38 ms·

San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  A novel solution: what about a hose into the ground with a large opening, and a 3/4 blind, maybe mounted on a tree, or post. Feces is another issue but … urinating is something we can solve.
• chrismeller 4y ago
  Version I found without a paywall: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/flushing-money-san-francisco-to-spend-1-7-million-to-build-a-single-public-toilet/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/flushing-money-san-franc...
• willcipriano 4y ago
  The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.
  • VHRanger 4y ago
    It's not inexplicable. The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners). It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.
    • willcipriano 4y ago
      If expensive permitting is the problem, since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees. Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong. A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.
      • throwayyy479087 4y ago
        Government has to get permits like the rest of us
      • bhelkey 4y ago
        > since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees. This assumes that the cost is due to fees imposed by the government. From the article: >> [The costs] include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach. >> we expect to be able to complete [the toilet] in 2025
        • willcipriano 4y ago
          It couldn't cost more than say 200k (and that is pretty crazy the article says the plumbing hookups are there it's not like they have to dig up a city block to run a sewer line or something) to actually build the thing so we are talking what? A million and a half in illustration, planning and review for a single toilet?
          • bhelkey 4y ago
            I don't have any special insight here but, in other cases, environmental reviews and environmental lawsuits are tools used to stifle new developments. > a rejected San Francisco apartment complex...required a more than 1,110-page environmental assessment [1] It is not socially acceptable to charge a million dollar permit for constructing a toilet. It is socially acceptable to make the process so onerous that it costs more than a million dollars to complete. Think of the environment. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-20/the-landmark-environmental-law-inside-a-nimby-firestorm https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-20/the-landm...
  • anm89 4y ago
    It's pretty explicable. Our entire economic system is based on the premise that we should off shore the production of things to other places who are willing to deal with the nitty gritty and get it done at a price Americans can afford and then we regulate and enforce wages that ensure that those activities are prohibitively onerous and expensive to be done in the USA. This is literally by design. It's great for multiplying the amount of physical things everyone gets to consume as long as the quality of those things isn't taken into account. It's a disaster in the event we actually need to build any physical things for ourselves. We've been able to pretend this isn't true for the last 40 years as we wore our existing infrastructure down into the ground. It is becoming more apparent now as we fail to rebuild to the state we were in 70 years ago.
    • missedthecue 4y ago
      This can't be the explanation, because the US has never offshored construction. You can't offshore construction. It's a service business that requires being on-site.
      • anm89 4y ago
        Right, and this a big part of the reason that houses are prohibitively expensive. If you could offshore them they'd be affordable. Americans can't afford to buy things made by Americans. Again we papered over this issue with decades of supressed interest rates but the ruse can't last forever.
      • julianapostate 4y ago
        its been inshored to latin americans
  • bergenty 4y ago
    Getting a contractor to work on your home is ridiculously expensive too. The other day I paid $900 to replace a faucet for my tub.
    • willcipriano 4y ago
      I'd love to see a breakdown of wages paid to plumbers, tilesetters and carpenters as well as all material and equipment costs vs everything else. I'd gamble it isn't even 20% of the total.
    • gimoc 4y ago
      Couldn't you do it yourself? It's typically a relatively simple job, no need to get a contractor in. The tools to replace it, if you don't have them already, would have come in at a fraction of $900.
      • bergenty 4y ago
        I could and I will moving forward. My wife ended up paying him when I was at work and she had no idea what it was supposed to cost.
      • dzhiurgis 4y ago
        You can for now, while it’s legal. Electrical work is now illegal in many places.
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with contractors. I had to do the exact same thing, while it wasn’t $900 it was $200-300 to have someone come out and replace a faucet. I ended up buying the tools and did it in ~20 minutes for like $20 in parts. I’ve done a lot of other projects and constantly get outrageous quotes from landscapers, plumbers, HVAC, etc. My theory is that they prey on people that don’t know any better. Less and less people know how to DIY so they have no frame of reference for the real value of labor and get scammed.
  • fudidjfuf 4y ago
    This isn't a universal problem across America and even from a contradictory perspective it's certainly not an equally impactful problem across America. The inability to build and excessive costs of regulatory compliance when allowed to do so are very much blue team problems.
  • yucky 4y ago
    There is a straight answer. Government is far too big and inefficient, which adds tremendously to the cost when it is involved.
• moneycantbuy 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/hDumb https://archive.ph/hDumb
• missedthecue 4y ago
  I'm not sure how you would be able to codify it in a fair and just way, but this level of waste needs to be a crime. There needs to be accountability.
  • sn0w_crash 4y ago
    This is already codified. It’s a political ideology that centers around throwing money into a bottomless pit of problems that never seem to be solved. “Accountability” would mean a massive reduction in headcount, budget, and taxation. The likelihood of this happening in SF is….. you know the answer to that.
• jimrandomh 4y ago
  I think things in SF have gotten well past the point where people should believe that it's mere inefficiency, and start calling it what it is: corruption. This money is being embezzled, used as political favors, or otherwise misappropriated. There will be a story about a wasteful process, of course, some budget paperwork, and excuses. But unless a detective looks closely at the books, those excuses will probably be lies. This particular price tag on this particular project isn't super important, but it looks to me like California government projects and public institutions have a pattern of doing this, adding up to a whole lot more than $1.7M.
  • anm89 4y ago
    Where's the corruption here? If you set up a system of regulation where a building a toilet costs 1.7M and then building a toilet costs 1.7M, that seems like inefficiency not corruption. I'm open to being proven wrong here but it seems like this statement needs to be justified.
    • citizenpaul 4y ago
      People that think like you interest me. Exactly how much would someone have to move against you before you simply stopped them and said this is enough regardless of evidence? Like would you die instead of fight back if it came to it? Were your parents extremely well off? I don't see how one can make it through life without being wary of the bad intent other people can have without some sort of caretaker that will bail you out.
      • jshzglr 4y ago
        If a proposal for a toilet needs to pass through several committees to be built, it sounds plausible that SF is just one bureaucratic monstrosity organized democratically. It doesn't need to be fraud, although frankly I wish it was. That would be easier to dismantle.
      • anm89 4y ago
        You are just making wild assumptions about my belief system. This is bordering on incoherent Can you point to where I say any of this is good or show any sign of support for any of it? Were your parent's uneducated? I don't see how you could make it through life with this level of reading comprehension.
• greendestiny_re 4y ago
  Grand opening of a public toilet, escalator, or elevator is a common sight in Eastern Europe during an election campaign. https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/gradonacelnik-zivinica-svecano-otvorio-lift/220907053 https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/gradonacelnik-zivinica-sveca...
  • sn0w_crash 4y ago
    Eastern Europe is 100x cleaner and more beautiful than SF will ever be.
• anonygler 4y ago
  Meanwhile, in Florida: https://twitter.com/MyFDOT/status/1582832749681201152 https://twitter.com/MyFDOT/status/1582832749681201152 California is a failed experiment.
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    Honestly, as a Californian; I see this positively. We need our butts kicked a bit to make progress. I want California to be the best place in the world. It’s trying hard to not be.
  • lovich 4y ago
    Meanwhile in Florida https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interactive-see-after-photos-florida-condo-building-collapse-n1272299 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interactive-see-after-p... You can find failed/failing/failing to implement infrastructure in every state in the US, it’s a national issue
    • anonygler 4y ago
      Counterpoint: California residents would've blocked the Condo development using CEQA and it'd be a hybrid parking lot/homeless encampment. Checkmate indeed. It's a good thing the Millennium Tower is still standing.
      • lovich 4y ago
        It’s not really a counterpoint when every place is fucked. I’m saying this from region that did the last mega engineering project in the US (the big dig) and that was even 20 years ago. We are one of the best areas for approving infrastructure projects and we still don’t approve enough to support the areas needs. It is a national problem
• tracerbulletx 4y ago
  Is there a cost breakdown of what goes into an estimate like this? The 1.7 million number comes from somewhere, so how was it calculated, what parts of the process result in it being so high? Cost of labor for doing the actual job, materials, administrative salaries for the planning and regulatory hurdles? Surely that exists somewhere, and so if this is corruption seeing such a document should make it more obvious who is benefiting from it
  • techdragon 4y ago
    This highlights one of my personal favourite ways to attack this problem, itemised cost breakdowns. If they were required by law to keep sufficiently detailed account of the government money they are using, and while making these public by default might be hard to convince people of (due to obvious questions about commercial in confidence information)… just requiring them to exist as government records of the project opens a pathway for the existing FOI processes to grant access to these for public inspection when it’s in the public interest. I really struggle to image how a FOI request to produce the itemised cost documentation of the 1.7 million dollar public toilet, might possibly not be in the public interest.
  • dzhiurgis 4y ago
    Container toilet from china - 10k Installation - 2k Rest - …
• Kukumber 4y ago
  This almost sounds like some sort of corruption, but i must be over-reacting
• tomcam 4y ago
  Why didn’t they open up the bids? My firm would’ve been willing to do that toilet for only $1.45 million and get it done within 18 months. Because we are go-getters /s
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    They are opening up the bids soon. Feel free to bid 1.45 MM, but that will probably be too high as the 1.7MM cost includes the architect, running the bid process, etc.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      We obviously need to collab
• Ptchd 4y ago
• jdross 4y ago
  I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift
  • dekken_ 4y ago
    hey now, let's not give them too much credit, it's probably a bit of both
  • duxup 4y ago
    Incompetence and bureaucracy seem more likely.
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      Por que no los dos. All the waste of money was done above the table and according to official government process. On one hand it's just a bunch of people who DGAF about the big picture doing their jobs and nothing more. On the other hand it walks, floats and quacks like the graft duck.
      • duxup 4y ago
        Incompetence looks like graft too... doesn't make it graft.
        • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
          Where does the line get drawn? This looks a lot like the "I'm gonna pay you $100 to F-off" scene from Trailer Park Boys where the money is being given to parties who would usually whine if there wasn't something "in it for them" (the unions, the NIMBYs, the politicians, etc.) Surely the fact pattern doesn't meat the legal definition of graft but if the entity doing the paying out wasn't the government a negligence tort would probably fly so it kind of begs the question why this fact pattern is acceptable.
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    It's straight out of the OSS (pre-CIA)'s "Simple Sabotage Field Manual". https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/467529962c184258d08f16daec83d5da https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/467529962c184258d08f16daec... > General Interference with Organizations and Production > Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Be worried about the propriety of any decision -- raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
• refurb 4y ago
  The Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee will be responsible for conducting a “multi-phase review” of the project, like it does for all projects on public lands. Before the project is put out for bid, it will be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act, according to the Chronicle. The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” according to a joint statement from Rec and Parks Department and the Department of Public Works, which added that, “While this isn’t the cheapest way to build, it reflects San Francisco’s values.” Lots of palms greased all the way around.
  • derelicta 4y ago
    I mean there is nothing wrong with the whole "built-by-union-workers"-thingy. its more all of the Bureaucracy involved thats stupid.
    • throwawaysleep 4y ago
      Nothing wrong with lazy and unaccountable workers?
      • derelicta 4y ago
        • throwawaysleep 4y ago
          I work for the government in one of my jobs. I see it all the time.
          • derelicta 4y ago
            Not to downplay your observations but thats mostly anecdotal. Also, I think professionals working in STEM fields should be careful not to encourage this race-to-the-bottom wage-wise for workers, for it may also happen to us sooner than we may hope.
• newsclues 4y ago
  Remember the jokes about the military overspending on toilet seats? It seems like it’s a bipartisan past time to waste taxpayers money on foolishly over expensive pet projects.
  • mellavora 4y ago
    It is a bipartisan pass-time (not past-time, you must have been auto-corrected) to accuse the government of wasting money. And then forcing them to waste money by shifting their tasks and priorities followed by blaming them again for the waste. The military overspending was on hammers. And the politician forgot to mention that these were hammers for use in a munitions factory, where it was rather important that the hammer not generate even micro-sparks. The politician also didn't mention anything about government overspend on desks for senators. I'm sure his desk didn't come from Ikea, but somehow that wasn't a problem.
    • newsclues 4y ago
      Attack the other team for their spending. To gain power and direct the spending to your team. Rinse and repeat.
    • jhgkjhlkhjkljk 4y ago
• duxup 4y ago
  Really frustrating there are no photos.
• vanillax 4y ago
  I would never step foot into a public SF toliet. Last time I went in there the homeless shit all over the floor and toliet and walls. I went in and nearly threw up. A homeless person pointed and laughed at me. Fuck that.
  • rajup 4y ago
    You probably don’t want to step in SF ever. FTFY.
    • illuminerdy 4y ago
      I used to live in the South Bay and go up to San Francisco and Oakland every other weekend. It was bad, but it seems to have completely gone to hell in the last decade. I would not set foot there unless all of human existence depended on it.
      • throwawaytoilet 4y ago
        I’ve wanted to leave SF for a few years as I don’t connect as well after having kids. It has slid but it is very easy to avoid the big problem areas and you get desensitized. But there is still lots to love about the city. It soul isn’t crushed yet.
        • fooblaster 4y ago
          hear hear! San Francisco is still a beautiful place, leagues ahead of the south bay strip mall.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • Spivak 4y ago
      I had Paris syndrome for SF real bad because of how it was described by people and portrayed in movies and when I finally went there it was uhh.. not somewhere I would live forever. I'm sure it's amazing if you live in the rich areas but I got an apartment in the mission which was sold to me by some of my native friends as one of the good semi-affordable areas for young professionals and it was culture shock.
• throwawaysleep 4y ago
  One of my jobs is in the public service. This seems like the usual case of public servants doing everything possible to avoid someone being unhappy with them later. Consultations, union workers, tons and tons of approvals, etc. Remember, you can't really win as a government worker. The priority is not to lose. You want every little concern addressed? You want layers and layers of accountability? You want the top concern of every person in gov to be avoiding any possible desire to be responsible for something? You get this. I've seen this play out many times. No corruption. No grift. Just ass covering.
  • newsclues 4y ago
    You say that like these public servants care about everyone but the taxpayers footing the bill.
    • throwawaysleep 4y ago
      I don't personally care about anything as a public servant beyond covering my ass. Joe Taxpayer does get screwed, but he gets screwed by the collective decision making satisfying everyone else, so I can't get in trouble for it. Joe Taxpayer doesn't show up to the planning meetings. Joe Taxpayer doesn't submit anything to the feedback forms. Joe Taxpayer doesn't care enough about any particular project to really win.
  • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 4y ago
    So how do we fix it without adding yet another layer? All the govt seems to do is add more layers.
    • mellavora 4y ago
      We start regarding public servants with some respect instead of someone to be yelled at. A culture shift. You are right more regulations/another layer isn't going to help.
      • fdewrewrewf 4y ago
• michaelscott 4y ago
  > San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets. The irony in this statement, given the reasons why this toilet costs so much, is absolutely unreal. I had to check the date on this article to make sure it wasn't an old April's Fools skit or something, but it seems red tape and NIMBYism have escalated to such a degree in SF that (a) securing budget for a single toilet that will take 3 years to build is considered a political victory worthy of patting themselves on the back in the press, and (b) a toilet to "ease" rampant homelessness is considered a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes. Wild.
  • vxNsr 4y ago
    Attacking the root causes would mean admitting that they have no idea what they’re doing, that they’ve been running full speed backwards and that their political opponents were 100% correct. Or they can spend more public money and keep running backwards while claiming victory.
  • aliqot 4y ago
    Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
    • msoad 4y ago
      SFO is the airport. I'm very confused by this comment. We're not all working at Google right now. MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        People sometimes use major airport codes as shorthand for a city or the metropolitan region the airport serves.
• 323 4y ago
  It's actually cheap. 3 years of litigation until all the stakeholders agree on all the aspects of this public toilet are not cheap. And what if the environmental reviews find a bunny family living at the proposed location? Relocating the bunny family will probably cost another million and 2 years of delay.
  • Bilal_io 4y ago
    It's like when an org needs to add a button to their website and it takes 20 meetings to get the okay. It's inefficient, ineffective and definitely not cheap. When many hands, many meetings, and definitely many layers of middleman are involved, it'll cost millions to build a single toilet.
    • system16 4y ago
      You're not even exaggerating. I worked as a contractor some time back for a major Canadian telecom company that no longer exists. I remember spending hours of meetings on calls with no less than 10 stakeholders (and in some meetings senior management) "circling back" to get a decision on button position. Not a single one of these people were a designer/UX person. I'd imagine it's even worse in the public sector.
      • roguas 4y ago
        There is probably some fallacy to explain this. My intuition tells me that if you have meaningless job (or you feel as if) you tend to make big deal out of small decisions, assert your territory of control/reign etc. This leads to what you described. I guess it also offers an easy cop out for them if the button will be placed in the worst possible way. "Since Jerry was also on the call and I always thought he has final say."
        • clankyclanker 4y ago
          Bikeshedding? http://bikeshed.com http://bikeshed.com
    • 4y ago
• sys32768 4y ago
  I thought San Francisco was a public toilet?
  • ackbar03 4y ago
    Do you happen to be homeless?
  • prionassembly 4y ago
    This is exaggeratedly mean. I can sort of correlate this, well, expression, with a political view. State it more crisply.
  • muaytimbo 4y ago
    The infamous SF poop map provides some insight: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab720912642b6aedafdb02a76d2a4 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...
  • doitLP 4y ago
    The Human Wasteland Project, that tracks human feces around SF agrees with you: http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/# http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/#
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • toomanyrichies 4y ago
    Rule #1 on the comments section of the Guidelines page: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Your comment goes against several of these requirements. Be better than this.
    • sys32768 4y ago
      I agree I stepped in some snark here, but this city has a human feces tracker app, which I failed to include which may have softened the blow: http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/# http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/#
• tristor 4y ago
  Paris has automatically self-cleaning public toilets all around and they cost around $200k each to build and install. There’s no way this is a remotely reasonable cost and is clearly a grift.
  • insanitybit 4y ago
    The cost isn't in the toilet itself, it's in all of the politics that will go into it. People will fight against it, there will be scrutiny in its design, etc.
    • knaekhoved 4y ago
      Honestly, I might fight a public toilet near my house too if I knew the end state was that it would mostly attract homeless people who want to shoot up heroin.
      • yardie 4y ago
        The Paris sanisettes were controversial when they went up. Using the same damn arguments against them. Everyone cares so much about what the homeless and drug users might do and care very little about the millions of others who also use them. And they were unfounded. The self-cleaning and maintenance schedule does not attract homeless. I've literally watched a drug user argue with one because the door forcefully opened automatically after 15 minutes and he marched off to finish his business elsewhere.
        • knaekhoved 4y ago
          > Everyone cares so much about what the homeless and drug users might do Yeah, because it's a huge problem when you have a homeless junkie causing problems where you live. > And [the concerns] were unfounded. ... I've literally watched a drug user argue with one You're not helping your argument here.
      • mtalantikite 4y ago
        I don't know, I'd rather them use a toilet that is self cleaning than do it on the trash bins outside my condo. I've lived in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) for a long time now, and the un-housed people that hang out up the block or sleep in the HSBC aren't happy about having to go to the bathroom in between parked cars on the street. Whenever I've walked by them while they're doing that (which is fairly often), they've always apologized. At least give them a clean, private place to do it.
• BluSyn 4y ago
  The entire article reads like something straight from The Onion.
• exabrial 4y ago
  • thfuran 4y ago
    What is your proposed alternative?
    • newsclues 4y ago
      For this, let private companies install public pay toilets. Let activists fund free pay toilet passes for the homeless/poor. Eventually there should be a couple brands of private public toilets where some are essentially free (lets say you own a business in an area with no public washrooms, it may be a financial benefit to you to sponsor a public toilet) and others are more luxury with higher prices to keep the riff raff out and fund more public ones. There is a market solution if the government gets out of the way.
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        I agree, but public pay toilets are illegal.
      • enragedcacti 4y ago
        There is a market solution for everything if we just imagine that the tragedy of the commons doesn't exist
  • WaitWaitWha 4y ago
    > Taxation is stupid. To some extent I agree. > ... US Governments have the worst value-delivered-per-dollar-collected ... Can you give me your reference for this? Looking at [0] the lowest & highest marginal tax rates, cross referenced with citizen happiness [1], USA does not seem to be the worst, but you might have better reference data. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• costcofries 4y ago
  This is like Canada spending $54m to build the BASIC covid entry app, ArriveCAN... Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/the-initial-cost-of-arrivecan-was-80000-what-about-the-other-54m https://nationalpost.com/news/the-initial-cost-of-arrivecan-...
• starkd 4y ago
  No wonder they can't build high-speed rail.
• ChrisBland 4y ago
  If you think about some of the really interesting architecture of San Francisco, do you think they could be built now? Imagine trying to get the golden gate bridge built today. At some point you have to accept that not everyone is going to like every aspect of your plan and tell them to go pound sound or nothing will ever get done.
  • davidw 4y ago
    This is exactly the problem. As someone who has been observing 'the process' closely in my own city, as we struggle to build enough homes, this piece really hit home: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-government-community-input-housing-public-transportation/629625/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-gove...
  • moduspol 4y ago
    It's certainly going to be tougher (not just in San Francisco, but elsewhere) because it was previously standard practice to choose cheaper areas for these projects to keep taxpayer costs low. Of course, in reality this disproportionately affects marginalized communities, so it'd be a political dumpster fire nowadays to propose that. If you can't build things in the cheaper areas, all that's left are the expensive ones.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    At some point I think we went off the rails and decided that democracy has to occur at every level of a public project. E.g. First the governor announces a vision, then the legislature allocates funds, then it goes to a design committee, etc, on down the line. At each level we try to get public participation, and at each level just a few loud voices can derail the whole thing for an indefinite amount of time. Perhaps we could reign that in. Democracy is how we elect leaders. If enough of our leaders decide to do something, then we do it. Maybe we have one public comment period for really big projects. But it gets done. Don't like what they did? Vote them out.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      The US was setup as republic for reasons that are becoming more and more apparent. We used to select representatives for a town or locality that would then group together and select representatives for the next level, etc. Much of this was due to communication limitations at the time, but there's something to be said to saying "I trust Bob here to make good decisions on my behalf" instead of everyone injecting themselves into every aspect of everything. All I can to personally is not vote for or against these various things.
• WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  Self-cleaning, vandalism-resistant public WCs have been around for a long time. Could SF purchase them instead?
  • Ptchd 4y ago
• yardie 4y ago
  Paris has over 400 public toilets, called sanisettes[0], and they work pretty well when they are in service. I doubt they cost ~$1.7m each. [0] https://europeforvisitors.com/paris/articles/paris-public-toilets.htm https://europeforvisitors.com/paris/articles/paris-public-to...
  • bsaul 4y ago
    i wouldn't really set paris as an example for this particular issue. It's certainly getting better with time, but we're far from anything decent
    • yardie 4y ago
      The bar is so low right now, trust me, they are light years ahead of most of the rest of the world.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    That seems to be about 2x the per capita rate of public toilets as SF.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• Ninjak8051 4y ago
  $1.7M is approximately the construction cost for a ~2000 sq ft rebuild in the suburbs. So that does seem a bit high to construct a single 150 sq ft bathroom. Probably the mistake is undertaking such a small project to begin with. It sounds like there are many fixed overhead costs (such as environmental review) that must be paid regardless of project size. Maybe you could have a 1,000 sq. ft. bathroom for $2 million, or an entire 10,000 sq. ft. park for $4 million.
  • caned 4y ago
    Sounds pretty reasonable...amortize the fixed costs over larger facilities and greater utility. Why was this downvoted?
• ahelwer 4y ago
  For the past few months I've been listening to Robert Caro's The Power Broker on audiobook (which has far and away the best narration I've ever heard - props to Robertson Dean!) and am about 40 hours in out of 65. The book is about a NYC administrator named Robert Moses who operated from roughly 1930-1970, and is quite eye-opening in its depiction of how the sausage is made in public works projects. I greatly recommend it if you have any interest at all in the nature of power within these areas. Robert Moses was famous in his time for "getting things done", which he was certainly successful at - but to think this required him to sweep away all the corruption and graft is absolutely untrue. He turned it to his own ends and operated successfully within an amazingly corrupt system, paying off everybody he could. All of this was non-transparently funded with money from public authorities, like bridge operators collecting tolls whose capitalization and disbursement were purely controlled by him. So we know this public toilet costs $1.7 million, which honestly isn't too astonishing a sum, but another era it also probably would have cost that - you just wouldn't know it unless you dug through the records decades after everyone involved was dead. Also the toilet would have, like, displaced an entire block of ethnic minority families or something. And had an elevated highway built over it.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  It's very expensive to defecate in San Francisco...
  • Ptchd 4y ago
    Remind me of the $60k/tent in San Francisco for the homeless... San Francisco is not corrupt at all: "S.F. spends more than $60K per tent at homeless sites. Now it’s being asked for another $15 million for the program"
• nemo44x 4y ago
  “the committee evaluates each project’s design, scale and massing for accessibility, safety and aesthetic merit.” The review process “ensures that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.” This is a perfect example of why you codify requirements and any review for permitting is as objective as possible. In this case, it's totally subjective and will be abused to get money and other favors from developers that want the project. This is pure corruption out in the open and they don't even try and hide it. They even mention that they might not need the full $1.7M and they'll find other uses for the money if it doesn't cost as much. This is theft of tax payer money by unaccountable officials. Any extra money should be returned to tax payers and every single part and labor cost must be documented and justified.
  • lkjlk34t34 4y ago
  • maerF0x0 4y ago
    Can you crap in it? Does it get crap on you? Anything that meets the description will do (doo) .
    • simplotek 4y ago
      > Can you crap in it? Does it get crap on you? Anything that meets the description will do (doo) . Not quite. You can spread portable toilets for pennies, or even a shipping container with toilets, but that will make any city look terrible. If you care about making things nice then it becomes necessary to invest resources making things nice which you would otherwise not have to spend if you just drop a portable toilet off the back of a pickup truck.
  • dijonman2 4y ago
    I worked on a public project in the South Bay and the corruption runs deep. Spend 15k on Airbnb in a week for one person? Expense approved. Seems everyone took a cut somehow.
• xyzzy4747 4y ago
  Maybe they'll raise taxes to pay for these toilets, and then raise the price of the toilets to match the higher budget.
• deleted 4y ago
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• _uhtu 4y ago
  The central issue in SF really is just that all the stakeholders with any power whatsoever are highly incentivized to minimize change, because most of the voting and bribery base (I mean, political donation base) is manically obsessed with keeping housing prices as high as possible, so every department in every place in government is designed to slow and reject permits as much as possible. The incentives have been there so long that it's seeped into appointed bureaucrats in every place in local government, so even if you vote for someone staunchly anti-obstruction, it would take years of intense work to get the rot out of the entire system, longer than a single election cycle for sure. Plus, the people who would vote less obstructionist policies often are the ones who live out in Oakland or something and commute in to work, and thus can't vote on the SF policies, so those people get shoved out even more by the high costs. It's a vicious cycle and there's probably no answer to it besides state/federal intervention to force lack of obstruction (e.g. making certain zoning requirements like "single family home only" illegal). For now, the incentives of local voters are stacked in the "we'll take literal shit on the streets if it means higher housing prices" camp.
  • anon291 4y ago
    If the SF local government were to substantially change, particular political party officials would be out of a job, because the city is run by one party, and is in fact the breeding ground of a lot of major national politicians from that party. People should think about this when they go to vote, because several SF politicians are attempting to potentially run for president and other national positions. One of them is already in the executive branch. The 'both sides' nonsense I see in this thread needs to stop. It is a lie. There is only one side in San Francisco; we all know what side that is; and for someone reason, we're actually totally okay with those very same politicians becoming top dog nationally. Despite all the hand-wringing here by people saying they can't vote for SF politicians because they don't live in SF, everyone sure seems really happy to do it when it comes to the national elections.
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      > is in fact the breeding ground of a lot of major national politicians from that party. Really? If Newsom runs for president, despite being somewhat moderate, he's going to have problems because Republican attack ads will frame him as the former mayor of the most liberal city in the country while showing pics of the TL in the background.
• fdfaz 4y ago
  Say what you will but the fact that cities in the US have that kind of money to throw around says a lot about the country - compare that to having to heat ourselves using duvets in Europe :D
• screye 4y ago
  Is the SF Bay Area the worst managed "successful" economic urban area in the world ? It performs pretty badly on public transport, safety, affordability & sanitation. All its pros seem to exist despite the management, and not because of it. (Universities, Jobs, Weather, Nature) I thought Greater Seattle was badly managed, but it has been funding light rail, missing middle-housing and recently started reversing the crime problem bit-by-bit. Bangalore might get a shoutout, but they did see unprecedented population explosion in a decade and are at least (badly) trying to build their way out of it now. I'll take a moment to mention one of my favorite comments on HN "I call them PINO NOIRs: Progressive In Name Only, NIMBY-Only In Reality"
  • cdot2 4y ago
    I think calling them "progressive in name only" is a bit of a "no-true-scotsman"
    • hexator 4y ago
      There is nothing progressive about literally stopping progress on housing affordability.
      • cdot2 4y ago
        They could certainly make arguments about "urban beautification", "community involvement", and other "progressive" causes. Unless of course those arent true progressives.
        • deleted 4y ago
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        • uoaei 4y ago
          I don't understand what definition of "progressive" you're using here, if you think that putting pretty names on oppressive policies constitutes "progressivism".
        • epistasis 4y ago
• titzer 4y ago
  The city should just spend $1.7M on composting toilet buckets ($22 at REI) and leave them by the dozens in areas with public defecation problems. What a goddamn boondoggle.
• cberry2010 4y ago
  It just me or why can't the City just put a bunch of porta potty throughout the city and have a crew with trucks that replaces/clean them on a periodic basis. This is what construction sites and community events do all the time! It's a simple model.
  • cdot2 4y ago
    That would need to be approved through the same channels
• sschueller 4y ago
  In contrast the tiny city of Zürich Switzerland has 106 public toilet facilities. [1] Some are staffed, some cost money to use and some are open 247. Does my tax money pay for this, yes, I have used them and I am glad they exist. The maintenance of these 106 facilities cost around 6,895,000 CHF (~USD) per year. Around 40% of that is staffing costs and 23% is rent to 3rd parties. Yearly investment in upgrades etc. is around CHF 1,796,000 [1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/gud/de/index/gesundheitsschutz/zueriwc.html https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/gud/de/index/gesundheitsschutz/...
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    SF has something like 67 public toilets, 49 of them staffed, according to an article written two years ago. And the population of the city is about 50% greater than Zürich.
    • reportgunner 4y ago
      Based on a quick search Zurich has some 440K inhabitants while SF has some 880K inhabitants which is roughly double (or 100% greater)
  • calebm 4y ago
    I remember finding the Zurich public toilets strange - they use the toilet bowl as the sink as well (notice in the photo how the water to wash your hands falls into the same bowl). It was a strange surprise, but seemed pretty efficient: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F--RNvx2Sla9U%2FUZ0OcN2mIYI%2FAAAAAAAB4Co%2FCfNuSMxFVb0%2Fs1600%2FEUR_4036.JPG&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=121d698cfb0eb6b188eb5205f61e54bf09f81fd6e4f36b155605ac4fa6af6730&ipo=images https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3...
    • sschueller 4y ago
      Only some are like that.
  • firefoxkekw 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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  • lkjlk34t34 4y ago
    Any founder based in SF pays a minimum of 3 business taxes to the city of SF so yes it is highly relevant. Take your libtarded vax-passing bucket of no brains back to reddit.
• asow92 4y ago
  Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty? It seems that there's a fine line between compassion and enablement when it comes to the deep blue municipalities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc. Sure the rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are areas with similar problems and mixed politics, but they also somehow feel different.
  • mehphp 4y ago
    Do they though? I think the problem is just more visible in densely populated areas (which tend to lean blue). Red states are filled with poverty/inequity it’s just more spread out. Drive through the derelict areas in rural America and you will see similar issues.
    • asow92 4y ago
      In my personal experience of living in both rural New York and Pennsylvania and NYC for decades, the ratio seems to skew more towards the city. But I can't say as much for the west.
  • vlovich123 4y ago
    City vs rural have different challenges for one. Cities as a whole seem to lean left but it’s unclear if the policies are to blame or if it’s just a problem of unrelated political factors (eg bussing homeless into cities from red areas to “clean up your streets”)
    • asow92 4y ago
      NYC has started bussing people to my rural area in Upstate NY because there isn't enough section 8 housing available and they're on a waiting list.
      • whimsicalism 4y ago
        this is a very a different sort of "bussing", it is state wide allocation of section 8 housing. they're not bussing people if they don't have section 8 already. Massachusetts does the same thing but from Boston to places like Fall River. Homeless are being bussed to SF without any housing arrangements.
• lkjlk34t34 4y ago
• olalonde 4y ago
  Related: $2M bathroom in New York https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8
• matthewmacleod 4y ago
  The thing is, you can look at this headline and know immediately that it's hiding information. You can read the opening paragraph and tell that it isn't an article that's actually seeking to inform anyone about anything. It's not news. It's not really hard to figure out why public discourse is so broken when this sort of shit-shovelling churnalism is treated seriously.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwaway5752 4y ago
    I can see why you were downvoted. You are correct about the submitted article, and these types of posts attract a different audience - newer, lower karma accounts that tend to focus on non-technical subjects. Yahoo doesn't produce much content, they distribute it. This is from the National Review, which is a partisan editorial magazine. It is not bias or incorrect to say it is not journalism. It is a subsidiary of the NRI, which is a dedicated to advancing conservative ideas and politicians (that is in their words - https://www.flipsnack.com/nrinst/2022-my-newsletter.html https://www.flipsnack.com/nrinst/2022-my-newsletter.html) This type of content is fairly well crafted to appeal to certain worst impulses, and manipulate people. There is a US political movement based on creating a long standing state of aggrievement and thrive on this sort of cortisol raising material. It's is a shame to see it getting a foothold here.
    • mardifoufs 4y ago
      What's the "truth" behind the headline then? Genuine question, I totally agree that it sounds a bit "too bad to be true" especially without more context. But what's the other side of this story?
      • throwaway5752 4y ago
        I sorry, I didn't make my point very clearly: I think this article is raises non-issue, intended to create conflict and bad feelings. They say that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy; I am ambivalent about this article and am not invested enough to knowledgeably discuss it. I'm not an SF resident, and I don't know how much it would reasonably cost to put up a durable and safe public toilet in a high cost, seismically active urban area. I don't have time to figure that out, so I'll assume the people involved are doing their best and I will go on with my life. There are a lot of people here focused on unproductive negativity, and that is not good for them or Hacker News as a community. The truth is there is always something to get outraged about somewhere, and rather than focusing on them everyone should do their best to live with dignity, integrity, and empathy.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  Reminds me of their $2.4B bus terminal, which opened in 2018, closed a month later when they noticed structural cracks, reopened in 2019, then closed in 2020 for covid19. Had to walk under its unfinished skeleton every day going to work.
  • dllthomas 4y ago
    And is presently open and pretty cool actually, most notably the way the transbay buses have a direct link to the bridge. And I believe the full price tag included the park on top of it, which remained open (though vendors did not) during COVID. I don't have a strong opinion about whether it was all worth $2.4B, but at least it wasn't quite as much of a disaster as you are portraying.
  • m0llusk 4y ago
    You are making light of things for your own delight and political leanings which is exactly the kind of thing that leads to all this nastiness. The station you are talking about is multimodal and is going to get Caltrain even though it takes a long time. It has a unique structure that makes it essentially a big floating barge and the problems that came with that have since been fixed. Lots of stuff got closed for COVID that could probably have been kept open with precautions. Your pointed criticism needs to be balanced against alternatives and you provide none.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      There's the obvious alternative of just building a regular terminal instead of an overdone mall-like thing with an artificial park on top. What they did was excessively costly and time-consuming, and during its long construction (effectively 9 years) the area was much less ped and bus friendly. It's like they wanted an iconic transportation structure like GG Bridge, except GG Bridge's form actually serves its function. Since $2.6B can be too big to think about, Salesforce Tower (tallest building in SF) cost $1.1B to build around the same time and in the same location. It took 5 years to build. Why did I mention Covid, to illustrate the point that things are more valuable now rather than later, cause you don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to hear that it's going to be useful eventually when they could've KISS'd and made something useful years ago.
• at_a_remove 4y ago
  I wonder what precautions will be taken to make sure that toilet doesn't become either someone's residence or a "shooting gallery."
  • Ylpertnodi 4y ago
    How the rest of the world (including parts of the US) does it - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-lights-drug-users-high/story?id=56140028 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-lights-drug-users-high/st...
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      Honestly these just make the place feel extremely shady. Supposedly addicts just mark their veins with a pen before going in anyway.
• danschumann 4y ago
• mattnewton 4y ago
  I think this is only a little bit of incompetence and poor city leadership, and a lot of Baumol's Cost Disease[0], which the bay area suffers from the worst case I have ever seen. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
• mattnewton 4y ago
  One of the reasons this toilet is so expensive no doubt, is that the new SF public toilets are self cleaning and will have attendants on duty to try to prevent this. The one on golden gate park and Haight closes after each visitor to spray the inside down like a dishwasher, and has an attendant on duty to make sure no one is inside while it does that (and to generally discourage people from shady stuff). It's not perfect but they have been clean every time I used it.
  • lr4444lr 4y ago
    They have to pay an attendant hourly just to be sure no one is in there while the self clean runs? Why can't it operate based on a weight sensor?
    • gregoriol 4y ago
      Because no startup has made an AI for that purpose yet?
      • uoaei 4y ago
        All you need is a PIR sensor
        • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
          Easily defeated with a masking tape.
        • yupper32 4y ago
          It's cheaper to pay someone $20 an hour 24 hours a day for 20 years than it is to pay out the $4mil lawsuit for when that sensor fails.
          • mousetree 4y ago
            I'm not an American, but can/would people sue for getting washed in a self-cleaning toilet? Surely some signs and disclosures would be sufficient?
• dboreham 4y ago
  The original Chronicle article (linked in TFA) is less onion-y. For readers not familiar with the city -- this proposed loo is in Noe Valley, an affluent residential area far from downtown, so comments about homeless people are not too relevant.
  • dang 4y ago
    (this comment was probably posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274885 before we merged it hither)
• abeppu 4y ago
  I've seen multiple articles on this, but none really explain why the public toilets that are used at other locations in SF cannot be used in this instance. Another comment in this thread mentions Paris's sanisettes, and SF already has a similar product (though far fewer of them). Given the city has already put them several places, I would have thought the marginal bureaucratic effort for one more shouldn't be so large. https://www.sfpublicworks.org/services/public-toilets https://www.sfpublicworks.org/services/public-toilets
• hot_gril 4y ago
  I've lived and worked in SF. Thankful that I'll probably never have another work-related reason to go back. SF is marked deprecated in my eyes.
  • stephencoyner 4y ago
    It’s easy to pile onto articles that highlight some of the city’s mismanagement, but San Francisco is one of the most naturally beautiful places in the country. If you’re out on the west side by Golden Gate Park, Baker Beach or the Presidio it feels like you’re in a nature movie. Even with all of its problems, I will always love that city.
    • jm20 4y ago
      I agree with you, but that has nothing to do with the city’s management though. SF is a tragedy considering all of its natural gifts.
    • WalterSear 4y ago
      Golden Gate Recreation is working to mess all that up.
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      > San Francisco is one of the most naturally beautiful places in the country. It's hit or miss. I find large swaths of the Outer Sunset desolate and depressing. Places like this: https://goo.gl/maps/QQbarT8iGEqLfNuN6 https://goo.gl/maps/QQbarT8iGEqLfNuN6
      • acchow 4y ago
        Agree. Much of the Richmond/Sunset is quite flat and doesn't exhibit the natural beauty of other parts of SF.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      Yes, I loved GG park on weekends, but that's about it. I'm very sick of working there or even visiting. It did not improve since I left.
• thebigship 4y ago
  San Francisco has always been bad at building public amenities: https://theoutline.com/post/8660/san-francisco-pissoir-aesthetics-of-urination https://theoutline.com/post/8660/san-francisco-pissoir-aesth...
• hansvm 4y ago
  The funny thing is a huge number public-facing businesses in SF are already legally required to have toilets and make them available to the public, but every single one of them is supposedly in a perpetual state of "the pipe just broke an hour ago" or other such excuses 24/7.
• deleted 4y ago
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• misiti3780 4y ago
  If you're NOT super rich and work in tech (aka can leave), I do not know how you sleep at night paying those ridiculous taxes knowing they are getting pissed away on projects like this.
  • strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    there are a lot of people who basically save nothing but they don't think about tomorrow.
• PKop 4y ago
• kyleyeats 4y ago
  NIMBYism would be a lot less popular in SF if we called them what they were: Conservatives.
• a_square_peg 4y ago
  I wonder if this is a sign of a system that's no longer salvageable.
• jerrysievert 4y ago
  I'm kind of surprised that new plans were drawn up when a perfectly serviceable toilet design[1] has been done and in production for much less[2]. This doesn't get rid of the permitting process, but it has been debugged and is already working in multiple cities. 1. https://portlandloo.com https://portlandloo.com 2. https://pffcdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Portland-Loo-Presentation-DC-march-2017-1.pdf https://pffcdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Portland-Loo-P... - $90,000 + estimated install costs of $4000
  • bombcar 4y ago
    "Not invented here" is not just a problem at companies like Google. And how dare you suggest that SF could use something named after another city!
    • jerrysievert 4y ago
      I mean, they could rename them. but very good point about NIH-syndrome. it's a shame that so much money needs to be spent when another solution has shown to work so well.
  • silverlake 4y ago
    This leaves people exposed from the openings at the top and bottom. The one in Paris is completely closed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette#/media/File:SanisetteWiki2009.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette#/media/File:Sanisett...).
• deleted 4y ago
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• ck2 4y ago
  Build it in a mobile truck like an RV, make a fleet of them and drive/park them to where needed Then at end of day replace with another truck while the previous goes to get flushed/cleaned. $1.7 million could build a fleet of a dozen with spare parts for a decade, fuel and labor to maintain/clean.
• deleted 4y ago
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• antiterra 4y ago
  Price doesn’t seem that outrageous to me. Public bathrooms in cities get destroyed and are very difficult to maintain; a lot of cities give up on free restrooms entirely. One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours. I priced out some relatively minor kitchen/bathroom renovation work in 2018 at around $100k. Put it off during covid times, and today the quote for the same work is well over $300k. Sure, some company with modular units is gonna sell you a stainless steel box public bathroom for that price, but it’s far from the same thing as a proper building. To those touting ‘cheap’ self cleaning toilets: https://missionlocal.org/2019/02/how-san-francisco-flushed-away-scores-of-millions-of-dollars-on-a-wretched-toilet-contract/ https://missionlocal.org/2019/02/how-san-francisco-flushed-a... https://dcist.com/story/19/07/29/this-self-cleaning-toilet-cost-metro-more-than-400k-and-it-doesnt-work-anymore/ https://dcist.com/story/19/07/29/this-self-cleaning-toilet-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/nyregion/11toilet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/nyregion/11toilet.html
  • blaser-waffle 4y ago
    > One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours. I'm in a big city in Canada and there was a downtown farmer's market here for a while. Literally smack in the middle of the city, went up and down a few streets on Saturday mornings. Loved going, was a short walk and had lots of good eats, local produce, etc. But no bathrooms. None of the local places would let you in if you weren't paying, and the only way I could make a head call was at the local YMCA -- and the only reason they let me in was cuz I was a member of their gym. It's crazy to me how you can be in the center a huge edifice of planning, piping, conduits, etc. and still not be able to find a toilet. edit: they did normally have porta-johns but didn't this morning. On at least one occasion I'd seen people tip them over, hopefully with no one in them.
  • colpabar 4y ago
    I know this is a forum for tech bros who are generally well paid but responding to a story about a million dollar public toilet with "that's no big deal, I'm currently spending six figures on minor kitchen renovations" seems pretty out of touch to me. That is a ton of money to so many people.
• tapatio 4y ago
  San Francisco is so advanced yet so birdbrained.
• jquery 4y ago
  Any actual SF residents in this thread? I’m seeing a lot of very authoritative posts coming from places of ignorance. One person even called it a “right wing dystopia”. Here’s the bottom line. The problems we are trying to solve in SF are hard. This place is fully developed. No way around that. Is SF perfect? No, not at all. But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of. We could easily sweep away the problems tourists complain about, do a little fascism, and make all these “problems” go away… by ignoring the humanity behind them. But we don’t. Instead we keep looking the problem in the eye and trying to solve it at a systemic level, as best a super dense 7x7km “island” possibly can. I would love to hear actual solutions from people who say they could do it better, but I am not holding my breath. They’re usually like people claiming P != NP because “well, obviously”…
  • notch656a 4y ago
    >But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of. This is the problem. The problem is you're trying too damn hard. Just build the fucking toilet. Less trying hard to do things the perfect way and be better than "almost any other city." At this point you should be looking at Camden or Gary IN for inspiration.
    • jquery 4y ago
      >“Just build the toilet” Did you think we are doing anything else? The article makes it pretty clear that’s all that is happening, but it’s making a big fuss over the fact some planning needs to take place, and that the planning website has some corporate-speak about doing our best or whatever. $1.7m is what it costs to hook up a full service public restroom in SF from idea to completion. It’s not cheap to build on top of fully developed area, you can’t just “dig and hope for the best”. No, you can’t cheat by sticking a commode on top of a storm drain and calling it a day.
      • notch656a 4y ago
        It's clear to me they're doing a lot else.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  This could be an article in the Onion. And people wonder why SF can't build affordable housing ... :/
• 1024core 4y ago
  It's simple. It's not their money. When you ask any SF Department to give you a budget for something, they will just hallucinate a number and pull it out of their ass. Matt Haney (the State Senator) asked the Parks & Rec Department for an estimate of what would it cost to build the toilet (given that the hookups are already in place). They shrugged and pulled a figure of $1.7M out of their ass. And he just accepted that! Any normal person would have alarm bells go off in their head about such a large amount. Imagine you walk up to a street vendor and ask about a hot dog, and he responds with $1000. You'll laugh at his face and walk away. But the politicians in SF thought this was perfectly normal, and were getting ready to celebrate this event (until the Chronicle published the article that went viral). Kudos to Heather Knight... but it shouldn't have come this far! Building a whole house costs $1.7M. A public toilet? Definitely not even close. But hey, it's not their money, so who gives a shit, right? When I read cases like these, I feel like maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big.
  • Raidion 4y ago
    I feel like that's a terrible false equivalency. One of the most liberal cities in the country making a bad decision over one toilet is not nearly enough to say "the whole concept of American government is too big, better reconsider my political party"
  • dralley 4y ago
    >When I read cases like these, I feel like maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big. States like Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky etc. are absolutely not immune to corruption, I assure you. Small-government Republicanism hasn't truly existed in decades. However, that's not to diminish blame from cities like NY, Chicago, LA, SF. They need to get their flipping act together.
    • onetokeoverthe 4y ago
    • readthenotes1 4y ago
• hunglee2 4y ago
  how do we maintain local community consultation without it becoming a 'vetocracy'? Seems to me that this is a problem that may be ameliorated with some form quadratic voting
• nixpulvis 4y ago
  Let me guess, it will require a password, fingerprint, and subscription to access, then it will take a blood sample before the seat is lifted.
• _blz2 4y ago
  Californians who move out, remember back test your beliefs before you force them (usually via money) where you move to. There's a reason why you're moving out and part of that reason is your flawed thinking. Doubling down on that will only lead to more 0 trust societies like SF.
  • no_butterscotch 4y ago
    Looking at you Austin. Seriously all the people moving to the "SF of Texas" because they no longer like SF is hilarious.
• tristor 4y ago
  There's a lot of comments in this thread blaming this on the boogeyman of "conservatives", but you're talking about a city that has been hard blue for more than 50 years and has not elected a single red in that time. Granted, blue isn't really "progressive", it's more globalist center-right in the global sense, but nonetheless, in the American sense, it's certainly not "conservative". I would suggest a re-examining of your political compass if this is the conclusion you came to after reading an article saying this boondoggle was based on regulations, committees, and unions.
• jalk 4y ago
  Could it be that the majority of the 1.7M is for getting the design "approved" and the clones they install elsewhere will be at a fraction of the cost.
• jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
  Considering all the parties mentioned, from city leaders to committees etc., the massive figure makes more sense when you realize it's actually a welfare program in disguise to support a bunch of people with bullshit jobs.
  • no_butterscotch 4y ago
    Homelessness and drug-abuse employs a lot of people in SF. Many people would no longer have fundraisers, gala events, and other things if those issues were solved.
• jakear 4y ago
  The real solution to the public defecation crisis is either unlocking bathrooms at night or more “single” use plastic bags. Anyone knows dog parks have less shit around when there are bags readily available, but somehow they haven’t connected that to the city in general. It used to be you could pretty reliably find a good clean plastic bag in any trash can. Not so anymore. Problem is anyone proposing this in government would be cancelled for disgracing the homeless or some shit (I’m homeless, I get a free pass). The absolute worst part of the homeless experience is being in a city during the hours when bathrooms are locked and desperately needing to use one. Not proud of the things I’ve done in times of such calamity. At least SF has people freely shooting up on the streets, so perhaps they won’t feel as compelled to prevent them from using bathrooms for the same? Anyone know if SF bathrooms get locked?
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    I don't think it's even possible to solve the public toilet problem without first solving the drug abuse problem. Everyone agrees it would be ideal to have toilet access to everyone, but no one has an answer for how you design a toilet that's impossible to abuse.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      The guy is literally asking for doggie bags to be available so he can crap in a bag when toilets aren’t available/closed. We need to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or the whole city turns into a toilet.
    • jakear 4y ago
      Folks abuse drugs right on the street in SF. I don’t see why they’d prefer to take up a stall, where you’re much more likely to get noticed, complained about, and “handled”. If not a doggy bag supply outside locked bathrooms, a roomful of toilets with no doors/walls/etc would be better than what we have now. Down with the idea that defecation is a naughtily private affair, bring back public bathhouses!
  • googlryas 4y ago
    You're saying people who are pooping on public sidewalks will willingly choose to poop into plastic bags on public sidewalks, if only they had them available?
• zwilliamson 4y ago
  Just pay for a top of the line port-a-potty cleaned and purged daily. Will be cheaper and won’t look that bad. I used to hang out at the park daily with my dog. It would work out just fine.
  • colpabar 4y ago
    They'd need to find someone who owns a port-a-potty company and is also married/related to someone on the city counsel, which could be a challenge.
  • UberFly 4y ago
    You could have a village of port-a-pottys for a long time for 1.7mill. On second thought, the person cleaning it daily would need a 200k annual city salary, so maybe not.
• baby 4y ago
  I'd really like to read an anonymous report from someone working in the government and who understands why the city is such a mess. Like, I read so many theories, but they mostly seem to be written by people with an agenda or who have no clue.
  • jonathankoren 4y ago
    If this is anything like the $20,000 trash cans[0], the price is inflated because there's only one and so all the one time costs around design and manufacturing are put on a single item. When you amortize the costs across the entire production run, it falls to a tenth the price, but "$2,000 trash can" doesn't generate headlines and outrage because that's how much a sturdy municipal trashcan costs.[1] But to talk about the nationwide problem that building anything anywhere takes orders of magnitude too long and too much, there's no smoking gun. It seems to be a combination of factors from understaffed government agencies, to invested interests, to out of date regulations, to just bad engineering and planning.[2][3] [0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-pricey-trash-can/2981181/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-pricey-t... [1] https://www.trashcanswarehouse.com/Municipal-Trash-Cans-and-Outdoor-Recycling-Bins_c_339.html https://www.trashcanswarehouse.com/Municipal-Trash-Cans-and-... [2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-out-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-o... [3] https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
    • refurb 4y ago
      The bigger question is why design a new trash can in the first place? Does no current trash can exist that would work? There are hundreds of designs now for less than $1000 each. https://trashcansunlimited.com/amp/metal-armor-series/ https://trashcansunlimited.com/amp/metal-armor-series/
• Turing_Machine 4y ago
  I'm thinking of a bar in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, back in the day, where the owner got tired of repairing destruction and lined the whole bathroom with stainless steel plate, to which he welded stainless steel sinks, urinals, and toilets (as used in prisons). At the end of the evening, he'd take the firehose in there to clean up.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  So the basic lie here is the cost for the full process vs the cost for the actual construction. This is just a small part of the ongoing and very popular conspiracy theory that all progressive government is actually an insane plot to destroy American society, if not human civilization.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  I live in the city and come across human feces daily. I've been thinking a lot about this, and after going through a year long process of trying to get the city (actually the port authority) to simply lock a dumpster at night as they say they do but don't actually. SF in particular seems to look for fancy big expensive flashy solutions to problems rather than look to other cities who have solved the issue in a simple "KISS" approach. In the example of the unlocked dumpsters which were and are a serious public health hazard (people and raccoons go though it every night and drag the trash all over the waterfront and immediate area) I kept calling the port just asking them to lock them at night. They said thos was already happening, but clearly wasn't. We went back and forth for months but I got nowhere. The port kept telling me they they got new big Belly Trash Cans and have asked to build a new dumpster enclosure. All that was 2 years ago and the dumpsters still sit open today. All I was asking for was for them to lock the dumpsters they said they were already locking, with the lock that's already on the dumpster. It's not a "build a new building" or buy expensive things problem. It's a simple people doing their job as promised problem. Back to this. I've been thinking of starting a non profit that distributes 5 gallon buckets with toilet lids on them (they make them for camping, like this: https://www.amazon.com/Camco-Toilet-Seat-Proof-Waste/dp/B07NM39V51/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?adgrpid=57740599882&gclid=Cj0KCQjw48OaBhDWARIsAMd966BUNNwC8FCksL2XUvMurWXBn_G-9gxV8VJHxU6iLufzRqBaRPVocTMaAl_sEALw_wcB&hvadid=274730355023&hvdev=m&hvlocint=9031942&hvlocphy=2258&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=8275679002399489419&hvtargid=kwd-301918832556&hydadcr=9844_9890018&keywords=5+gallon+bucket+toilet+seat&qid=1666308786&qu=eyJxc2MiOiI0Ljk3IiwicXNhIjoiNC4xNCIsInFzcCI6IjMuOTEifQ%3D%3D&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Camco-Toilet-Seat-Proof-Waste/dp/B07N...) A non profit that distributed these throughout the city, then picked them up every few days would do far more good than any of these other efforts I've seen proposed by the city. The problem is its not sexy, interesting or newsworthy, it's just work. Working with a startup or design team to yet again invent another solution is, so that's why the people in power do that. Not because its better.
• refurb 4y ago
  It’s pretty wild. Chicago always had a reputation of corruption, but it’s pretty clear SF isn’t much better. There have been convictions with garbage collection and the planning reviews and the mayor has connections to all those people. It runs deep.
• w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
  SCAMerica https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1elBgwBu2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1elBgwBu2g
• HWR_14 4y ago
  It's a maximum amount allocated, and takes into account the possible costs of needing to start over because of building code changes and slowdowns due to power issues. As well as the cost for all the administration to decide on what kind of bathroom to build, a custom design, etc. It sounds high, but not insanely so.
• bumpian 4y ago
  > “They told me $1.7 million, and I got $1.7 million,” Haney explained. “I didn’t have the option of bringing home less of the bacon when it comes to building a toilet. A half a toilet or a toilet-maybe-someday is not much use to anyone.” Did he not know how to bargain? He just paid whatever amount people asked him to pay?
  • pyuser583 4y ago
    He wasn’t in a position to bargain - which seems part of the problem.
• nasmorn 4y ago
  Vienna changed their freestanding restroom design a decade ago. It is all stainless steel now, they can clean it with a pressure hose, you can’t pee all over the seat. They are all the same and it is the first public toilet I don’t loathe to use. Obviously in my closest park the architect designed something of aesthetic merit and it is always broken. Operational concerns, basically cleanliness, trump everything with public toilets.
• aix1 4y ago
  Transport for London once spent £39m (about $60m 2010 USD) on attempting to build two lifts (elevators) before abandoning the project: https://www.mylondon.news/news/local-news/transport-london-wastes-39m-lift-6061282 https://www.mylondon.news/news/local-news/transport-london-w...
• stuaxo 4y ago
  There's a of work needed to put in public infrastructure, this seems like a non story.
• mancerayder 4y ago
  The people's money going straight to the crapper.
• ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  >UPDATE: Celebration for S.F.’s $1.7 million toilet canceled after backlash: "The cost is insane." https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Celebration-for-S-F-s-1-7-million-toilet-17520998.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
• Svsks 4y ago