign at the intersection — one very much like the ones above — from which the phone number had been clearly chopped off.
Hmmmm.
Most sign sharks prefer to remove the entire sign. Some sharks have found that if you remove a sign another spammer will come along and assume that spot as simply “unclaimed”. These sharks disable the sign (by slashing or painting) but leave part of the sign and thereby send a message to all spammers that their signs will be disabled too. Both complete removal and disabling of signs discourage the placement of new signs and this is the common long-term goal.
I guess … and certainly it’s a laudable cause. Still, defacing a public sign, even an illegal / reprehensible one, seems … worrisome. I mean, it’s got that knee-jerk “Yeah, you go, guys!” kind of appeal to it, but it sets a (yes) social precedent that folks whose righteousness (and legality) might be a bit sketchier.
If you “disable” the sign but leave it up, isn’t it still unsightly? Do they want the area clean or just unprofitable? Do you really think the spammer respect each others “territory”?
I would think the best way to attack the problem is the same way they attack graffiti – zero tolerance and constant vigilance. Graffiti breeds graffiti. If you clean up all of the graffiti in an area and quickly remove any new tags the frequency of tagging decreases. So, if you remove all the spam signs in a neighborhood and keep removing them, spammer will post elsewhere. Unlike electronic spam, sign spam has a true cost.
I agree that the best tactic is ripping it down as fast as it goes up — it’s not a deterrant, but it’s a non-attractant (and, in the meantime, it’s clean).
On the other hand, if I was going to put something up on Corner X and all the phone numbers on the attached signs were chopped off, I might think twice. Unless, of course, I was doing piece-work on behalf of a spammer, and as long as I put it up, I got my 10 cents each or something like that.
Interesting. I had no idea they were still around.
I do find it ironic that some of the volunteers are simply exchanging one form of unsightly sign for another, though…
It appears they only do this when the sign is otherwise unreachable, or worse, permanently affixed to the public property in question.
I applaud these guys. They’re doing a public service. Saying this is a social-precedent slippery slope is akin to saying that picking up discarded cans will lead to shoplifting soda from the store – the signs are trash, and the spamvertiser has no real expectation of property protection when they leave these derelict pieces of junk in the public right-of-way. They’re no different than cigarette butts, no matter what the spamvertiser’s intention was.
The sign I saw it on was within reach (which was how they chopped a section off). I don’t know how it was affixed, but it was not “permanent” by any means (it was on a metal light pole at the bottom of an onramp).
I agree that the signs are trash, and there’s no proper expectation of property protection. But disappearing or mutilating signs *I* think are improper is a precedent that most assuredly other folks will extend to themselves.