People are pooping more than ever on the streets of San Francisco
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
They give away $24 million a year in cash.
It's a genuinely good idea to provide assistance to the homeless, but it should be in the form of Care Not Cash and given away equally across the state. Otherwise, you are funding a drug demand epidemic and likely creating incentives for people with drug problems from around the Bay Area to move here for the cash.
I filed a FOIA with the city to get data on the total cash given away.
http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CAAP-d...
http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CAPI-d...
Would at least make better sense to direct-pay rent for housing to the landlord and then stagger the remaining cash for everything else on a weekly basis on a different day of the week.
My general theory is that, if you want a well-ordered society, distribute ownership more.
Something something, fix broken windows.
Basically, I guess I'm just saying – it's really complicated and just concluding giving away resources is missing the forest for the trees.
That’s my high level thought which of course requires a lot of boiling down.
If I were disenfranchised, I sure as hell wouldn't care about society, norms and whatever is of value to the haves.
I'm actually not sure of this, and it comes from living in the Bay Area. Over the last 8 years, we've seen a large increase in the number of high-income families who are renting, largely because of our screwed-up property markets where a condo that rents for $3K/month might have a PITA of $8K/month if you buy it. We're even starting to get the phenomena of millionaire renters, people who could pass the accredited investor test and yet still don't own their own home.
And I've noticed that when rental areas gentrify, they get nicer. The apartments are more well-kept; there's less junk on streets and balconies; less loitering; nice shops spring up with clean (but often sterile or artificial) interiors.
I think it really is about the money. When richer tenants move in, landlords and property managers have more money for repairs & landscaping. The tenants may not be able to afford a home, but they can certainly afford someone to cart away their couch. They spend more money in the local area, which means that shop owners have more disposable income to hire people for cleaning & repairs.
The guy running his own burger stand can get up everyday and take pride in making the best hamburger he can make. But for the guy working at Wendy's, making the best hamburger he can make isn't his job. His job is to follow the Wendy's standards to the letter, and make the exact same hamburger everyday. If he does his job well, he is essentially acting like a hamburger producing robot. For most people, that will never be fulfilling.
Owning your own business is obviously a more powerful version of the same phenomenon, though.
Neither place, in my experience, has an abundance of public bathrooms. There's almost none that are truly public, like a building specifically with a bathroom for the public to use. Most fast food places and coffee shops will have a lock on the door with a code so you have to buy something.
So why is it just San Francisco that has so many people pooping in the streets?
It's like it's been normalized. No joke. In a residential (western) neighborhood (i.e. not SOMA) within a month I saw evidence of human feces twice [it's not like I'm out and about all day long]. Once on a set of steps, the other someone squatting behind some bushes. It's out of hand [seeing brown streaked tissue is another indicator]. Ridiculous.
Props to the chartmakers for reminding me of the Brown Zune.
I've walked by many by such "incidents" in the past without knowing that reporting was an option.
If we had to choose just a single thing a state should solve this is it - the most fundamental and unconditional yet simple need everybody has - a way to defecate comfortably whenever and wherever and in a city they are, regardless to how much money they have. The only need for every human that is more basic is breathing. It's ridiculous it still isn't done in a well-developed country in the 21-st century.
I'd like to see you push a mentally ill person from pooping into the street into the heroine-needle ridden prostitution hub of a public toilet.
Hell, I see the prostitution happen in front of city hall, where there is a childrens playground in open daylight!
Now a girl has to hustle on the street where it is dangerous.
Peak SF.
I suppose there's also the possibility that homeless have been under counted, but to do so by to such a degree seems unlikely.
Another possible cause of the rise (with no evidence to support) could be demographics of the homeless population. I imagine propensity to poop in public is correlated with other behaviors that make it difficult to get off the street. If SF is getting people off the street slightly slower than new homeless people are being added to the population, and the set of people being reintegrated are less likely than the median to poop in public, over time we'd expect to see a slowly growing homeless population that is increasingly likely to poop on the street.
There may also be a matter of changing norms; if there's already poop on the street, adding some more (vs making the trek to a public restroom that may be unsafe) isn't as unappealing.
There are too many homeless in San Francisco.
Additionally, California has too few wolves.
I propose that we release wolves into the streets of San Francisco once per month.
Only the strong will be able to evade the wolves and the weak and sick will be eaten.
This will lower the homeless population will simultaneously helping the wolf population rebound to record numbers.
Edit: Thanks guys I understand the proposal is a joke, it's just sick and callous. So all the people riffing on this joke are making nuanced social commentary as well with their analysis of homeless fighting abilities?
Disgusting
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2015/03/...
If we fed the wealthy to the wolves, we could fit like a hundred people in each mansion.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-p...
San Francisco can either have housing, or it can have homelessness.
Even people who are on the fringes of society because they're difficult or mentally ill or just get a kick out of making things a little bit worse where they can as a fuck you to people for whom things are going better.
It'd be a benefit to everyone, especially people who are on the fringes for other reasons, but really anyone who's ever needed a place to do their business if you can figure this out and really want a change-the-world challenge.
The response from many, many California businesses is to just close their bathrooms to the public. This means fewer places for homeless people to use the bathroom. This causes homeless people to go to the fewer and fewer available bathrooms. Since homeless people often smell, and may make a mess in the bathroom, without necessarily buying anything, the increased traffic to the remaining bathrooms causes even more bathroom closures.
Combine this with the SFPD's non enforcement of public urination and defecation laws, and general non enforcement of minor crimes, particularly if the perpetrator is homeless, it's inevitable that you will have poop all over the sidewalk.
We need more bathrooms, and we need to start enforcing the law against homeless people. If there is a reasonable place to use the bathroom, and not using it will get you arrested, the problem will go away.
Next up is getting the drugs out of the SF city jail. Many ex-addicts say that they got clean when they hit rock bottom, got arrested, and had no choice but to kick in jail. In SF though, you can get drugs in jail, so one of the only positive things about going to jail is eliminated.
The solution will require much more than some free-to-use restrooms.
So really, we just don’t have enough, and I don’t think anyone really cares if people are actually shooting up drugs in a bathroom. That’s better than doing it in playgrounds or on park trails and leaving the needles strewn around.
It isn’t that we can’t. It completely makes sense to open up more public restrooms. We are simply choosing not to and making excuses for our choices. “The solution” is nothing. If you want people living in the streets to take a dump somewhere other than just the streets, give them a place to actually do it. Make them common. Make them regular. Make them staffed. Make them clean and well plumbed. Make them high throughout so any member of the public can use them. And even add biohazard collection bins if you feel it is necessary.
Our society’s attitude is “if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t deserve help.” That’s so morally wrong I can’t even explain it without going red in the face, but that’s the situation we’re in.
If you spend $100k and lift 9/10 people out of homelessness, that terrible math shows you spent $100k per homeless person.
Think about it, if there was a threshold and somehow spending $1 more per year reduced the number of homeless by 50%, that metric would get worse.
It's fine to make the argument that the outcomes are bad but it's lazy and ignorant to divide two unrelated numbers and declare yourself outraged.
Spend some time working with the thousands of underpaid and overworked social/case workers and volunteers in SF if only to get a sense of the scale of the problem.
It’s not about the amount of money, it’s about summoning the political will to implement programs that sound counter-intuitive but attack the root of the problem while spending far less money.
A few examples:
- Safe injection sites reduce crime, restrict the spread of blood-borne diseases, and are cheaper than most forms of outreach. When combined with access to detox and treatment programs, they’re more effective and almost certainly cheaper than police and paramedics responding to hundreds of overdoses a day.
- Homeless shelters as designed are dangerous and ineffective at helping people transition from living on the street. A more effective solution is to provide longer-term, smaller scale housing. Lack of housing stability severely impairs an otherwise capable person’s ability to find a job. While the cost-per-person for such a program would be higher than shelters, I suspect it would actually save money by reducing the amount of time a person needs benefits.
- Mental health. Mental health. Mental health. We ignore the problem and marginalize mentally ill people from society; which leads to homelessness. There are not enough case workers to deal with the problem, and they are so underpaid that most aren’t far removed from homelessness themselves. We also have to recognize that some people will never be capable of independent living — giving them benefits is not “enabling” their bad habits, it’s taking care of a person who cannot take care of themselves.
- Too many outreach programs use a “carrot and stick” approach to providing benefits. For people dealing with profound mental health issues, they may not be capable of meeting whatever requirements are placed upon them, despite their best efforts. The efforts of ensuring compliance with “carrot and stick” programs add costs and reduce the impact of every dollar spent.
- A political recognition and acceptance that some people will try to game the system. Some will be successful. That doesn’t mean these programs are ineffective — provide the benefits, investigate the fraud and prosecute the offenders. We have laws against this kind of fraud already. We don’t need new, complex compliance mechanisms.
The net here is that homeless people’s lives are often in an out-of-control spiral of helplessness and marginalization that generates an existential level of stress. Unless we can break that spiral by providing a stable, safe environment, the homeless problem will only get worse. It takes the political will to actually help people rather than paper over the problem.
There is shit in the streets, now. If you’re fine with shit continuing to be in the streets, then sure, if the measure comes up to do something about it, go ahead and vote it down. Frankly it is largely in the parts of town I don’t frequent these days, I don’t even have much of a vested interest, but I do have enough pride in my city to at the very least, not want people and their shit to remain on the streets.
Let's assume we do install these toilets. These won't be cheap toilets, they will, for a large percentage of their time in service, essentially be "hard living facilities for the mentally ill". Homeless people and vagrants put very strange objects into public toilets in SF, breaking them constantly. The San Francisco public library had to install grinders[1] to handle the load homeless people were putting on public toilets. And this was after they began to constantly monitor the restrooms[2][3]. How many public toilets should we build and how much should we spend on each one per year?
[1] I can't find the source for the grinders but I do recall reading about the installation of them a few years back, maybe someone can provide a link. [2] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-main-library-t... [3] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-library-s-main-br...
So we have a problem, where we have a large homeless population, many of them addicted to drugs, and literally shitting in the streets. If you don’t have strong nerves, you might find yourself facing a difficult choice between knowing your kid is going to come up against this environment, and possibly encounter needles, or just leaving the city entirely. I’m not telling you or anyone to leave, but it might not be for you. I made it to adulthood without any blood born illnesses from getting stuck with a needle. Nobody killed me in a public restroom, you have a data point of one.
So hey, this is a pretty innovative community, if the bathrooms we have right now are inadequate in every measurable manner, and we’re worried about them becoming hard living shelters, then what combination of police powers, patrols, tech and community reporting forums do we need to prevent that? Is the problem unsolvable or have we just made peace with shit in the streets and don’t want to rock the boat?
Its also a form of restroom that is common in many other countries. Such a type of toilet is not new.
The former is not preferable because it spreads disease, and instills disdain for the homeless among the community thus decreasing willingness to dedicate resources towards services helping the homeless (thus hurting those homeless that do try to maintain good hygiene).
Not to mention, you have a very negative and prejudiced view of the homeless if you think that they desire to cause harm to the city. The overwhelming majority of homeless are not the spiteful, antisocial people you seem to believe them to be. They may often resort to harmful activity to survive (e.g. theft) but rarely have I seen them cause harm for no reason but to make other people suffer. Maybe things like leaving trash strewn about after scavenging through it, but that's more negligent than spiteful.
Regardless that's largely tangential to the ridiculous claim you made earlier that open defecation is somehow better for the community than using a squat toilet. Not only are you advocating a highly unsanitary activity that can easily lead to hepatitis outbreaks for example (which would disproportionately affect people living on the streets), you're portraying the homeless as some sort of spiteful group that wants to deliberately inflict suffering on the rest of society. I cannot fathom why you thought that comment was productive.
The reason I ask is this:
If they do understand the impact, then they're intentionally endangering public health, harming quality of life for the city's other inhabitants, and possibly committing a crime for which they are of sound mind and body to be (hopefully) held accountable.
And if they don't understand the impact of this choice, odds are that the same applies their other various life choices as well. And if that's indeed the case, can we as a society please stop treating their choice to live on the streets as one that should be respected? We wouldn't let a child make that decision on their own, so why should we let someone whose mental faculties are arguably just as lacking, if not more so?
I'm not arguing that homelessness should be a crime for which people should be jailed. In fact I'm aware already that the courts in the US have barred cities from jailing homeless when no other alternatives are available.
I don't pretend to know what the solution to homelessness is, but I think we need to at least discuss whether a person who is homeless due to mental disfunction can simultaneously be mentally sound enough to decide for themselves to live on the street. I think "respect their decision to live on the streets" lets us avoid making tough decisions about how to help people who are impaired from helping themselves.
Note that I'm only referring to people who are homeless due to mental illness, not due to other factors (domestic abuse, job loss, etc.).
Furthermore, one isn't likely to create a community that does allow dignity for all, without first winning the hearts and minds of the less-than-compassionate members of the public. And one isn't likely to win those people over by pooping on their doorstep.
anecdote time: i had one a block from where i was living, and a block from a grocery store - while checking out, a very desperate person charged up complaining that the grocery store bathroom had been locked for too long. trying to be helpful, I mention the portland loo a block away only to be yelled at by the complainant. it was then that i figured out that the desire for the restroom wasn't for bodily waste elimination (portland loo's have a timer to stop drug use and prostitution in them).
as an aside, the portland loo's are some of the cleanest and best maintained public restrooms i've used - when given the choice between a "standard" restroom and a portland loo, such as on the waterfront, i choose the loo.
However, using Google Maps, I found 4. I'm not sure how many bathrooms you'd normally allocate per person, but I imagine the number of homeless and those out and about would necessitate more than that. How many bathrooms per person are in the typical office building? Should the number of these loos not similarly match the homeless population?
Also, how is a timer in a bathroom at all dignified? If I need 15 minutes to relieve myself, will the Portland Loo kick me out?
i'm not sure how long the timer is, maybe you can try one and let us know?
my point was that even when restrooms are provided, there are still large problems with defecation. my favorite instances were people pooping on the building housing the (open and available) restrooms, instead of entering the building in a small 1/4 block park - the whole park is now fenced off (there is a Portland Loo one block away, not to mention the bathrooms in the building that was being defecated on - now those restrooms are closed for all).
editing to add that a previous reply also talked about being able to choose between other public restrooms and the portland loo, so not sure why you would think there are no restrooms available.
I'd argue enough restrooms are provided when the number is population appropriate and within a one block distance.
I also didn't say that restrooms aren't provided, but it seemed like it wasn't obvious to everyone why inconvenience or lack of dignity leads to non-use.
the part of this discussion that i have taken part in has been around portland, where blocks are very small, but as noted before even where there are restrooms at more than one per block, there was pooping on the building instead of entering the building - so i'm not sure what would be a "proper" number of bathrooms at that point. at some point, you need to start looking at what other problems can be and look at other ways to solve the problem.
and no, i don't have that solution.
Why bother trying to have dignity if the world doesn't want to let you have any?
(Of course it's not so simple.)
I don't see how a homeless person would be able to use an establishment's bathroom more than once without being kicked out. Some places even hired security guards to stand outside of bathrooms and check receipts before allowing you to use them.
Telling people to poop behind a bush next to the street is not a solution for peopling defecating on the street.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Set-to-R...
Up front, yes, we need to be compassionate to these people (and they are people) and remember that if you're posting on HN odds are you're fortunate enough to extend a helping hand once in a while.
But we cannot sacrifice the city's quality of life by enabling behaviors that endanger these people and others. That's what we're doing right now. Explicitly. There's no "how do we engineer our way out of this problem" by way of designing some new novel public bathroom. Reinventing the urinal isn't a solution to this - it isn't even a bandaid. What's worse, more public bathrooms seems extremely likely to encourage a spiral of dangerous behavior to an increasing degree. We'd just move it from the streets and concentrate it in public spaces that are no longer really public, but rather are just bio-hazardous dorms for the homeless and addicted. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that SF essentially already has a pseudo-UBI program for the homeless. This seems patently absurd to me. Forget about this being a literal cash transfer to drug dealers, giving an addict cash is actually worse than just giving them drugs - now they have to go out and score, endangering themselves and very likely others around them.
So what is to be done? First we have to be honest. The overwhelming majority of these people are no longer "down on their luck". They're addicts, with severe mental health issues and no amount of "nudges" will make them change their behavior. We should start with diverting all this money that goes to nebulous initiatives like "housing" and these cash give-aways into funding legitimate facilities staffed with case workers, doctors, job trainers, and police.
And then we should make vagrancy illegal.
I don't say this lightly, as I've had a family member die from opioid addiction. But so many of these people have lost their own agency. They no longer have the ability to care for themselves. If the state doesn't step in, they will be next on the gurney - and everyone here knows it. You know it when you walk past the guy shooting up on the sidewalk on the way home from work. You know it when you see the woman with that "look" holding a sign that says "7 months pregnant, terrified, anything will help". We can stand idle and watch this happen, like we have for so many years. Or we can swallow our pride and realize that this system we've set up out of "compassion" is fundamentally broken and is at its root enabling severe problems - and end it.
Meanwhile, any company that opts to set up shop in San Francisco at this point is issuing a big FU to employees and investors. Why would you do this to people? Talk about squandering a ton of money for squalor.
The waste is a problem, cleaning and disposing is an undesirable task.
All that's left is to make that task pay adequately to motivate potential employees.
I don't give a shit.