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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its also a form of restroom that is common in many other countries. Such a type of toilet is not new.
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.
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.).