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People are pooping more than ever on the streets of San Francisco
- tonymet 8y agoIf one thing is shown in this article, it's that brown should be used more frequently in charts.
- hatmatrix 8y agoDon't fool around - use the brown.
- Scoundreller 8y agoSoooo, build bathrooms and make them free (as in beer)?
- kradroy 8y agoThey have some of those throughout the city. However, they require attendants to be on site during operation because people shoot up drugs, prostitute themselves, or sleep in them. The solution will require much more than some free-to-use restrooms.
- SllX 8y agoYou know something, we already have police patrolling the streets, and even if it were only open 16 hours a day, that’s still 16 hours of availability. So really, we just don’t have enough, and I don’t think anyone really cares if people are actually shooting up drugs in a bathroom. That’s better than doing it in playgrounds or on park trails and leaving the needles strewn around. It isn’t that we can’t. It completely makes sense to open up more public restrooms. We are simply choosing not to and making excuses for our choices. “The solution” is nothing. If you want people living in the streets to take a dump somewhere other than just the streets, give them a place to actually do it. Make them common. Make them regular. Make them staffed. Make them clean and well plumbed. Make them high throughout so any member of the public can use them. And even add biohazard collection bins if you feel it is necessary.
- jquery 8y agoI have a little girl. I care very much if someone is shooting up drugs in a public bathroom. How can she use such a bathroom safely? Maybe once she's a teenager but long before then she won't be letting me accompany her inside a bathroom. I don't want homeless people shooting up drugs in the park or in public bathrooms, unless "public bathroom" is merely to become a euphemism for something else, which seems to be a different conversation. Let's assume we do install these toilets. These won't be cheap toilets, they will, for a large percentage of their time in service, essentially be "hard living facilities for the mentally ill". Homeless people and vagrants put very strange objects into public toilets in SF, breaking them constantly. The San Francisco public library had to install grinders[1] to handle the load homeless people were putting on public toilets. And this was after they began to constantly monitor the restrooms[2][3]. How many public toilets should we build and how much should we spend on each one per year? [1] I can't find the source for the grinders but I do recall reading about the installation of them a few years back, maybe someone can provide a link. [2] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-main-library-trying-to-address-bathroom-cleanliness-issues/?oid=2560444 https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-main-library-t... [3] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-library-s-main-branch-bathrooms-a-mess-4864613.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-library-s-main-br...
- SllX 8y agoMate, I grew up in this city. No less than three times in my time where my age might be counted in single digits did I find needles buried in the sand in the park or along the trails. Each and every time, my mother was pissed. I’m not a parent yet, but I was in the position of being the kid, finding the needles strewn about in our parks. The examples I gave were from my own memories, not some abstract ideas of things that might happen. One notable change: most of the playgrounds don’t have sand anymore. I don’t know if that’s a net improvement, but if someone leaves a needle around, it is much more likely to be in plain sight of the adults around. That is not the case for park trails if you like to go off the beaten path with your kids. So we have a problem, where we have a large homeless population, many of them addicted to drugs, and literally shitting in the streets. If you don’t have strong nerves, you might find yourself facing a difficult choice between knowing your kid is going to come up against this environment, and possibly encounter needles, or just leaving the city entirely. I’m not telling you or anyone to leave, but it might not be for you. I made it to adulthood without any blood born illnesses from getting stuck with a needle. Nobody killed me in a public restroom, you have a data point of one. So hey, this is a pretty innovative community, if the bathrooms we have right now are inadequate in every measurable manner, and we’re worried about them becoming hard living shelters, then what combination of police powers, patrols, tech and community reporting forums do we need to prevent that? Is the problem unsolvable or have we just made peace with shit in the streets and don’t want to rock the boat?
- manfredo 8y agoThey could have open holes in the ground that connect straight to the sewage system. Maybe add a simple lever to open/close the hole if odor is an issue. Sure it'd lack privacy, but privacy evidently isn't an issue if people are taking dumps on the sidewalk.
- jakevn 8y agoIf you're not going to give someone a dignified place to relieve themselves, why would they care about using such a thing?
- manfredo 8y agoBecause it's strictly better than the status quo? Given the choice between taking a crap in public and leaving a turd on the sidewalk vs. taking a crap in public and having it flushed how is the former preferable to the latter? The unfortunately reality is that creating a private space for relieving oneself is regularly abused as other commenters have pointed out. It's an instance of hostile design 1, but one that is evidently necessary. Its also a form of restroom that is common in many other countries. Such a type of toilet is not new. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture
- jakevn 8y agoThe former is preferable because you are providing a disservice to the community that will not allow you dignity, even though they can most obviously afford it.
- manfredo 8y agoAgain, the issue is not affordability but the fact that public restrooms are abused and used for dangerous and often illicit activity The former is not preferable because it spreads disease, and instills disdain for the homeless among the community thus decreasing willingness to dedicate resources towards services helping the homeless (thus hurting those homeless that do try to maintain good hygiene). Not to mention, you have a very negative and prejudiced view of the homeless if you think that they desire to cause harm to the city. The overwhelming majority of homeless are not the spiteful, antisocial people you seem to believe them to be. They may often resort to harmful activity to survive (e.g. theft) but rarely have I seen them cause harm for no reason but to make other people suffer. Maybe things like leaving trash strewn about after scavenging through it, but that's more negligent than spiteful.
- jerrysievert 8y agothey have those in portland (see: https://portlandloo.com https://portlandloo.com) but the problem persists there as well, even around the toilets.
- jakevn 8y agoWhy would _one_ of these solve any problems?
- jerrysievert 8y agonot sure where "one" came from, there are many of them around portland, concentrated in problem areas. there is typically poop and needles around the toilets (which also have sharps containers that are emptied regularly), and neighboring businesses still get hit fairly heavily. anecdote time: i had one a block from where i was living, and a block from a grocery store - while checking out, a very desperate person charged up complaining that the grocery store bathroom had been locked for too long. trying to be helpful, I mention the portland loo a block away only to be yelled at by the complainant. it was then that i figured out that the desire for the restroom wasn't for bodily waste elimination (portland loo's have a timer to stop drug use and prostitution in them). as an aside, the portland loo's are some of the cleanest and best maintained public restrooms i've used - when given the choice between a "standard" restroom and a portland loo, such as on the waterfront, i choose the loo.
- jakevn 8y agoI got the number from the website you linked. However, using Google Maps, I found 4. I'm not sure how many bathrooms you'd normally allocate per person, but I imagine the number of homeless and those out and about would necessitate more than that. How many bathrooms per person are in the typical office building? Should the number of these loos not similarly match the homeless population? Also, how is a timer in a bathroom at all dignified? If I need 15 minutes to relieve myself, will the Portland Loo kick me out?
- 8y ago
- jcims 8y agoPeople that shit on the Market St sidewalk in broad daylight are not doing so because they were looking for a restroom and ran out of time. There’s a little more going on.
- henryfjordan 8y agoIf you've been told "no, you cannot poop in our bathroom because you are homeless" at every restaurant/business in the city, would you bother looking for a bathroom the next time you had to shit? Why bother trying to have dignity if the world doesn't want to let you have any?
- baddox 8y agoThe fact that they're also often covered in blood and open sores and surrounded by previously- or currently-used needles is another indicator that perhaps the availability of public bathrooms is not the primary problem.
- ng12 8y agoSF has lots of public toilets. They're just unpleasant to use for obvious reasons.
- swasheck 8y agoWhat if SF employed a few of the homeless to clean them? I’d like to see public money spent invested in people than more unusable/inaccessible utilities. Certainly not a get rich quick scheme, but it’s just a quick thought.
- anbop 8y agoWhy should someone with a job cleaning toilets be homeless?
- swasheck 8y agoI don’t think that was the argument, so forgive me for the confusion. It’s really more like, “why not employ the unemployed homeless and receive the civic benefit of clean toilets, which might improve the quality of said toilets and hopefully drive up their use” not “toilet cleaners are homeless.”
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- PunksATawnyFill 8y agoThey're shitting on the sidewalks of L.A. too, right downtown in front of restaurants. Meanwhile, any company that opts to set up shop in San Francisco at this point is issuing a big FU to employees and investors. Why would you do this to people? Talk about squandering a ton of money for squalor.
- burtonator 8y agoI have a modest proposal to end this problem. There are too many homeless in San Francisco. Additionally, California has too few wolves. I propose that we release wolves into the streets of San Francisco once per month. Only the strong will be able to evade the wolves and the weak and sick will be eaten. This will lower the homeless population will simultaneously helping the wolf population rebound to record numbers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cmurf 8y agoYou've never watched the homeless fight. I give 3 to 1 odds to the homeless vs the wolf. Meanwhile, I expect the wolves will instead go after San Francisco's few children.
- malandrew 8y agoWhat about wolf poop?
- chrisdhoover 8y agoInitially wolves will prosper as the food source is abundant. The net change in poop will go slightly up. Adding wolves to the biosphere will make it more diverse and green. See Yellowstone. Eventually though wolves will consume all of the available resources, birth rates will fall, and migration will start. The poop will lessen. At some point we’ll reach a stasis where the wolf, homeless, and poop is in equilibrium.
- swasheck 8y agoThis was my thought. Also, this can’t really be that much more sanitary or clean.
- labster 8y agoI doubt this will help. The wolves of Wall Street have done little to solve the homeless problem in NYC.
- 8y ago
- mc32 8y agoThat chart tells the tale. It's quite astounding how it's climbed from ~5,500 incidents in 2011 to ~28,000 in 2018. Keep in mind this is _reported_ incidents. It's like it's been normalized. No joke. In a residential (western) neighborhood (i.e. not SOMA) within a month I saw evidence of human feces twice [it's not like I'm out and about all day long]. Once on a set of steps, the other someone squatting behind some bushes. It's out of hand [seeing brown streaked tissue is another indicator]. Ridiculous. Props to the chartmakers for reminding me of the Brown Zune.
- ineedasername 8y agoThe strange thing is that the number of homeless has not increased that dramatically in the same period of time. There's something going on here besides the number of homeless people that need to poop
- rdtsc 8y agoCould it be that there was just no way to report it or that people didn't know to report it. I've walked by many by such "incidents" in the past without knowing that reporting was an option.
- hoorayimhelping 8y agoIs it easier to report now? Would not be surprised if somewhere between 2011 and 2018, an app was released that lets you quickly report human shit on the sidewalk.
- nrp 8y agoIt is certainly easier to report now. The 311 mobile app for San Francisco launched in 2013. "SnapCrap," a 3rd party app focused on poop, launched in 2018.
- basetop 8y agoSF created a "Poop Patrol" a few months ago... https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Set-to-Roll-Out-the-Poop-Patrol-490874121.html https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Set-to-R...
- kaycebasques 8y agoI have a general theory related to this this article. Disenfranchised people do not take care of the society around them. Rightfully so. If my society doesn't seem to give a shit about me, why should I give a shit about it? If this theory holds true, then graffiti, vandalism, pooping on the streets, and so on, are all symptoms of disenfranchisement. Conversely, go to a neighborhood of homeowners, and look at how well-kept everything generally is. You can even compare it to a neighborhood of renters. There's a noticeable difference between homeowner and renter neighborhoods. And it's not an income level thing. We can control the renter vs. owner neighborhood comparison for income level. My general theory is that, if you want a well-ordered society, distribute ownership more.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dfischer 8y agoThat has a lot of assumptions. You can argue the other way with having a sense of ownership and being responsible is what leads to higher quality in your surroundings. Something something, fix broken windows.
- kaycebasques 8y agoI can see that. From personal experience, when I’ve been given the opportunity to own something, such as a project at work, I found a sense of pride in it that I wasn’t expecting. So I am suggesting that providing people the chance to own something can be a transformative experience.
- dfischer 8y agoA chance to "own" something is a very deep iceberg. Ownership needs to consider a lot of things from an economic perspective, a rights perspective (law), society, and so on. Basically, I guess I'm just saying – it's really complicated and just concluding giving away resources is missing the forest for the trees.
- smadge 8y agoPooping is pretty high up on the hierarchy of needs. Higher than social norms. People are going to poop, sleep, eat, etc wether or not a dignified way to perform these functions is available. Solution: provide a dignified way to perform life necessities.
- bayareanative 8y agoYup. Bio bags like for camping/pets at a minimum. Public urinals for numero uno. No million-dollar toilet that charges people like it's Europe.
- whenchamenia 8y agoThere used to be plenty, well... enough public toilets in SF. The junkie/homeless problem started in the 60s, and never stopped. With a push by the emptying of asylums in the 80s, and a current resurgance in opiate addiction, the problem just continues. Shelters, enforcement, all have practical limitations. The best option seems to be injection sites, and then a push for open bathrooms. But few actually want to mplement it, no matter how much they may agree in spirit. And we are back to NIMBYism. Bay area in a nutshell.
- conanbatt 8y agoRoot cause analysis shows that pooping is caused by eating. By removing all sources of food, you will solve the problem entirely and indirectly!
- imgabe 8y agoHere's what I don't understand. I live in DC. There's plenty of homeless people. I see them every day. But there's very little pooping in the street. Likewise in NYC. Homeless people? Sure. Poop in the street? Not so much. Neither place, in my experience, has an abundance of public bathrooms. There's almost none that are truly public, like a building specifically with a bathroom for the public to use. Most fast food places and coffee shops will have a lock on the door with a code so you have to buy something. So why is it just San Francisco that has so many people pooping in the streets?
- ineedasername 8y agoIt looks like the homeless population has remained fairly steady over the same period of time that reported poop incidents has quintupled. That leads to two likely conclusions: Either people are reporting it more often than before (Has it become easier to report such incidents?) or more homeless are deciding (as much as it can be called a decision) to poop publicly, maybe a further symbol of spite for a society that has left them behind? I suppose there's also the possibility that homeless have been under counted, but to do so by to such a degree seems unlikely.
- jdreyfuss 8y agoI would imagine that it's a mix. A rise in reports (thanks to the availability of the 311 mobile app and such), as well as a rise in incidents. I don't have much to back up the rise in incidents (besides everyone's general feeling that things have gotten worse on the homeless front, and maybe something to do with the opioid crisis), but it certainly feels that way anecdotally
- kylemisc 8y agoAs another anecdote, I've not noticed an increase in human waste over the last few years, but I have noticed an increase in discussions about reporting it. Another possible cause of the rise (with no evidence to support) could be demographics of the homeless population. I imagine propensity to poop in public is correlated with other behaviors that make it difficult to get off the street. If SF is getting people off the street slightly slower than new homeless people are being added to the population, and the set of people being reintegrated are less likely than the median to poop in public, over time we'd expect to see a slowly growing homeless population that is increasingly likely to poop on the street. There may also be a matter of changing norms; if there's already poop on the street, adding some more (vs making the trek to a public restroom that may be unsafe) isn't as unappealing.
- chrisdhoover 8y agoCould there possibly be more than one reason?
- qwerty456127 8y agoJust build the damn public toilets everywhere, make them free and clean and almost nobody but a small number of the craziest people will poop at the streets. If we had to choose just a single thing a state should solve this is it - the most fundamental and unconditional yet simple need everybody has - a way to defecate comfortably whenever and wherever and in a city they are, regardless to how much money they have. The only need for every human that is more basic is breathing. It's ridiculous it still isn't done in a well-developed country in the 21-st century.
- conanbatt 8y agoEven private toilets are disgusting when they service that population. I'd like to see you push a mentally ill person from pooping into the street into the heroine-needle ridden prostitution hub of a public toilet. Hell, I see the prostitution happen in front of city hall, where there is a childrens playground in open daylight!
- chrisdhoover 8y agoThe slave hysteria and general illiberal views by the government shut down the web sites that allowed professionals control over their business. Pros became independent and prostitution was moved inside. Now a girl has to hustle on the street where it is dangerous.
- threatofrain 8y agoDo people seriously hustle like that on the streets of SF? Like there's a special street corner people know about, and you just pull up in your car and demonstrate your financial credibility? I would think there's much more stuff happening on dating apps.
- conanbatt 8y ago>there's much more stuff happening on dating apps. Peak SF.
- 8y ago
- x3n0ph3n3 8y agoHow has no one mentioned the plastic bag bans of 2012 (for SF) and 2017 (for CA)? The homeless use to defecate in plastic bags and throw them away. Now that option is entire unavailable to them. Additionally, I read that diseases like Hepatitis are on the rise, partly due to the increased exposure to other peoples' poop.
- IWeldMelons 8y agoThe problem is partially in the way American cities structured. They are either too urban (San Francisco, NYC) or suburban (perhaps Chicago is the right balance, with its alleys where someone can quietly poop). Many soviet and European cities are structured in different way - spots of high and very high density separated by greenery, where a homeless person can safely poop, without creating problems for the neighborhood's dwellers.
- Balero 8y agoPeople defecating in a public park or green space is creating problems. Telling people to poop behind a bush next to the street is not a solution for peopling defecating on the street.
- wwweston 8y agoThis challenge is more or less equivalent to the problem of how to make public restrooms broadly available that are either difficult to abuse or that people don't abuse. Even people who are on the fringes of society because they're difficult or mentally ill or just get a kick out of making things a little bit worse where they can as a fuck you to people for whom things are going better. It'd be a benefit to everyone, especially people who are on the fringes for other reasons, but really anyone who's ever needed a place to do their business if you can figure this out and really want a change-the-world challenge.
- nrook 8y agoMeanwhile: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-park-supervisors-vote-reject-nimby https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-p... San Francisco can either have housing, or it can have homelessness.
- auggierose 8y agoSF seems to have become a shithole
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- the_economist 8y agoThe city of San Francisco provides homeless people with $520/month in cash, via an ATM card that refills on the 1st of the month. They give away $24 million a year in cash. It's a genuinely good idea to provide assistance to the homeless, but it should be in the form of Care Not Cash and given away equally across the state. Otherwise, you are funding a drug demand epidemic and likely creating incentives for people with drug problems from around the Bay Area to move here for the cash. I filed a FOIA with the city to get data on the total cash given away. http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CAAP-data-for-sunshine-request-March-2019-final-003.xlsx http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CAAP-d... http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CAPI-data-for-sunshine-request-March-2019-final-003.xlsx http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CAPI-d...
- Scoundreller 8y agoI wonder what drug prices are like on the first and second. And robberies of homeless people. And robberies of everyone else towards the end of the month. Would at least make better sense to direct-pay rent for housing to the landlord and then stagger the remaining cash for everything else on a weekly basis on a different day of the week.
- mm_aa 8y agoPolice officer told me it’s $12-$20/dose of meth. Didn’t verify.
- remarkEon 8y agoMy friend is a cop in an area that deals with a lot of meth and opioid issues. I asked him this and his answer was that it's usually in easy multiples. $15, $20, $25 etc. I suppose this makes sense, given it's an all cash business.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- RickJWagner 8y agoIt seems there's an opportunity for additional employment there. The waste is a problem, cleaning and disposing is an undesirable task. All that's left is to make that task pay adequately to motivate potential employees.
- remarkEon 8y agoThis is a solvable problem, but I don't think anyone is approaching it from a sufficiently removed perspective. Up front, yes, we need to be compassionate to these people (and they are people) and remember that if you're posting on HN odds are you're fortunate enough to extend a helping hand once in a while. But we cannot sacrifice the city's quality of life by enabling behaviors that endanger these people and others. That's what we're doing right now. Explicitly. There's no "how do we engineer our way out of this problem" by way of designing some new novel public bathroom. Reinventing the urinal isn't a solution to this - it isn't even a bandaid. What's worse, more public bathrooms seems extremely likely to encourage a spiral of dangerous behavior to an increasing degree. We'd just move it from the streets and concentrate it in public spaces that are no longer really public, but rather are just bio-hazardous dorms for the homeless and addicted. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that SF essentially already has a pseudo-UBI program for the homeless. This seems patently absurd to me. Forget about this being a literal cash transfer to drug dealers, giving an addict cash is actually worse than just giving them drugs - now they have to go out and score, endangering themselves and very likely others around them. So what is to be done? First we have to be honest. The overwhelming majority of these people are no longer "down on their luck". They're addicts, with severe mental health issues and no amount of "nudges" will make them change their behavior. We should start with diverting all this money that goes to nebulous initiatives like "housing" and these cash give-aways into funding legitimate facilities staffed with case workers, doctors, job trainers, and police. And then we should make vagrancy illegal. I don't say this lightly, as I've had a family member die from opioid addiction. But so many of these people have lost their own agency. They no longer have the ability to care for themselves. If the state doesn't step in, they will be next on the gurney - and everyone here knows it. You know it when you walk past the guy shooting up on the sidewalk on the way home from work. You know it when you see the woman with that "look" holding a sign that says "7 months pregnant, terrified, anything will help". We can stand idle and watch this happen, like we have for so many years. Or we can swallow our pride and realize that this system we've set up out of "compassion" is fundamentally broken and is at its root enabling severe problems - and end it.
- automated_toast 8y agoI don't live in SF, I don't visit SF. I can't afford SF. I don't give a shit.
- cameldrv 8y agoI think that what's lost in some of this is that there are not enough private bathrooms in the city. Most stores don't have public bathrooms anymore, largely because of the rise of serial ADA litigation. In California, if your bathroom does not meet a fairly long list of very specific accessibility requirements, you can be sued by a disabled person, and it can cost you tens of thousands of dollars. There are a number of people in California that make their living driving around visiting businesses looking for violations and then suing them. The response from many, many California businesses is to just close their bathrooms to the public. This means fewer places for homeless people to use the bathroom. This causes homeless people to go to the fewer and fewer available bathrooms. Since homeless people often smell, and may make a mess in the bathroom, without necessarily buying anything, the increased traffic to the remaining bathrooms causes even more bathroom closures. Combine this with the SFPD's non enforcement of public urination and defecation laws, and general non enforcement of minor crimes, particularly if the perpetrator is homeless, it's inevitable that you will have poop all over the sidewalk. We need more bathrooms, and we need to start enforcing the law against homeless people. If there is a reasonable place to use the bathroom, and not using it will get you arrested, the problem will go away. Next up is getting the drugs out of the SF city jail. Many ex-addicts say that they got clean when they hit rock bottom, got arrested, and had no choice but to kick in jail. In SF though, you can get drugs in jail, so one of the only positive things about going to jail is eliminated.