Comment A view from the 'removal' side of things (Score 1) 554
Just to get the view of someone on the front lines of fighting back against this stuff, my summer job this year is with Graffiti Removal for a major city in Canada (that's all I'm willing to disclose). There are a few different crews which either do pressure washing, soda blasting (yes, baking soda), painting or paint spraying. I do pressure washing.
So far this summer, I have seen one honestly cool tag, well actually, it's art. It's about 12-15m long by 3m high. On the right there's Bin Laden with the crosshairs of a sniper scope on his forehead, on the left there's the twin towers with smoke coming out of one and a plane about to hit the other, above that there's a quote from Mr. George W. himself. There's the nicknames of the four guys who painted it placed off to the side, but unfortunately it looks like some other guy tagged on top of it, but not over top of anything important or cool, just in a part of the sky that had nothing in it. It's all multicoloured with a deep red sky and, well, it's pretty damn awesome. It's so awesome in fact, that the owner of the building doesn't want us to remove it because he likes it too. It's too bad more people can't see it because it's behind the building on private property and there's no lane behind the building, so you have to get out and walk around to see it.
Other than that cool tag, the rest are all just the little asshole punks putting their illegible names all over shit. We have tons of different ways of removing it but it always comes back. If they tag buildings though, the removal process (in my case pressure washing with baking soda) actually in some cases removes a small layer of the surface of the building, like say stucco walls or wooden fences. There's really no other way to remove it because it soaks in and gets "roots" as I like to say, but you deteriorate the surface. The mortar between bricks and even the bricks themselves get worn away over time by my equipment or even worse by the soda blaster, which is a 4000+ psi tow-behind compressor blasting baking soda and a tiny bit of water to keep the dust down. Some buildings that we repeatedly clean are starting to actually to have loose bricks or bricks worn 1-2" deeper than the original surface, which isn't the cheapest thing to start repairing.
I find it funny that these punks go to the store and spend their own money to buy a bunch of paint when I get paid quite well (by their parents' tax dollars no less) to drive around in a big ass pig of a truck and remove it if I feel like it.
So far this summer, I have seen one honestly cool tag, well actually, it's art. It's about 12-15m long by 3m high. On the right there's Bin Laden with the crosshairs of a sniper scope on his forehead, on the left there's the twin towers with smoke coming out of one and a plane about to hit the other, above that there's a quote from Mr. George W. himself. There's the nicknames of the four guys who painted it placed off to the side, but unfortunately it looks like some other guy tagged on top of it, but not over top of anything important or cool, just in a part of the sky that had nothing in it. It's all multicoloured with a deep red sky and, well, it's pretty damn awesome. It's so awesome in fact, that the owner of the building doesn't want us to remove it because he likes it too. It's too bad more people can't see it because it's behind the building on private property and there's no lane behind the building, so you have to get out and walk around to see it.
Other than that cool tag, the rest are all just the little asshole punks putting their illegible names all over shit. We have tons of different ways of removing it but it always comes back. If they tag buildings though, the removal process (in my case pressure washing with baking soda) actually in some cases removes a small layer of the surface of the building, like say stucco walls or wooden fences. There's really no other way to remove it because it soaks in and gets "roots" as I like to say, but you deteriorate the surface. The mortar between bricks and even the bricks themselves get worn away over time by my equipment or even worse by the soda blaster, which is a 4000+ psi tow-behind compressor blasting baking soda and a tiny bit of water to keep the dust down. Some buildings that we repeatedly clean are starting to actually to have loose bricks or bricks worn 1-2" deeper than the original surface, which isn't the cheapest thing to start repairing.
I find it funny that these punks go to the store and spend their own money to buy a bunch of paint when I get paid quite well (by their parents' tax dollars no less) to drive around in a big ass pig of a truck and remove it if I feel like it.
