10 ms·

Mapping San Francisco's Human Waste Challenge

67 points by spking 8y ago

excitom 8y ago
I work in SoMa and walk to and from the CalTrain every day. Reading this article you'd think I'd be ankle deep in poop during my walk. It's just not the problem it's made out to be, not even close. I think people who write these kind of articles like to take cheap shots at "lib" cities like SF. The last sentence of the article bears this out. Edit: Wow, I'm being downvoted for a personal observation that a story is exaggerated. Sorry if I disturbed your confirmation bias.
- franciscop 8y ago
  As a foreigner from Europe (Spain) living in Japan who just visited SF for a couple of weeks it's amazingly disgusting... I've seen people pooping in broad daylight near Market Street twice, many times peeing, and in some touristic areas I've had to literally jump over homeless people to keep going. True it's not "ankle deep in poop", but if that's the bar where we are comparing it with then there's something truly amiss in a 1-st world city/country.
  - fiblye 8y ago
    Furthermore, one of the absolute richest cities in the wealthiest country on earth. A lot of these solutions just involve pumping money through injection sites, programs, etc. I think it’s something no amount of money will fix. Something needs to be done about a culture that not only accepts this as normal, but is trying to find ways to make it acceptable and easier to do in hopes that they’ll stop. There’s a reason other counties bus people into SF: it’s because they know people in SF will put up with it. There will be a constant flow of new people who don’t care about ruining a city.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      >There’s a reason other counties bus people into SF: it’s because they know people in SF will put up with it. There will be a constant flow of new people who don’t care about ruining a city. There's some serious cognitive dissonance here. The people who start in CA and end in Denver, Portland or Austin might not be shitting on the streets themselves but they fight tooth and nail for the kind of public policy that has led cities like SF and SD into their current pediment. They're shitting on the streets by proxy.
- chippy 8y ago
  How does it compare to other cities? Do other cities have dedicated "poop patrols"? Is the outcry about public defecation about gentrification or is it a genuine problem? How can we get accurate comparative statistics that also show how the homeless are treated. Like I have heard that by (almost) decriminalising public defecation and urination the city puts less stress on the homeless who wouldn't be able to afford any fines, and in "cleaner" cities the homeless have a harder life.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > How does it compare to other cities? This is a very rare problem in literally any other Western city. Even in the severely deprived ones which have used needle problems. Dog waste and public urination, maybe.
    - nutjob2 8y ago
      You do occasionally encounter it elsewhere, maybe everywhere, even in "clean" cities but the scale is incomparable to most other cities.
  - brunoTbear 8y ago
    The comparison is best with San Diego as a warning: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/13/550674476/san-diego-washing-streets-with-bleach-to-combat-hepatitis-a-outbreak https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/13/550674476...
- myvoiceismypass 8y ago
  I walked through SoMa every day on my way to work (Financial District) for a year, and I saw more poop (and needles) on those walks than I have the rest of my life combined. I’ve lived most of my life in Philly, FWIW. Not exactly a bastion of cleanliness.
- keiferski 8y ago
  Politicizing and tribalizing an issue like this is the wrong approach. San Francisco has a serious problem and it’s plainly visible to anyone who visits.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  'Not literally ankle deep' is a pretty low standard to be happy with. I've never seen human waste in any Western city except San Francisco. It should really give someone some pause for thought rather than dismissing it.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    FWIW, I see human poop on my walk to work in NYC about once per two weeks. But, that walk passes an area where homeless people congregate, so that's probably not characteristic of most parts of the city.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  In every single city around me for a thousand miles, you will go to jail for shitting in the street. There is also no shitting in the street. Let alone shitting on people's cars or other property, which only seems explicable as malice.
- dev_north_east 8y ago
  > take cheap shots at "lib" cities like SF Possibly but I'll throw my two cents in. Non-American here with no Dem or Rep axe to grind, SF is the most disgusting western city I've ever been to.
- nutjob2 8y ago
  I used to live in the Tenderloin nearish Market and you literally couldn't walk anywhere without keeping your eyes focused on the ground. It only takes a single poop to spoil your day, or at least your shoes. I don't think it's a cheap shot to criticize SF in this case, and as a liberal city. It takes a woefully unrealistic approach to homelessness. At its core, the problem is the more accommodative you are of homeless people the more you attract. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, you cannot "solve it" as a city. Homelessness has network effects just like the tech industry. Now I'm all for helping people less fortunate and those down on their luck, and SF does help people, but there are those who are chronically homeless. They fall into three groups: those who prefer the lifestyle, those who are mentally ill, and those who prefer to spend all their money on hard drugs (including drink). You're very unlikely to get these groups off the streets, no matter what you do, but you will still attract them.
- jowiar 8y ago
  I’ve lived in SF, NY, DC, and Chicago — all liberal cities. SF is the only city where human shit on the sidewalk is a common occurrence. It’s absolutely the problem it’s made out to be.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Basically every major city in the US is a "lib" city. Can we no longer criticize the stupid things they do without being accused of partisan trolling?
- closeparen 8y ago
  I live in SOMA near the Bay, and when I walk to Metreon I encounter a turd about half the time. When I walk to work on Folsom, Harrison, or Mission it’s just about 100% of the time, usually around 6th street. On Market I have twice seen people drop their pants and shit in front of me on a crowded sidewalk.
- berberous 8y ago
  I live in NY and I'm not a conservative taking a shot at a liberal city. There was shit on the building wall of my (not cheap) hotel. I was honestly shocked at how many areas of the city, while beautiful, clearly had a slight smell of piss or shit. NY smells like garbage half the time, but other than when you get on the bad car on the subway where some homeless guy has camped up, very rarely does it smell like human waste.
cowsandmilk 8y ago
The human waste and needles on the street are intimately related in my mind. Step 1: People start shooting up in public bathrooms, and then passing out on the toilets Step 2: Public bathrooms are closed due to the drug problem found in step 1 Step 3: Now everyone begins shitting in the street because public bathrooms are no longer available. And those people shooting up in the bathrooms are also shooting up on the street. In those public bathrooms that remain, you typically see needle disposal containers; sometimes in every stall. In Seattle on Sunday, I went to the bathroom in Macy's and every stall had them and I'm pretty sure 3 of the stalls were occupied by people doing drugs. The obvious answer is supervised injection sites where people can safely shoot up, which would then allow public restrooms to reopen and not be constantly occupied by people with needles. Unfortunately, the republican party at the national level has worked to actively prevent SF from opening these sites. So, the author, a prominent republican, should maybe consider telling his party's national apparatus to get out of the way of SF fixing their local problems rather than his weird nonsensical admonition at the end.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  Supervised injection sites don't seem like the obvious answer to me. Legalize the use of drugs, sure. Provide needle exchange programs to prevent the spread of disease, maybe. But I don't know that we need to pay to provide space and staff for people to use heroin. We should draw the line in indulging people's bad habits somewhere. It isn't reasonable to shoot up in a public bathroom even if a city doesn't provide supervised injection sites any more than it is reasonable to have sex in the street if a city doesn't provide free love hotels. At some point antisocial behavior is and ought to be considered criminal.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    I talked to a doctor once who said Amsterdam does what you think is "over the line", they even supplied the drugs. It's probably cheaper than "cleaning up" after the druggies, and also for the police resources needed to prevent crimes. And she said some druggies even quit, because they lost the thrill: when it was illegal and they had to do crimes to get money to buy their next hit, it was thrilling, but when all they did was go to the injection site, get high, and then go home again, some of them realized "my life needs more meaning than this". Also, since they're not busy burglarizing homes to get money to buy drugs, they could also be employed for tasks like street cleaning.
RickJWagner 8y ago
I had a conference in San Francisco last year. One day as I was walking between Moscone Center and the hotel, a roughly dressed woman was walking on the sidewalk alongside of me. "Watch out for that shi*!" she exclaimed. I thought she was crazy, shouting at random. Then I saw that I'd stepped in human poop. True story.
danenania 8y ago
Having lived in SF for about a year now, it's actually quite a clean, beautiful, and safe city IF you just stay away from a big chunk of the center. My wife and I pretty much try to avoid it at all costs now, which is sad because there's a lot of good stuff there (architecture, theatre, restaurants, the tech scene, public transit arteries, etc.) but there are also plenty of interesting and beautiful neighborhoods to explore that don't have any of these problems, so we still enjoy living here a lot for the most part. It's a utopia and dystopia all wrapped up into one.
- maxaf 8y ago
  So, SF is not a clean, beautiful, and safe city, considering that the part of it with all the interesting stuff also happens to be drowning in a putrid combination of feces and needles. It's just like saying that Earth is a lovely place, as long as you avoid breathing the atmosphere and drinking any of the water. Look at the forests! Hope your spacesuit's faceplate doesn't become pitted by the acid rain.
  - danenania 8y ago
    My point is that all the interesting stuff is not in the center. There is some interesting stuff there, but there's just as much (if not more) interesting stuff and urban/natural beauty in other less central neighborhoods like Richmond, Sunset, Pac Heights, NoPa, Castro, North Beach, Mission-Bernal, Noe Valley, Lower Haight, and a bunch more. All of those neighborhoods are safe, walkable, have plenty of things to do, and compare well on just about every dimension to any neighborhood in any big city in the world. So while the drug and homelessness problems radiating out from SoMa/Tenderloin are very serious and not to be diminished, trying to paint the whole city as a cesspool just indicates that you haven't seen much of it.
    - thrax 8y ago
      Shhh!
pr0zac 8y ago
Theres a pretty clear reason for the problem. SF's shelter system is terribly lacking compared to cities like NYC. https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...

67 points by spking 8y ago

I work in SoMa and walk to and from the CalTrain every day. Reading this article you'd think I'd be ankle deep in poop during my walk. It's just not the problem it's made out to be, not even close. I think people who write these kind of articles like to take cheap shots at "lib" cities like SF. The last sentence of the article bears this out. Edit: Wow, I'm being downvoted for a personal observation that a story is exaggerated. Sorry if I disturbed your confirmation bias.

franciscop 8y ago
As a foreigner from Europe (Spain) living in Japan who just visited SF for a couple of weeks it's amazingly disgusting... I've seen people pooping in broad daylight near Market Street twice, many times peeing, and in some touristic areas I've had to literally jump over homeless people to keep going. True it's not "ankle deep in poop", but if that's the bar where we are comparing it with then there's something truly amiss in a 1-st world city/country.
- fiblye 8y ago
  Furthermore, one of the absolute richest cities in the wealthiest country on earth. A lot of these solutions just involve pumping money through injection sites, programs, etc. I think it’s something no amount of money will fix. Something needs to be done about a culture that not only accepts this as normal, but is trying to find ways to make it acceptable and easier to do in hopes that they’ll stop. There’s a reason other counties bus people into SF: it’s because they know people in SF will put up with it. There will be a constant flow of new people who don’t care about ruining a city.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >There’s a reason other counties bus people into SF: it’s because they know people in SF will put up with it. There will be a constant flow of new people who don’t care about ruining a city. There's some serious cognitive dissonance here. The people who start in CA and end in Denver, Portland or Austin might not be shitting on the streets themselves but they fight tooth and nail for the kind of public policy that has led cities like SF and SD into their current pediment. They're shitting on the streets by proxy.
chippy 8y ago
How does it compare to other cities? Do other cities have dedicated "poop patrols"? Is the outcry about public defecation about gentrification or is it a genuine problem? How can we get accurate comparative statistics that also show how the homeless are treated. Like I have heard that by (almost) decriminalising public defecation and urination the city puts less stress on the homeless who wouldn't be able to afford any fines, and in "cleaner" cities the homeless have a harder life.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > How does it compare to other cities? This is a very rare problem in literally any other Western city. Even in the severely deprived ones which have used needle problems. Dog waste and public urination, maybe.
  - nutjob2 8y ago
    You do occasionally encounter it elsewhere, maybe everywhere, even in "clean" cities but the scale is incomparable to most other cities.
- brunoTbear 8y ago
  The comparison is best with San Diego as a warning: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/13/550674476/san-diego-washing-streets-with-bleach-to-combat-hepatitis-a-outbreak https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/13/550674476...
myvoiceismypass 8y ago
I walked through SoMa every day on my way to work (Financial District) for a year, and I saw more poop (and needles) on those walks than I have the rest of my life combined. I’ve lived most of my life in Philly, FWIW. Not exactly a bastion of cleanliness.
keiferski 8y ago
Politicizing and tribalizing an issue like this is the wrong approach. San Francisco has a serious problem and it’s plainly visible to anyone who visits.
chrisseaton 8y ago
'Not literally ankle deep' is a pretty low standard to be happy with. I've never seen human waste in any Western city except San Francisco. It should really give someone some pause for thought rather than dismissing it.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  FWIW, I see human poop on my walk to work in NYC about once per two weeks. But, that walk passes an area where homeless people congregate, so that's probably not characteristic of most parts of the city.
merpnderp 8y ago
In every single city around me for a thousand miles, you will go to jail for shitting in the street. There is also no shitting in the street. Let alone shitting on people's cars or other property, which only seems explicable as malice.
dev_north_east 8y ago
> take cheap shots at "lib" cities like SF Possibly but I'll throw my two cents in. Non-American here with no Dem or Rep axe to grind, SF is the most disgusting western city I've ever been to.
nutjob2 8y ago
I used to live in the Tenderloin nearish Market and you literally couldn't walk anywhere without keeping your eyes focused on the ground. It only takes a single poop to spoil your day, or at least your shoes. I don't think it's a cheap shot to criticize SF in this case, and as a liberal city. It takes a woefully unrealistic approach to homelessness. At its core, the problem is the more accommodative you are of homeless people the more you attract. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, you cannot "solve it" as a city. Homelessness has network effects just like the tech industry. Now I'm all for helping people less fortunate and those down on their luck, and SF does help people, but there are those who are chronically homeless. They fall into three groups: those who prefer the lifestyle, those who are mentally ill, and those who prefer to spend all their money on hard drugs (including drink). You're very unlikely to get these groups off the streets, no matter what you do, but you will still attract them.
jowiar 8y ago
I’ve lived in SF, NY, DC, and Chicago — all liberal cities. SF is the only city where human shit on the sidewalk is a common occurrence. It’s absolutely the problem it’s made out to be.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Basically every major city in the US is a "lib" city. Can we no longer criticize the stupid things they do without being accused of partisan trolling?
closeparen 8y ago
I live in SOMA near the Bay, and when I walk to Metreon I encounter a turd about half the time. When I walk to work on Folsom, Harrison, or Mission it’s just about 100% of the time, usually around 6th street. On Market I have twice seen people drop their pants and shit in front of me on a crowded sidewalk.
berberous 8y ago
I live in NY and I'm not a conservative taking a shot at a liberal city. There was shit on the building wall of my (not cheap) hotel. I was honestly shocked at how many areas of the city, while beautiful, clearly had a slight smell of piss or shit. NY smells like garbage half the time, but other than when you get on the bad car on the subway where some homeless guy has camped up, very rarely does it smell like human waste.

cowsandmilk 8y ago

The human waste and needles on the street are intimately related in my mind. Step 1: People start shooting up in public bathrooms, and then passing out on the toilets Step 2: Public bathrooms are closed due to the drug problem found in step 1 Step 3: Now everyone begins shitting in the street because public bathrooms are no longer available. And those people shooting up in the bathrooms are also shooting up on the street. In those public bathrooms that remain, you typically see needle disposal containers; sometimes in every stall. In Seattle on Sunday, I went to the bathroom in Macy's and every stall had them and I'm pretty sure 3 of the stalls were occupied by people doing drugs. The obvious answer is supervised injection sites where people can safely shoot up, which would then allow public restrooms to reopen and not be constantly occupied by people with needles. Unfortunately, the republican party at the national level has worked to actively prevent SF from opening these sites. So, the author, a prominent republican, should maybe consider telling his party's national apparatus to get out of the way of SF fixing their local problems rather than his weird nonsensical admonition at the end.

bradleyjg 8y ago
Supervised injection sites don't seem like the obvious answer to me. Legalize the use of drugs, sure. Provide needle exchange programs to prevent the spread of disease, maybe. But I don't know that we need to pay to provide space and staff for people to use heroin. We should draw the line in indulging people's bad habits somewhere. It isn't reasonable to shoot up in a public bathroom even if a city doesn't provide supervised injection sites any more than it is reasonable to have sex in the street if a city doesn't provide free love hotels. At some point antisocial behavior is and ought to be considered criminal.
- netsharc 8y ago
  I talked to a doctor once who said Amsterdam does what you think is "over the line", they even supplied the drugs. It's probably cheaper than "cleaning up" after the druggies, and also for the police resources needed to prevent crimes. And she said some druggies even quit, because they lost the thrill: when it was illegal and they had to do crimes to get money to buy their next hit, it was thrilling, but when all they did was go to the injection site, get high, and then go home again, some of them realized "my life needs more meaning than this". Also, since they're not busy burglarizing homes to get money to buy drugs, they could also be employed for tasks like street cleaning.

RickJWagner 8y ago

I had a conference in San Francisco last year. One day as I was walking between Moscone Center and the hotel, a roughly dressed woman was walking on the sidewalk alongside of me. "Watch out for that shi*!" she exclaimed. I thought she was crazy, shouting at random. Then I saw that I'd stepped in human poop. True story.

danenania 8y ago

Having lived in SF for about a year now, it's actually quite a clean, beautiful, and safe city IF you just stay away from a big chunk of the center. My wife and I pretty much try to avoid it at all costs now, which is sad because there's a lot of good stuff there (architecture, theatre, restaurants, the tech scene, public transit arteries, etc.) but there are also plenty of interesting and beautiful neighborhoods to explore that don't have any of these problems, so we still enjoy living here a lot for the most part. It's a utopia and dystopia all wrapped up into one.

maxaf 8y ago
So, SF is not a clean, beautiful, and safe city, considering that the part of it with all the interesting stuff also happens to be drowning in a putrid combination of feces and needles. It's just like saying that Earth is a lovely place, as long as you avoid breathing the atmosphere and drinking any of the water. Look at the forests! Hope your spacesuit's faceplate doesn't become pitted by the acid rain.
- danenania 8y ago
  My point is that all the interesting stuff is not in the center. There is some interesting stuff there, but there's just as much (if not more) interesting stuff and urban/natural beauty in other less central neighborhoods like Richmond, Sunset, Pac Heights, NoPa, Castro, North Beach, Mission-Bernal, Noe Valley, Lower Haight, and a bunch more. All of those neighborhoods are safe, walkable, have plenty of things to do, and compare well on just about every dimension to any neighborhood in any big city in the world. So while the drug and homelessness problems radiating out from SoMa/Tenderloin are very serious and not to be diminished, trying to paint the whole city as a cesspool just indicates that you haven't seen much of it.
  - thrax 8y ago
    Shhh!

pr0zac 8y ago

Theres a pretty clear reason for the problem. SF's shelter system is terribly lacking compared to cities like NYC. https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...