10 ms·

California’s Biggest Cities Confront a ‘Defecation Crisis’

120 points by eplanit 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago
> Without wishing to return to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, we ought to consider what was lost when the courts discouraged Americans from thinking of “homelessness” in light of the old laws against vagrancy. Ah, so we're back to imprisoning the homeless (at huge expense) rather than providing, say, public toilets or shelter facilities. Not only is the WSJ not learning from history, they don't want to learn from history. That's because the article is written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Kesler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Kesler
- empath75 7y ago
  We need better mental health care, and cheaper housing.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Dr. Drew was on Scott Adam's podcast recently talking about this. Apparently even free housing is insufficient because most of the people relevant to this discussion will not accept even free housing. Nor will they accept mental healthcare even when provided for free. The only way to get them into the mental healthcare situations is to compel them by force, and that is not something people are interested in. Correction: Scott Adams, not Rogan
    - pieterhg 7y ago
      Dr. Drew hasn't been on Rogan
    - babuskov 7y ago
      > Dr. Drew was on Rogan recently talking about this. I'm trying to find that episode on YouTube, but no luck. Google searches show that they don't like each other much. Got a link?
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        Sorry, I had the wrong podcast. A youtube search for Dr Drew plague has several interviews with him, but I was thinking about his appearance on Scott Adam's podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72x2LfvSfE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72x2LfvSfE4
    - krustyburger 7y ago
      People aren’t interested in compelling the allegedly mentally ill by force, unless they pose a threat to themselves or others, because it is unconstitutional and contrary to the values of a free society. A given citizen disregarding the norms of society does not give society permission to use force against that citizen, or to subject them to forced medical treatments. Again, if the person poses an active threat that is a different scenario. But there’s a good reason most Americans don’t want to start rounding up the seemingly mentally ill.
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        This is a tragedy of the commons problem. A few people living or even defecating on the streets isn't a serious public health problem. But there is a legitimate and reasonable concern that the situation in California right now is going to result in the return of the plague.
      - reggieband 7y ago
        > ... allegedly mentally ill ... ... disregarding the norms of society ... seemingly mentally ill I think you are giving yourself too much leeway with your weasel words here. I lived in San Francisco and saw first hand the homeless problem. These are not a group of free-spirits, bucking the norms of society and living an honest drifter lifestyle. Maybe you would like to call to mind the counter-culture described by beat poets like Jack Kerouac. Or maybe you want to warn against the kind of authoritarian cruelty fictionalized in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. However, it is my experience that the people living on the streets in the Tenderloin aren't down on their luck Woody Guthrie types, pining for a pre-technology, more social friendly USA that valued simple folk. I think we need to avoid painting ourselves into corners with false dichotomies. It isn't like the only options are to round them up and lock them away in a mental hospital or to leave them completely free on the streets. And like it or not, the middle ground may require some intervention that is forceful.
  - archaea_hao 7y ago
    Mental healthcare may be relevant to this issue. But the cost of housing is not. These people cannot hold jobs because they are mentally ill. They need state provided institutional care, otherwise they will remain on the streets.
    - ajross 7y ago
      That's a caricature. In fact there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless, and many homeless folks not only can hold jobs, but work them already. Yet they're on the streets anyway because of financial pressure, look like the "these people" you want to lock up, and would probably get picked up under the same ordinance.
      - stOneskull 7y ago
        Shitting on the street and being homeless are two issues here.
        ajross 7y ago
        The proposal in the linked opinion piece is literally to lock up all homeless because some of them shit on the street. You can't treat them as two issues while insisting on a remedy that doesn't.
        turtlecloud 7y ago
        Yes I agree. We should use the term street shitters to differentiate. I see a huge issue when talking about homeless is that people have different ideas what we are talking about and get easily offended.
      - archaea_hao 7y ago
        "In fact there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless" Near infinite in the sense that there are near infinite ways of dying. You could be hit by an asteroid. You could fall off a cliff. But that obscures the fact that most people die from some sickness or disease. I've done volunteer work with the homeless. There are 2 major causes of homelessness: mental illness and drug addiction. Everything else is insignificant in comparison.
  - ausjke 7y ago
    by doing that too much you drag down a city to rat's hole, more homeless coming, working people move out, economy slows down, less money left to help those in need, similar to what socialism does: great on paper, horrible in practice. should we not care for those homeless? NO, should we always put them first? NO. it's a balance of arts, going in any direction a little too far will break it.
    - masklinn 7y ago
      > should we not care for those homeless? NO, should we always put them first? NO. it's a balance of arts, going in any direction a little too far will break it. Bay Area is currently doing very little except complain about homeless folks. NYC has more homelessness per capita, but they've both built shelters and had a strong policy of sheltering homeless folks. As a result, ~95% of NYC homeless people (>63000 people) sleep in shelters, versus ~33% in Bay Area and ~25% in LA. And it's no surprise given Bay Area has lost shelter beds in the last decade. Which is compounded by the overall lack of housing. The west coast is singularly bad at it: Chicago is at 74% sheltering, Denver is at 84, DC is at 95.
      - ausjke 7y ago
        can you provide source for the percentages? thanks. CA is leading the path towards socialism, i'm surprised it's lagging behind to take care of the homeless there, which should be a core action item for that ideology. Maybe they're just good at talk the talk, as always. Seattle seems no better as far as homeless is concerned. Austin is becoming a favorite destination city for homeless nowadays too, tents up everywhere in hot summer.
        masklinn 7y ago
        > can you provide source for the percentages? thanks. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Where do you poop during the year you’re pulling your mental health out of the gutter though?
- jswizzy 7y ago
  Maybe in a Utopia the homeless would use shelters but many refuse to for very reasons.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    How many exactly? Do you have concrete data? My understanding is that the vast majority of the homeless in NYC do sleep in shelters because... well, NYC has plenty of shelters.
    - masklinn 7y ago
      That's also what a comment above notes, quoting an SFBay article[0]: 67% of Bay Area homeless are unsheltered, 5% in NYC. So there might be a small number of homeless folks who can't / won't live in shelters, but that's what it is: a small minority. [0] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        Hundreds of shelter beds go empty every night in LA because many of the homeless would rather stay high/drunk than be sooner for a night. They used to be a small portion of the population but now comprise the bulk of LAs skid row population.
        adrr 7y ago
        Could criminalize sleeping on the streets if beds are available at a local shelter.
- bitcurious 7y ago
  >Ah, so we're back to imprisoning the homeless (at huge expense) rather than providing, say, public toilets or shelter facilities. It's weird to frame it as a "rather" when in fact you need both. You need to have public bathrooms and come down hard on shitting on the street.
  - pyrophane 7y ago
    That framing is likely based on the assumption that people would rather use a toilet than defecate on the streets, so if there are adequate facilities for them to do so, no further action is needed to encourage that behavior.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  There are public toilets in some of these cities. San Francisco has had self-cleaning public toilets for a long time, but probably has the worst feces problem of any first world country. On Google maps, it appears there are at least 20 public bathrooms in SF within a few miles radius. That's way more than I see when searching for the same thing in Santa Monica, another homeless mecca that doesn't have anywhere near the same problem with defecation. I'm skeptical that these toilets have much of an effect. Don't get me wrong, I do think there should be public toilets, and perhaps more of them. But if the homeless were that easy to reason with, perhaps we wouldn't have so many on the streets in the first place.
  - jtchang 7y ago
    Our public bathroom facilities are pretty sparse compared to some in other countries. Taiwan for instance has fantastic public restrooms in every subway stop.
    - jes5199 7y ago
      there are toilets in the BART stations, but they’ve been closed for “security reasons” for the last 18 years
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    There should be at least one clean and safe public toilet per block that has a "defecation crisis". Instead, SF has maybe one public toilet per 20 or 30 blocks in the most concentrated downtown areas, if that. I personally know of only maybe 3 or 4 public toilets in all of SF. Toilet use at private businesses is also sometimes an option, but often in neighborhoods with large homeless populations those businesses either restrict toilet use to customers or only let the staff use their toilets. Of course, homeless people can rarely afford to keep spending money to purchase things from these businesses multiple times per day just to use their toilets, not to mention that virtually all these businesses close for the night in SF, making it impossible to find a toilet in some areas at night.
    - cameldrv 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
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officemonkey 7y ago
Could it be dogs or could it be people? What economic factors could lead people to stop picking up dog poop? Have poop bags gone so far up in price that it's impossible for the average person to purchase poop bags?
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  It's people.
  - jquery 7y ago
    Yes, for the most part dog owners are pretty conscientious. My neighborhood is full of dog-walkers but I rarely see feces, even in the park next to my house. The only doggy-poo beef in my neighborhood, based on NextDoor threads, is some of them put the dog feces in people's personal trash cans right after the trash has been picked up, which can be kind of annoying if you keep your trash bin inside your house (I always take it to the public trash bin when I see it). But even that is a minority of dog owners, after that thread I haven't seen that happen even once (it used to happen regularly).
  - scurvy 7y ago
    It's more than half dogs. People in SF just don't care. Also, it wasn't such a good idea to give shelter animals to the permanent homeless. Now not only can they not get into a shelter, but now something else is dropping turds on the street and not being picked up.
throebd 7y ago
It is a ban of plastic bags from supermarkets. People have some decency, but with ban there is no way to dispose excrements.
- jquery 7y ago
  Interesting theory, do you have any citations? It does sound plausible and seems to coincide with my experience in San Francisco (the problem did seem to get somewhat worse after the ban), but maybe that's coincidence or just my anecdotal experience.
  - jakear 7y ago
    Food stamps recipients don’t pay the bag tax, which would make me less inclined to believe that theory. But I don’t know how many of these people are on EBT.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      People weren't just using their own bags, they were scavenging bags from the garbage (or the streets—discsrded single use bags were eveeywhere.) Banning designed-as single use bags (and encouraging reuse with a minimum charge per bag) greatly reduced the number of scavengable bags.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It is a ban of plastic bags from supermarkets. It's a ban of free or single-use plastic bags from supermarkets; bags must be reusable (with specified strength standards for plastic bags), and there is a minimum charge.
- gfodor 7y ago
  holy cow this is a great theory. i haven't heard it before, and it would cut through a ton of noise if this could be supported by data. can it? the disappearance of readily available plastic bags (in the trash, floating around, etc) certainly would make way more sense as something that could suddenly have a huge impact than other theories which are stabbing in the dark at higher level variables that have trended slowly over time like shelter access or density of public restrooms. it would also explain why this problem is uniquely SF -- given the social signaling that is associated with a store being seen as environmentally conscious (by abandoning plastic bags) compared to other cities, it wouldn't surprise me if the rate and degree of abandonment of plastic bags outpaced other California cities. this certainly seems like the kind of thing that will bubble up to economics textbooks if true, a classic case of unintended consequences by tweaking incentives and regulations. i hope it gets more attention.
madengr 7y ago
Reminds me of the Southpark where Cartman is traversing San Francisco in a moon suite.
weeksie 7y ago
Build. More. Homeless. Shelters. California is so damned NIMBY'd up that they refuse to build shelters and act surprised when homeless people sleep outside. Then they throw their hands up in the air like "uh, it must be the weather" It's stupid. In New York we have more homeless per capita and in absolute numbers but we have nothing like the street issues that west coast cities have. It's because we actually house the damned homeless. And for fuck's sake, it's not the weather. Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer. The whole CA homeless crisis is a self-inflicted wound. For reference, an article in SF Gate: "67 percent of Bay Area homeless are unsheltered. In New York, it's 5%" https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
- throwawaybdb25 7y ago
  > Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer. Come for a walk with me. There are tents and makeshift shelters in the north end of Central Park (west side, north of 96th) and in the parks along both rivers if you know where to look.
  - 01100011 7y ago
    Well, I'm guessing the shelters don't let you shoot up, so...tent cities form.
- bongobongo 7y ago
  I think this is accurate, having lived all over CA and the Northeast. Northeastern cities build shelters because otherwise homeless people would freeze to death in the winter, though. Sometimes the shelters are only available during the freezing months.
  - weeksie 7y ago
    We didn't used to build shelters. There was an entire riot in the 80s when the cops removed a homeless encampment that had entirely taken over Tomkins Sq Park in the East Village. I don't know when we started building them (I'm a transplant, circa 2008) but I know there was a qualitative difference from when I'd been to the city in the early 00s versus when I moved so I assume Bloomberg was responsible for building more.
ajross 7y ago
> The triple scourges of drug abuse, mental illness and family breakdown have produced anomie and derangements far deeper than those seen in the 1930s Completely unsourced nonsense. As if there were no homeless families or mental illness in the great depression. Even drug abuse isn't a modern thing, though the chemicals have changed. I mean it doesn't even pass the basic (heh) smell test of "would you rather walk the streets of San Francisco in 1931 or 2019? I mean, come on.
- jquery 7y ago
  It's the classic apocalyptic mindset, of which we seem to have plenty of in 2019: "things are worse than ever" even though that's not borne out by the evidence[1] [1]https://singularityhub.com/2016/06/27/why-the-world-is-better-than-you-think-in-10-powerful-charts/ https://singularityhub.com/2016/06/27/why-the-world-is-bette...
  - Tade0 7y ago
    Because the evidence is cherry-picked. Humans may be doing better (for now), but it all came at a great cost to the environment.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  People vastly underestimate just how bad run-of-the-mill alcoholism was in past years, let alone more "exotic" illegal drugs. Look at the gin craze in London a few centuries ago, for example: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a8e4e/a-gin-craze-nearly-destroyed-18th-century-london https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a8e4e/a-gin-craze-nearly...
- rabbitonrails 7y ago
  It's an opinion piece.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Uh... under normal journalistic practice, even opinion pieces are expected to support statements that they present as fact. Maybe things are different in conservative media, I dunno.
realplayer6 7y ago
The homeless need to learn to code and stop using plastic.
henryl 7y ago
“Seattle Is Dying” is a great investigative report about the problems and potential solutions to homelessness. Also applicable to SF. https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw
- cbHXBY1D 7y ago
  I've seen this video and it's a Sinclair hit piece. Not worth the time of anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion. It's 2019 and this propaganda piece (yes, it's propaganda) is arguing mass incarceration is the solution.
deleted 7y ago
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hello_tyler 7y ago
You could easily solve this problem by converting a small portion of major parks into homelessness crisis centers. Somewhere for people to sleep safely, with facilities, and resources for reintegration. Everyone blames the homeless though, they will rarely vote to actually help them but seem content to assuage their guilt by dropping a dollar into the can or praying for them. As if that helps.
akiselev 7y ago
> Under that understanding, no one had a right to camp out indefinitely on public property, much less to defecate on it. Public property belonged to the public—to everyone—and couldn’t be privatized for the benefit of one or more vagrants, however poor or sick. Though that principle would need to be applied to modern circumstances, it is the indispensable starting point for thinking about the shocking problems of the Golden State. Anyone else find this to be a rather entirely perverse way of thinking about public spaces? Public space is meant to be used by the public and a homeless person has just as much right to use it as anyone else, for as long as they want to. I might be annoyed that they have taken over my favorite park bench but thats part and parcel for living in a society and I don't have a right (morally, if not legally) to use ordinances to stop them Obviously, it's a whole different issue if we're talking about public health but the solution is to build more public bathrooms and shelters, not criminalize existence. And to nitpick: considering how much of the west coast is wilderness owned by the Federal government and managed by BLM, you sure as hell do have a right to defecate on public property. It's literally in our nature.
- kipqi 7y ago
  Using != abusing. Camping in a public space means taking part of it for yourself, permanently. In other words, you're taking away the right of the rest of citizens of using that part of public space. Defecating is a public health issue, too.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    Exactly. People defecate in the woods all the time, but they have the decency to at least dig a hole and cover it. Just because it's natural to take a shit doesn't mean we should be stepping in it.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Even shitting in the woods isn't great, it's just that most people won't use the better but grosser alternative (shitting in a sealable bag). In parks where restrooms are provided, like the Grand Canyon, shitting outside of restrooms isn't allowed. Anywhere the foot traffic gets high enough, the park service will put in restrooms and require people to use them to defecate, because the alternative is pretty bad. Even in the wilderness.
baby 7y ago
Serious question. Where are people supposed to go to the restroom when the is no public restroom around?
- samsonradu 7y ago
  This is an issue in some cities in western Europe also, there are no free restrooms available. No wonder everything around train/subway stations smells like piss.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  What do they do in Germany? Their public toilets are amazing, but not free. I suspect the answer is that they don't have that many people who have these sorts of issues in the first place, but at the same time more social spending doesn't seem to be the issue, as California spend a fortune on the homeless issue and gets relatively little for it, and the most common length of time to be homeless is one day.
notus 7y ago
i wonder if incentivizing the homeless to use bathrooms would work... free meal, joint, w/e
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  All you have to do is have plenty of public bathrooms nearby and keep them clean. Neither of those is the case in SF. There are almost no public bathrooms, and those that exist tend to be disgusting.
- throwmebaby 7y ago
  Damn, I can get a free meal and a joint in SF just by using the bathroom? Sign me up!
hristov 7y ago
This is very much a problem but it is incorrectly stated as California's problem. This America’s problem. It just so happens that because California is relatively rich, tends to have some of the most tolerable year round weather and the people are relatively compassionate a large percentage of the homeless of all of America are moving to California. How many times have you heard some politician or just an ordinary person from the south or the midwest say something to the effect “we have a great homelessness policy, we buy each homeless person a bus ticket to California and send them on their way!” They usually say this with pride or with a laugh instead of being embarrassed as they should be. In fact if i remember correctly this was part of the plot of a south park episode (although i do not exactly remember whether south park endorsed or mocked that policy). So lets not treat this as some failure on California’s part. It is failure of the entire USA. The reasons are the usual ones— lack of mental health treatment for the poor, drug addiction, lack of social safety nets in general. And of course there is one new very scary reason — out of control health care costs that force people that were and should be fully functioning members of society into suffering and homelessness.
- deleted 7y ago
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- chucksmash 7y ago
  > How many times have you heard some politician or just an ordinary person from the south or the midwest say something to the effect “we have a great homelessness policy, we buy each homeless person a bus ticket to California and send them on their way!” They usually say this with pride or with a laugh instead of being embarrassed as they should be. In fact if i remember correctly this was part of the plot of a south park episode (although i do not exactly remember whether south park endorsed or mocked that policy). Zero times? This seems like a lazy characterization and citing South Park doesn't really help your case. According to this Guardian article on homeless busing in the US[1], these sorts of programs tend to originate in the Western states: > A count earlier this year found half a million homeless people on one night in America. The problem is most severe in the west, where rates of homelessness are skyrocketing in a number of major cities, and where states like California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have some of the highest rates of per capita homelessness. > These are also the states where homeless relocation programs are concentrated. Using public record laws, the Guardian obtained data from 16 cities and counties that give homeless people free bus tickets to live elsewhere. Key West and Ft Lauderdale are discussed in the article; Atlanta is mentioned as having been criticized for this in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics. That said, jumping immediately to "we all know how those darn Southerners and Midwesterners are" doesn't seem to jive with the facts. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
scurvy 7y ago
Let's also not forget the animal element of street poop here. I live in Russian Hill, a not rough part of SF, and I daily see people neglecting to clean up after their dogs. These people belong to no particular group: young, old, rich, poor, students, tourists, your neighbors. There's something about this city that attracts people who just don't give a damn. It's unsustainable for those of us who do. Also, homeless people tend to poop in between parked cars on the street or in doorways. If you see a fresh turd in the middle of the sidewalk, I'd say better than 75% chance it came from Fido, not Frank. EDIT, I might live in Russian Hill but I walk through the Tenderloin every work day for my commute. I see it all.
lettergram 7y ago
I recall a homeless guy in SF laying in front of the Alameda ferry terminal. He had pooped and was smearing it over the door, ground, and was rolling in it. The other passengers and myself were just watching. I remember watching everyone’s faces and us deciding what to do. This was fairly normal for all of us. The coast guard came off the incoming ferry and basically joined us. It wasn’t their job, eventually we got some security and even they were like... “ugh, I don’t know if it’s safe to move him”. Eventually all of us just routed around the homeless man via the other doors (usually for getting off the ferry). No one taking care of the problem, to my knowledge. Can’t really blame anyone for not wanting to move a man covered in feces. But I agree this is a crisis and I honestly don’t know who they will get willing to solve that problem.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  In a different country, some sailor would be tasked with removing him, and would just hose everything away with the firehose (it runs on whatever water the ship sails in, so the only cost is the power to move the water through it). I am not sure it would be a better solution, but it seems to me that the current status where you can't enforce basic societal rules, like don't roll in shit in public, because the only social sanction, exclusion, can't be applied is simply unsustainable and quite frankly we need to make it possible to arrest people who act this way (and ensure they are arrested).
CydeWeys 7y ago
"But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere." [citation needed] Bodily waste has been a huge problem for shantytowns across all of recorded history. I doubt that Hoovervilles had some unique solution to the problem that has not been replicated since.
- nradov 7y ago
  Hooverville residents were mostly not mentally ill or drug addicts. They probably dug pit latrines.
sbhn 7y ago
The defecation crisis is see is the eagerness of law fearing citizens to put a substance that decomposes back into nature in about a week, into a plastic bag that will still have its contents nicely stored, and brewing, ready to be freed, for years to come.
- gshdg 7y ago
  Riiight... have you ever read about what’s happened in places with high concentrations of humans that tried to return their bodily wastes to nature? See also London’s Great Stink.
buboard 7y ago
What percentage of HN users live in the Bay area?
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Half.
rasz 7y ago
When I watched Jennifer Garners Peppermint (2018) I naturally assumed typical Hollywood hyperbole. But then I saw this: Skid Row, Downtown Los Angeles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbTSDuQET94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbTSDuQET94
aussieguy1234 7y ago
This was a problem once relegated to third world countries like India. It will get worse, unless the US can fix their welfare system.

120 points by eplanit 7y ago

> Without wishing to return to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, we ought to consider what was lost when the courts discouraged Americans from thinking of “homelessness” in light of the old laws against vagrancy. Ah, so we're back to imprisoning the homeless (at huge expense) rather than providing, say, public toilets or shelter facilities. Not only is the WSJ not learning from history, they don't want to learn from history. That's because the article is written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Kesler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Kesler

empath75 7y ago
We need better mental health care, and cheaper housing.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Dr. Drew was on Scott Adam's podcast recently talking about this. Apparently even free housing is insufficient because most of the people relevant to this discussion will not accept even free housing. Nor will they accept mental healthcare even when provided for free. The only way to get them into the mental healthcare situations is to compel them by force, and that is not something people are interested in. Correction: Scott Adams, not Rogan
  - pieterhg 7y ago
    Dr. Drew hasn't been on Rogan
  - babuskov 7y ago
    > Dr. Drew was on Rogan recently talking about this. I'm trying to find that episode on YouTube, but no luck. Google searches show that they don't like each other much. Got a link?
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      Sorry, I had the wrong podcast. A youtube search for Dr Drew plague has several interviews with him, but I was thinking about his appearance on Scott Adam's podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72x2LfvSfE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72x2LfvSfE4
  - krustyburger 7y ago
    People aren’t interested in compelling the allegedly mentally ill by force, unless they pose a threat to themselves or others, because it is unconstitutional and contrary to the values of a free society. A given citizen disregarding the norms of society does not give society permission to use force against that citizen, or to subject them to forced medical treatments. Again, if the person poses an active threat that is a different scenario. But there’s a good reason most Americans don’t want to start rounding up the seemingly mentally ill.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      This is a tragedy of the commons problem. A few people living or even defecating on the streets isn't a serious public health problem. But there is a legitimate and reasonable concern that the situation in California right now is going to result in the return of the plague.
    - reggieband 7y ago
      > ... allegedly mentally ill ... ... disregarding the norms of society ... seemingly mentally ill I think you are giving yourself too much leeway with your weasel words here. I lived in San Francisco and saw first hand the homeless problem. These are not a group of free-spirits, bucking the norms of society and living an honest drifter lifestyle. Maybe you would like to call to mind the counter-culture described by beat poets like Jack Kerouac. Or maybe you want to warn against the kind of authoritarian cruelty fictionalized in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. However, it is my experience that the people living on the streets in the Tenderloin aren't down on their luck Woody Guthrie types, pining for a pre-technology, more social friendly USA that valued simple folk. I think we need to avoid painting ourselves into corners with false dichotomies. It isn't like the only options are to round them up and lock them away in a mental hospital or to leave them completely free on the streets. And like it or not, the middle ground may require some intervention that is forceful.
- archaea_hao 7y ago
  Mental healthcare may be relevant to this issue. But the cost of housing is not. These people cannot hold jobs because they are mentally ill. They need state provided institutional care, otherwise they will remain on the streets.
  - ajross 7y ago
    That's a caricature. In fact there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless, and many homeless folks not only can hold jobs, but work them already. Yet they're on the streets anyway because of financial pressure, look like the "these people" you want to lock up, and would probably get picked up under the same ordinance.
    - stOneskull 7y ago
      Shitting on the street and being homeless are two issues here.
      - ajross 7y ago
        The proposal in the linked opinion piece is literally to lock up all homeless because some of them shit on the street. You can't treat them as two issues while insisting on a remedy that doesn't.
      - turtlecloud 7y ago
        Yes I agree. We should use the term street shitters to differentiate. I see a huge issue when talking about homeless is that people have different ideas what we are talking about and get easily offended.
    - archaea_hao 7y ago
      "In fact there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless" Near infinite in the sense that there are near infinite ways of dying. You could be hit by an asteroid. You could fall off a cliff. But that obscures the fact that most people die from some sickness or disease. I've done volunteer work with the homeless. There are 2 major causes of homelessness: mental illness and drug addiction. Everything else is insignificant in comparison.
- ausjke 7y ago
  by doing that too much you drag down a city to rat's hole, more homeless coming, working people move out, economy slows down, less money left to help those in need, similar to what socialism does: great on paper, horrible in practice. should we not care for those homeless? NO, should we always put them first? NO. it's a balance of arts, going in any direction a little too far will break it.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    > should we not care for those homeless? NO, should we always put them first? NO. it's a balance of arts, going in any direction a little too far will break it. Bay Area is currently doing very little except complain about homeless folks. NYC has more homelessness per capita, but they've both built shelters and had a strong policy of sheltering homeless folks. As a result, ~95% of NYC homeless people (>63000 people) sleep in shelters, versus ~33% in Bay Area and ~25% in LA. And it's no surprise given Bay Area has lost shelter beds in the last decade. Which is compounded by the overall lack of housing. The west coast is singularly bad at it: Chicago is at 74% sheltering, Denver is at 84, DC is at 95.
    - ausjke 7y ago
      can you provide source for the percentages? thanks. CA is leading the path towards socialism, i'm surprised it's lagging behind to take care of the homeless there, which should be a core action item for that ideology. Maybe they're just good at talk the talk, as always. Seattle seems no better as far as homeless is concerned. Austin is becoming a favorite destination city for homeless nowadays too, tents up everywhere in hot summer.
      - masklinn 7y ago
        > can you provide source for the percentages? thanks. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Where do you poop during the year you’re pulling your mental health out of the gutter though?
jswizzy 7y ago
Maybe in a Utopia the homeless would use shelters but many refuse to for very reasons.
- akiselev 7y ago
  How many exactly? Do you have concrete data? My understanding is that the vast majority of the homeless in NYC do sleep in shelters because... well, NYC has plenty of shelters.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    That's also what a comment above notes, quoting an SFBay article[0]: 67% of Bay Area homeless are unsheltered, 5% in NYC. So there might be a small number of homeless folks who can't / won't live in shelters, but that's what it is: a small minority. [0] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      Hundreds of shelter beds go empty every night in LA because many of the homeless would rather stay high/drunk than be sooner for a night. They used to be a small portion of the population but now comprise the bulk of LAs skid row population.
      - adrr 7y ago
        Could criminalize sleeping on the streets if beds are available at a local shelter.
bitcurious 7y ago
>Ah, so we're back to imprisoning the homeless (at huge expense) rather than providing, say, public toilets or shelter facilities. It's weird to frame it as a "rather" when in fact you need both. You need to have public bathrooms and come down hard on shitting on the street.
- pyrophane 7y ago
  That framing is likely based on the assumption that people would rather use a toilet than defecate on the streets, so if there are adequate facilities for them to do so, no further action is needed to encourage that behavior.
ravenstine 7y ago
There are public toilets in some of these cities. San Francisco has had self-cleaning public toilets for a long time, but probably has the worst feces problem of any first world country. On Google maps, it appears there are at least 20 public bathrooms in SF within a few miles radius. That's way more than I see when searching for the same thing in Santa Monica, another homeless mecca that doesn't have anywhere near the same problem with defecation. I'm skeptical that these toilets have much of an effect. Don't get me wrong, I do think there should be public toilets, and perhaps more of them. But if the homeless were that easy to reason with, perhaps we wouldn't have so many on the streets in the first place.
- jtchang 7y ago
  Our public bathroom facilities are pretty sparse compared to some in other countries. Taiwan for instance has fantastic public restrooms in every subway stop.
  - jes5199 7y ago
    there are toilets in the BART stations, but they’ve been closed for “security reasons” for the last 18 years
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  There should be at least one clean and safe public toilet per block that has a "defecation crisis". Instead, SF has maybe one public toilet per 20 or 30 blocks in the most concentrated downtown areas, if that. I personally know of only maybe 3 or 4 public toilets in all of SF. Toilet use at private businesses is also sometimes an option, but often in neighborhoods with large homeless populations those businesses either restrict toilet use to customers or only let the staff use their toilets. Of course, homeless people can rarely afford to keep spending money to purchase things from these businesses multiple times per day just to use their toilets, not to mention that virtually all these businesses close for the night in SF, making it impossible to find a toilet in some areas at night.
  - cameldrv 7y ago
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officemonkey 7y ago

Could it be dogs or could it be people? What economic factors could lead people to stop picking up dog poop? Have poop bags gone so far up in price that it's impossible for the average person to purchase poop bags?

Hydraulix989 7y ago
It's people.
- jquery 7y ago
  Yes, for the most part dog owners are pretty conscientious. My neighborhood is full of dog-walkers but I rarely see feces, even in the park next to my house. The only doggy-poo beef in my neighborhood, based on NextDoor threads, is some of them put the dog feces in people's personal trash cans right after the trash has been picked up, which can be kind of annoying if you keep your trash bin inside your house (I always take it to the public trash bin when I see it). But even that is a minority of dog owners, after that thread I haven't seen that happen even once (it used to happen regularly).
- scurvy 7y ago
  It's more than half dogs. People in SF just don't care. Also, it wasn't such a good idea to give shelter animals to the permanent homeless. Now not only can they not get into a shelter, but now something else is dropping turds on the street and not being picked up.

throebd 7y ago

It is a ban of plastic bags from supermarkets. People have some decency, but with ban there is no way to dispose excrements.

jquery 7y ago
Interesting theory, do you have any citations? It does sound plausible and seems to coincide with my experience in San Francisco (the problem did seem to get somewhat worse after the ban), but maybe that's coincidence or just my anecdotal experience.
- jakear 7y ago
  Food stamps recipients don’t pay the bag tax, which would make me less inclined to believe that theory. But I don’t know how many of these people are on EBT.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    People weren't just using their own bags, they were scavenging bags from the garbage (or the streets—discsrded single use bags were eveeywhere.) Banning designed-as single use bags (and encouraging reuse with a minimum charge per bag) greatly reduced the number of scavengable bags.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> It is a ban of plastic bags from supermarkets. It's a ban of free or single-use plastic bags from supermarkets; bags must be reusable (with specified strength standards for plastic bags), and there is a minimum charge.
gfodor 7y ago
holy cow this is a great theory. i haven't heard it before, and it would cut through a ton of noise if this could be supported by data. can it? the disappearance of readily available plastic bags (in the trash, floating around, etc) certainly would make way more sense as something that could suddenly have a huge impact than other theories which are stabbing in the dark at higher level variables that have trended slowly over time like shelter access or density of public restrooms. it would also explain why this problem is uniquely SF -- given the social signaling that is associated with a store being seen as environmentally conscious (by abandoning plastic bags) compared to other cities, it wouldn't surprise me if the rate and degree of abandonment of plastic bags outpaced other California cities. this certainly seems like the kind of thing that will bubble up to economics textbooks if true, a classic case of unintended consequences by tweaking incentives and regulations. i hope it gets more attention.

madengr 7y ago

Reminds me of the Southpark where Cartman is traversing San Francisco in a moon suite.

weeksie 7y ago

Build. More. Homeless. Shelters. California is so damned NIMBY'd up that they refuse to build shelters and act surprised when homeless people sleep outside. Then they throw their hands up in the air like "uh, it must be the weather" It's stupid. In New York we have more homeless per capita and in absolute numbers but we have nothing like the street issues that west coast cities have. It's because we actually house the damned homeless. And for fuck's sake, it's not the weather. Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer. The whole CA homeless crisis is a self-inflicted wound. For reference, an article in SF Gate: "67 percent of Bay Area homeless are unsheltered. In New York, it's 5%" https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...

throwawaybdb25 7y ago
> Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer. Come for a walk with me. There are tents and makeshift shelters in the north end of Central Park (west side, north of 96th) and in the parks along both rivers if you know where to look.
- 01100011 7y ago
  Well, I'm guessing the shelters don't let you shoot up, so...tent cities form.
bongobongo 7y ago
I think this is accurate, having lived all over CA and the Northeast. Northeastern cities build shelters because otherwise homeless people would freeze to death in the winter, though. Sometimes the shelters are only available during the freezing months.
- weeksie 7y ago
  We didn't used to build shelters. There was an entire riot in the 80s when the cops removed a homeless encampment that had entirely taken over Tomkins Sq Park in the East Village. I don't know when we started building them (I'm a transplant, circa 2008) but I know there was a qualitative difference from when I'd been to the city in the early 00s versus when I moved so I assume Bloomberg was responsible for building more.

ajross 7y ago

> The triple scourges of drug abuse, mental illness and family breakdown have produced anomie and derangements far deeper than those seen in the 1930s Completely unsourced nonsense. As if there were no homeless families or mental illness in the great depression. Even drug abuse isn't a modern thing, though the chemicals have changed. I mean it doesn't even pass the basic (heh) smell test of "would you rather walk the streets of San Francisco in 1931 or 2019? I mean, come on.

jquery 7y ago
It's the classic apocalyptic mindset, of which we seem to have plenty of in 2019: "things are worse than ever" even though that's not borne out by the evidence[1] [1]https://singularityhub.com/2016/06/27/why-the-world-is-better-than-you-think-in-10-powerful-charts/ https://singularityhub.com/2016/06/27/why-the-world-is-bette...
- Tade0 7y ago
  Because the evidence is cherry-picked. Humans may be doing better (for now), but it all came at a great cost to the environment.
CydeWeys 7y ago
People vastly underestimate just how bad run-of-the-mill alcoholism was in past years, let alone more "exotic" illegal drugs. Look at the gin craze in London a few centuries ago, for example: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a8e4e/a-gin-craze-nearly-destroyed-18th-century-london https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a8e4e/a-gin-craze-nearly...
rabbitonrails 7y ago
It's an opinion piece.
- ajross 7y ago
  Uh... under normal journalistic practice, even opinion pieces are expected to support statements that they present as fact. Maybe things are different in conservative media, I dunno.

realplayer6 7y ago

The homeless need to learn to code and stop using plastic.

henryl 7y ago

“Seattle Is Dying” is a great investigative report about the problems and potential solutions to homelessness. Also applicable to SF. https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw

cbHXBY1D 7y ago
I've seen this video and it's a Sinclair hit piece. Not worth the time of anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion. It's 2019 and this propaganda piece (yes, it's propaganda) is arguing mass incarceration is the solution.

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hello_tyler 7y ago

You could easily solve this problem by converting a small portion of major parks into homelessness crisis centers. Somewhere for people to sleep safely, with facilities, and resources for reintegration. Everyone blames the homeless though, they will rarely vote to actually help them but seem content to assuage their guilt by dropping a dollar into the can or praying for them. As if that helps.

akiselev 7y ago

> Under that understanding, no one had a right to camp out indefinitely on public property, much less to defecate on it. Public property belonged to the public—to everyone—and couldn’t be privatized for the benefit of one or more vagrants, however poor or sick. Though that principle would need to be applied to modern circumstances, it is the indispensable starting point for thinking about the shocking problems of the Golden State. Anyone else find this to be a rather entirely perverse way of thinking about public spaces? Public space is meant to be used by the public and a homeless person has just as much right to use it as anyone else, for as long as they want to. I might be annoyed that they have taken over my favorite park bench but thats part and parcel for living in a society and I don't have a right (morally, if not legally) to use ordinances to stop them Obviously, it's a whole different issue if we're talking about public health but the solution is to build more public bathrooms and shelters, not criminalize existence. And to nitpick: considering how much of the west coast is wilderness owned by the Federal government and managed by BLM, you sure as hell do have a right to defecate on public property. It's literally in our nature.

kipqi 7y ago
Using != abusing. Camping in a public space means taking part of it for yourself, permanently. In other words, you're taking away the right of the rest of citizens of using that part of public space. Defecating is a public health issue, too.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Exactly. People defecate in the woods all the time, but they have the decency to at least dig a hole and cover it. Just because it's natural to take a shit doesn't mean we should be stepping in it.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Even shitting in the woods isn't great, it's just that most people won't use the better but grosser alternative (shitting in a sealable bag). In parks where restrooms are provided, like the Grand Canyon, shitting outside of restrooms isn't allowed. Anywhere the foot traffic gets high enough, the park service will put in restrooms and require people to use them to defecate, because the alternative is pretty bad. Even in the wilderness.

baby 7y ago

Serious question. Where are people supposed to go to the restroom when the is no public restroom around?

samsonradu 7y ago
This is an issue in some cities in western Europe also, there are no free restrooms available. No wonder everything around train/subway stations smells like piss.
tomjen3 7y ago
What do they do in Germany? Their public toilets are amazing, but not free. I suspect the answer is that they don't have that many people who have these sorts of issues in the first place, but at the same time more social spending doesn't seem to be the issue, as California spend a fortune on the homeless issue and gets relatively little for it, and the most common length of time to be homeless is one day.

notus 7y ago

i wonder if incentivizing the homeless to use bathrooms would work... free meal, joint, w/e

pmoriarty 7y ago
All you have to do is have plenty of public bathrooms nearby and keep them clean. Neither of those is the case in SF. There are almost no public bathrooms, and those that exist tend to be disgusting.
throwmebaby 7y ago
Damn, I can get a free meal and a joint in SF just by using the bathroom? Sign me up!

hristov 7y ago

This is very much a problem but it is incorrectly stated as California's problem. This America’s problem. It just so happens that because California is relatively rich, tends to have some of the most tolerable year round weather and the people are relatively compassionate a large percentage of the homeless of all of America are moving to California. How many times have you heard some politician or just an ordinary person from the south or the midwest say something to the effect “we have a great homelessness policy, we buy each homeless person a bus ticket to California and send them on their way!” They usually say this with pride or with a laugh instead of being embarrassed as they should be. In fact if i remember correctly this was part of the plot of a south park episode (although i do not exactly remember whether south park endorsed or mocked that policy). So lets not treat this as some failure on California’s part. It is failure of the entire USA. The reasons are the usual ones— lack of mental health treatment for the poor, drug addiction, lack of social safety nets in general. And of course there is one new very scary reason — out of control health care costs that force people that were and should be fully functioning members of society into suffering and homelessness.

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chucksmash 7y ago
> How many times have you heard some politician or just an ordinary person from the south or the midwest say something to the effect “we have a great homelessness policy, we buy each homeless person a bus ticket to California and send them on their way!” They usually say this with pride or with a laugh instead of being embarrassed as they should be. In fact if i remember correctly this was part of the plot of a south park episode (although i do not exactly remember whether south park endorsed or mocked that policy). Zero times? This seems like a lazy characterization and citing South Park doesn't really help your case. According to this Guardian article on homeless busing in the US[1], these sorts of programs tend to originate in the Western states: > A count earlier this year found half a million homeless people on one night in America. The problem is most severe in the west, where rates of homelessness are skyrocketing in a number of major cities, and where states like California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have some of the highest rates of per capita homelessness. > These are also the states where homeless relocation programs are concentrated. Using public record laws, the Guardian obtained data from 16 cities and counties that give homeless people free bus tickets to live elsewhere. Key West and Ft Lauderdale are discussed in the article; Atlanta is mentioned as having been criticized for this in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics. That said, jumping immediately to "we all know how those darn Southerners and Midwesterners are" doesn't seem to jive with the facts. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

scurvy 7y ago

Let's also not forget the animal element of street poop here. I live in Russian Hill, a not rough part of SF, and I daily see people neglecting to clean up after their dogs. These people belong to no particular group: young, old, rich, poor, students, tourists, your neighbors. There's something about this city that attracts people who just don't give a damn. It's unsustainable for those of us who do. Also, homeless people tend to poop in between parked cars on the street or in doorways. If you see a fresh turd in the middle of the sidewalk, I'd say better than 75% chance it came from Fido, not Frank. EDIT, I might live in Russian Hill but I walk through the Tenderloin every work day for my commute. I see it all.

lettergram 7y ago

I recall a homeless guy in SF laying in front of the Alameda ferry terminal. He had pooped and was smearing it over the door, ground, and was rolling in it. The other passengers and myself were just watching. I remember watching everyone’s faces and us deciding what to do. This was fairly normal for all of us. The coast guard came off the incoming ferry and basically joined us. It wasn’t their job, eventually we got some security and even they were like... “ugh, I don’t know if it’s safe to move him”. Eventually all of us just routed around the homeless man via the other doors (usually for getting off the ferry). No one taking care of the problem, to my knowledge. Can’t really blame anyone for not wanting to move a man covered in feces. But I agree this is a crisis and I honestly don’t know who they will get willing to solve that problem.

tomjen3 7y ago
In a different country, some sailor would be tasked with removing him, and would just hose everything away with the firehose (it runs on whatever water the ship sails in, so the only cost is the power to move the water through it). I am not sure it would be a better solution, but it seems to me that the current status where you can't enforce basic societal rules, like don't roll in shit in public, because the only social sanction, exclusion, can't be applied is simply unsustainable and quite frankly we need to make it possible to arrest people who act this way (and ensure they are arrested).

CydeWeys 7y ago

"But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere." [citation needed] Bodily waste has been a huge problem for shantytowns across all of recorded history. I doubt that Hoovervilles had some unique solution to the problem that has not been replicated since.

nradov 7y ago
Hooverville residents were mostly not mentally ill or drug addicts. They probably dug pit latrines.

sbhn 7y ago

The defecation crisis is see is the eagerness of law fearing citizens to put a substance that decomposes back into nature in about a week, into a plastic bag that will still have its contents nicely stored, and brewing, ready to be freed, for years to come.

gshdg 7y ago
Riiight... have you ever read about what’s happened in places with high concentrations of humans that tried to return their bodily wastes to nature? See also London’s Great Stink.

buboard 7y ago

What percentage of HN users live in the Bay area?

erikpukinskis 7y ago
Half.

rasz 7y ago

When I watched Jennifer Garners Peppermint (2018) I naturally assumed typical Hollywood hyperbole. But then I saw this: Skid Row, Downtown Los Angeles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbTSDuQET94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbTSDuQET94

aussieguy1234 7y ago

This was a problem once relegated to third world countries like India. It will get worse, unless the US can fix their welfare system.