Residents of Homewood are lamenting the loss of a longtime amenity that stood rare among others in the Birmingham metro area – boutique front-door garbage service.

Gone are the days of city sanitation workers walking up to hundreds of homes to collect cans in the early hours of the day. Now residents have to take their trash down to the street and place it in industrial containers for a private company to collect it using trucks with automatic lifts, the same as done in most other nearby cities.

“We went from having consistent service that we could actually depend on to no one even knowing when the trash is coming,” said resident Stephanie Patterson. “A lot of times I’ll see the guys come down the street and they’ll pick up some of the houses and skip some of the houses.”

In Homewood, a growing suburb that’s home to about 27,000 people just south of Birmingham, the switch from the old-fashioned city trash collection to commercial provider Amwaste has come with major obstacles, both city officials and residents agree.

Residents have turned to a forum on the city website to report complaints about missed service and to post photos showing garbage bags left on the curb or cans left unemptied by the trash service crews. The website shows dozens of reports in the past few weeks.