David Clarke estimates it will take him three to five years to clean up every forgotten tree bed, underpass and planter in New York City. After that, he says, he’ll have to find something else to do.
The 24-year-old Washington Heights resident has already made a big dent in his own neighborhood, making it his mission to beautify the city from sunup to sundown — and teach everyone else how to do it, too.
Through his rapidly growing social media accounts, Clarke is aiming to reverse what he calls “learned helplessness,” or community members’ overreliance on city government to maintain public spaces. To educate his 8.5 million neighbors, he’s made “Trash Talk” his full-time job.
“This only makes sense if you view it as something I do from 7 a.m. to the moment I go to sleep every day,” Clarke told The City Reporter from his apartment, filled with power tools, storage containers bursting with soil and racks lined with plants. He calls it his “lab.”
Clarke said he started this work last spring with a simple goal: picking up litter, piece by piece, in Washington Heights and posting about it on TikTok and Instagram. Since then, he’s planted seasonal flora in local tree beds, built benches around them for neighbors with mobility issues and shoveled out overgrown weeds and litter from dirty walkways.
In the five months since Clarke started posting his cleanup projects, he’s amassed more than 230,000 followers on both platforms and leveraged that audience to fundraise for more trash bags, grabbers and gloves, all while seeking volunteers to join him.
Lily Xiao said she came across Clarke’s Instagram Reels in May, during the first weeks of his initiative. Within the month, she bought a pink trash-grabber and started volunteering with him, cleaning up walkways along the South Brooklyn waterfront.
“It all started with one person wanting to make a change. We all have that agency,” Xiao told The City Reporter. “I think sometimes we forget, and his Reels are a good reminder of that.”
Neighbor David
Clarke said in the beginning, some of his neighbors appreciated his efforts, others didn’t care, but most were confused by the sight of a man holding a circular saw or pickaxe in Upper Manhattan. By now, they’ve gotten to know him and he frequently gets stopped in public, he said.
When he was walking around Washington Heights this week, Clarke said a local grocery store employee recognized him, saying “I know you!” and insisting he take a loaf of bread home. With the bread in Clarke’s left hand, he pointed with his right to fencing he built around tree beds on 171st Street, painted by neighborhood kids in pastels with images of flowers, fruits and a portrait of World Cup phenom Lamine Yamal. One fence read “David The Best.”
Before he started posting online about his work, Clarke began picking up local trash in the winter, motivated by a question he said he thought of often: “How much can one person do to improve the situation where they live?”
He received a Middle Eastern studies degree from Columbia University in 2024, took the LSAT and was gearing up for law school, but ultimately didn’t go through with it. While he founded a tutoring business in 2025, he said Trash Talk now consumes practically all of his time.
Clarke said his venture is funded almost entirely by a GoFundMe, which is still “barely enough to cover the cost of running this thing.” He said he’s raised more than $55,000 so far, and puts it all back into equipment.
On Tuesday afternoon, he was headed to B&H Videos downtown to learn more about what he needs to start shooting horizontal, long-form videos. The vertical, 60-second model isn’t long enough to tell every story, he said.
When Clarke built wooden fencing and planted perennials around a tree bed for his neighbor Dee, he said, the experience didn’t fully translate for social media. She had built a memorial there for her nephew in 2022, but it’d been lost to time and litter. Clarke added in a small bench, bargaining with his building’s disgruntled super who he said was sure “there’ll be kids out there smoking weed at night.” (He said his super is now one of his biggest supporters.)
Later, according to Clarke, Dee showed up to his door with soup, a handwritten letter, a subway map and other knickknacks for his kindness.
Is This Legal?
Clarke’s relationship with city agencies is a little more complicated than his relationship with his neighbors. He’s chided the Department of Transportation, which manages many of the city’s public spaces, online about the amount of muck and litter in the Haven Park Underpass in Washington Heights. DOT didn’t respond to The City Reporter’s requests for comment.
The Parks Department, the agency in charge of tree beds, encourages New Yorkers to plant in street tree pits, provided they don’t harm trees or introduce invasive species, such as bamboo, into neighborhoods, spokesperson Judd Faulkner told The City Reporter.
“NYC Parks loves seeing New Yorkers take an active role in caring for the tree beds and natural areas in their neighborhoods, and encourages anyone interested in stewardship to get involved, because community care helps our street trees and green spaces thrive,” Faulkner said in a statement.
Clarke added that his agency contacts have been friendly and helpful.
The Department of Sanitation praised Clarke — and encouraged other New Yorkers to do their part.
“We support the great number of residents such as David and longstanding community groups who help care for our public spaces and organize cleanups to improve quality of life in their neighborhoods,” spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said in a statement. “We hope that their work inspires all New Yorkers to refrain from littering and put trash in its proper place.”
Through the department’s volunteer cleanup program, residents can borrow equipment to pick up litter in public spaces across the city, except parks and beaches.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani follows Clarke on TikTok, and while the administration invited him to be a guest on one of the mayor’s fireside chat-like “Talk With the People” livestreams in July — according to group chat messages reviewed by The City Reporter — he didn’t participate. (Clarke said he’s waiting to pull “the Mamdani card” for something down the line — but he’s not yet sure what.)
Clarke said leading up to the June primary election, he noticed that after he posted videos about some messy areas in his neighborhood, they got cleaned up within a few days.
“It’s a weird political vulnerability, but trash looks bad,” he said.
By the end of his Trash Talk adventures, Clarke said he wants all five boroughs thoroughly beautified. But each project — every tree bed, plant and bench — needs to be maintained. He can handle the ones on his block for now — the wooden fencing around the tree beds will need to be replaced every five years — but is in the process of writing a book so community members can likewise maintain tree beds near their apartments.
When he’s done, maybe he’ll find another problem to solve — and post about it on TikTok.
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