California’s Biggest Cities Confront a ‘Defecation Crisis’ | Hacker News Reader

California’s Biggest Cities Confront a ‘Defecation Crisis’

wsj.com

120 pointseplanit159 comments

I recall a homeless guy in SF laying in front of the Alameda ferry terminal. He had pooped and was smearing it over the door, ground, and was rolling in it.

The other passengers and myself were just watching. I remember watching everyone’s faces and us deciding what to do. This was fairly normal for all of us. The coast guard came off the incoming ferry and basically joined us. It wasn’t their job, eventually we got some security and even they were like... “ugh, I don’t know if it’s safe to move him”.

Eventually all of us just routed around the homeless man via the other doors (usually for getting off the ferry). No one taking care of the problem, to my knowledge.

Can’t really blame anyone for not wanting to move a man covered in feces. But I agree this is a crisis and I honestly don’t know who they will get willing to solve that problem.

In a different country, some sailor would be tasked with removing him, and would just hose everything away with the firehose (it runs on whatever water the ship sails in, so the only cost is the power to move the water through it).

I am not sure it would be a better solution, but it seems to me that the current status where you can't enforce basic societal rules, like don't roll in shit in public, because the only social sanction, exclusion, can't be applied is simply unsustainable and quite frankly we need to make it possible to arrest people who act this way (and ensure they are arrested).

This is very much a problem but it is incorrectly stated as California's problem. This America’s problem. It just so happens that because California is relatively rich, tends to have some of the most tolerable year round weather and the people are relatively compassionate a large percentage of the homeless of all of America are moving to California.

How many times have you heard some politician or just an ordinary person from the south or the midwest say something to the effect “we have a great homelessness policy, we buy each homeless person a bus ticket to California and send them on their way!” They usually say this with pride or with a laugh instead of being embarrassed as they should be. In fact if i remember correctly this was part of the plot of a south park episode (although i do not exactly remember whether south park endorsed or mocked that policy).

So lets not treat this as some failure on California’s part. It is failure of the entire USA. The reasons are the usual ones— lack of mental health treatment for the poor, drug addiction, lack of social safety nets in general. And of course there is one new very scary reason — out of control health care costs that force people that were and should be fully functioning members of society into suffering and homelessness.

> How many times have you heard some politician or just an ordinary person from the south or the midwest say something to the effect “we have a great homelessness policy, we buy each homeless person a bus ticket to California and send them on their way!” They usually say this with pride or with a laugh instead of being embarrassed as they should be. In fact if i remember correctly this was part of the plot of a south park episode (although i do not exactly remember whether south park endorsed or mocked that policy).

Zero times? This seems like a lazy characterization and citing South Park doesn't really help your case. According to this Guardian article on homeless busing in the US[1], these sorts of programs tend to originate in the Western states:

> A count earlier this year found half a million homeless people on one night in America. The problem is most severe in the west, where rates of homelessness are skyrocketing in a number of major cities, and where states like California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have some of the highest rates of per capita homelessness.

> These are also the states where homeless relocation programs are concentrated. Using public record laws, the Guardian obtained data from 16 cities and counties that give homeless people free bus tickets to live elsewhere.

Key West and Ft Lauderdale are discussed in the article; Atlanta is mentioned as having been criticized for this in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics. That said, jumping immediately to "we all know how those darn Southerners and Midwesterners are" doesn't seem to jive with the facts.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Here is an example of nevada giving homeless people with mental problems bus tickets to california instead of treating them.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-...

This is article about bloomberg himself defending his program to send homeless to california: https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/mayor-defends-...

The quote you have from the guardian is about cities that attract homeless trying to reverse the process by sending the homeless (willingly) back where they come from. These programs attempt to be more responsible because they will only give a free ticket if they can make sure that the homeless person will not be homeless at the end of their destination. This does not always work out as intended as the guardian article explains but at least conceptually it is the right idea.

Historically, the western states tend to be composed of transplants in general. It’s like, is it really weird that some homeless guy is from out of state when that tech worker is also? It’s been like that since the Great Depression with people like the Oakies.

Let's also not forget the animal element of street poop here. I live in Russian Hill, a not rough part of SF, and I daily see people neglecting to clean up after their dogs. These people belong to no particular group: young, old, rich, poor, students, tourists, your neighbors.

There's something about this city that attracts people who just don't give a damn. It's unsustainable for those of us who do.

Also, homeless people tend to poop in between parked cars on the street or in doorways. If you see a fresh turd in the middle of the sidewalk, I'd say better than 75% chance it came from Fido, not Frank.

EDIT, I might live in Russian Hill but I walk through the Tenderloin every work day for my commute. I see it all.

“Seattle Is Dying” is a great investigative report about the problems and potential solutions to homelessness. Also applicable to SF.

https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw

I've seen this video and it's a Sinclair hit piece. Not worth the time of anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion.

It's 2019 and this propaganda piece (yes, it's propaganda) is arguing mass incarceration is the solution.

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

Interesting theory, do you have any citations? It does sound plausible and seems to coincide with my experience in San Francisco (the problem did seem to get somewhat worse after the ban), but maybe that's coincidence or just my anecdotal experience.

Food stamps recipients don’t pay the bag tax, which would make me less inclined to believe that theory. But I don’t know how many of these people are on EBT.

People weren't just using their own bags, they were scavenging bags from the garbage (or the streets—discsrded single use bags were eveeywhere.) Banning designed-as single use bags (and encouraging reuse with a minimum charge per bag) greatly reduced the number of scavengable bags.

> It is a ban of plastic bags from supermarkets.

It's a ban of free or single-use plastic bags from supermarkets; bags must be reusable (with specified strength standards for plastic bags), and there is a minimum charge.

holy cow this is a great theory. i haven't heard it before, and it would cut through a ton of noise if this could be supported by data. can it?

the disappearance of readily available plastic bags (in the trash, floating around, etc) certainly would make way more sense as something that could suddenly have a huge impact than other theories which are stabbing in the dark at higher level variables that have trended slowly over time like shelter access or density of public restrooms. it would also explain why this problem is uniquely SF -- given the social signaling that is associated with a store being seen as environmentally conscious (by abandoning plastic bags) compared to other cities, it wouldn't surprise me if the rate and degree of abandonment of plastic bags outpaced other California cities.

this certainly seems like the kind of thing that will bubble up to economics textbooks if true, a classic case of unintended consequences by tweaking incentives and regulations. i hope it gets more attention.

Relevant:

"Plastic-bag ban led to hep A health crisis?"

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-pl...

Also, banning plastic bags and straws has no positive impact on the environment.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-...

"That said, these bans do reduce nonbiodegradable litter."

Plastic produce bags are still free and are even better suited to human waste than non-sealable open grocery bags.

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

This is an issue in some cities in western Europe also, there are no free restrooms available. No wonder everything around train/subway stations smells like piss.

What do they do in Germany? Their public toilets are amazing, but not free.

I suspect the answer is that they don't have that many people who have these sorts of issues in the first place, but at the same time more social spending doesn't seem to be the issue, as California spend a fortune on the homeless issue and gets relatively little for it, and the most common length of time to be homeless is one day.

"But there was no “defecation crisis”—a term usually associated with rural India—in the 1930s, even with unemployment at 25%, vagabonds roaming the country, and shantytowns and “Hoovervilles” springing up everywhere."

[citation needed]

Bodily waste has been a huge problem for shantytowns across all of recorded history. I doubt that Hoovervilles had some unique solution to the problem that has not been replicated since.

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

When I watched Jennifer Garners Peppermint (2018) I naturally assumed typical Hollywood hyperbole. But then I saw this:

Skid Row, Downtown Los Angeles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbTSDuQET94

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

> The triple scourges of drug abuse, mental illness and family breakdown have produced anomie and derangements far deeper than those seen in the 1930s

Completely unsourced nonsense. As if there were no homeless families or mental illness in the great depression. Even drug abuse isn't a modern thing, though the chemicals have changed.

I mean it doesn't even pass the basic (heh) smell test of "would you rather walk the streets of San Francisco in 1931 or 2019? I mean, come on.

It's the classic apocalyptic mindset, of which we seem to have plenty of in 2019: "things are worse than ever" even though that's not borne out by the evidence[1]

[1]https://singularityhub.com/2016/06/27/why-the-world-is-bette...

Because the evidence is cherry-picked.

Humans may be doing better (for now), but it all came at a great cost to the environment.

People vastly underestimate just how bad run-of-the-mill alcoholism was in past years, let alone more "exotic" illegal drugs. Look at the gin craze in London a few centuries ago, for example: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a8e4e/a-gin-craze-nearly...

It's an opinion piece.

Uh... under normal journalistic practice, even opinion pieces are expected to support statements that they present as fact. Maybe things are different in conservative media, I dunno.

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

All you have to do is have plenty of public bathrooms nearby and keep them clean.

Neither of those is the case in SF. There are almost no public bathrooms, and those that exist tend to be disgusting.

Damn, I can get a free meal and a joint in SF just by using the bathroom? Sign me up!

Build. More. Homeless. Shelters. California is so damned NIMBY'd up that they refuse to build shelters and act surprised when homeless people sleep outside. Then they throw their hands up in the air like "uh, it must be the weather"

It's stupid. In New York we have more homeless per capita and in absolute numbers but we have nothing like the street issues that west coast cities have. It's because we actually house the damned homeless. And for fuck's sake, it's not the weather. Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer.

The whole CA homeless crisis is a self-inflicted wound. For reference, an article in SF Gate: "67 percent of Bay Area homeless are unsheltered. In New York, it's 5%"

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...

I think this is accurate, having lived all over CA and the Northeast. Northeastern cities build shelters because otherwise homeless people would freeze to death in the winter, though. Sometimes the shelters are only available during the freezing months.

We didn't used to build shelters. There was an entire riot in the 80s when the cops removed a homeless encampment that had entirely taken over Tomkins Sq Park in the East Village.

I don't know when we started building them (I'm a transplant, circa 2008) but I know there was a qualitative difference from when I'd been to the city in the early 00s versus when I moved so I assume Bloomberg was responsible for building more.

There was a Federal lawsuit and consent decree that forced NYC to house homeless people.

It had a lot of negative impact on poor people in general. Mentally ill homeless people skipped the line for subsidized housing and had an outsized impact on crime and quality of life issues in public housing.

Recent policies to guarantee housing has made NYC something of a magnet. If you live upstate, you may need to wait a year (or more) for a Section 8 voucher, or you can show up in NYC and have interim housing in 48 hours.

Most of the visible homeless related issues are a result of the elimination of involuntary commitment. Without supervision, people won’t take the medications they need because the side effects suck. It’s an impossible problem with no solution.

> It had a lot of negative impact on poor people in general. Mentally ill homeless people skipped the line for subsidized housing and had an outsized impact on crime and quality of life issues in public housing.

I don't know much about this but there's got to be more to that story. Personally, I'm more than okay with policies that attract some additional homeless people to our city if it means that (1) those people get to sleep in a bed each night and (2) there are fewer people sleeping on NYC streets in general.

What I legitimately don't understand is why there are still so many people sleeping on the street...

Depends. Short-term homeless are economic tragedies (lost work, divorce, etc).

Long-term homeless usually have significant health and other issues. Stuff like serious mental health issues, chronic alcoholism, drug issues, etc.

I’m not an expert in the subject, just pointing out that you can die or lose your toes sleeping outside in the North, which changes things a bit.

> we have nothing like the street issues that west coast cities have

Maybe not as bad west coast cities, but since January 1, 2014 things have gotten significantly, noticeably worse. In subway stations and cars, in the streets, in the parks, in Penn Station -- all over. And as you point out we have enough shelter beds for everyone.

NYC 2019 is not what good looks like.

God, I miss Bloomberg.

I feel like a lot of cities in America are suffering from applying national politics to their local elections. Electing a Republican or conservative/centrist Democrat every now and then wouldn't be a bad thing, Democrats do not have a monopoly on solving local issues in a compassionate yet effective manner, in fact I'd claim that the increasing ease with which the Democrat candidate wins elections in major American cities contributes to the lack of urgency and a sense of complacency with the status quo. It limits the range of possible solutions to a local minima. I expect the problems to get worse before they get better.

> . Electing a Republican or conservative/centrist Democrat every now and then wouldn't be a bad thing, Democrats do not have a monopoly on solving local issues in a compassionate yet effective manner, in fact I'd claim that the increasing ease with which the Democrat candidate wins elections in major American cities contributes to the lack of urgency and a sense of complacency with the status quo.

In California cities there is no one “Democratic candidate”; mayor's offices are nonpartisan elections and in a city like San Francisco there will be multiple competitive cabdidates, who might all notionally be Demcorats, some of whom will have a local government approach that is indistinguishable from what one might, based on party alignment on similar national issues, expect from a Republican.

Build more period. I will rejoice the day the state just revokes planning from local communities. I hate to say that because it feels horrible, but local communities in California run zoning in the most incompetent and self serving way.

It's terrible everywhere but seems especially bad in California. We're hardly immune. Our boro president was celebrating a lawsuit blocking a new 5000(!) unit development as if it was a victory for housing justice.

That said, the YIMBY message seems to be making headway. I hear a lot more pro-housing chatter than I did ten years ago, so at least that's something.

What logic could that person possibly be following? It's just mind boggling.

In any case, that's why I want to see local planning just abolished. These people are so clueless or self-serving (not sure which, don't care) that I don't see any reasoning with them or even talking to them. Just fire them all and abolish their offices.

Easy: people require infrastructure and many land developers ignore it. More lanes on roads being a big one. In my former neck of the woods, a developer is putting in 1 or 2 thousands homes. They will connect right onto the two lane highway, miles from the freeway that already has too much traffic causing chaos in the rush hours. The developers will make a bundle if they don't go bankrupt first, and the community will be worse off.

The proposed 5000 unit development which has just been killed by NIMBYs is within blocks of two different subway stations. Few if any any of the residents would have owned cars. Roads are not an issue here.

It's pure against-all-change conservatism. It's fine to have that personality type, but the vast, overwhelming majority of the country is filled with landscapes that change slowly if at all. Can't the small island of Manhattan be set aside for change and growth?

My cynical take is that we just have to wait out the boomers. We changed and grew in every way until they took over and everything stopped. I think it will restart when they retire.

> My cynical take is that we just have to wait out the boomers...

Not to double down on cynicism but what makes you think that oligarchs of the following generations will be any less self serving?

I don't think the people leading the charge down in the LES are disproportionately rich, at least unless you count the implicit value of a rent regulated apartment, what they are is disproportionately older. And I get it--change can be disorienting, construction is noisy, and so on. But this is literally Manhattan we are talking about. If not here, where?

The NIMBYs in California are mostly older and middle class. The oligarchs happen to mostly be on the right side at least on this particular issue.

I really think a big elephant in the room on this issue is racism. Restricting housing supply to hold prices high to exclude all but the already economically established is how liberals implement red lining without admitting their real motives even to themselves. They can pretend its about community, the environment (despite the fact that NIMBY policies encourage sprawl), etc.

That's a failure of urban planning too. Either better infrastructure is needed or density needs to be located closer to good infrastructure. NIMBY planners in California are opposed to both. They block construction near high capacity transportation and they oppose the extension of that transportation to new places.

The whole state seems to be run as a giant housing supply restriction cartel for the purpose of enriching existing property owners and speculators at the expense of newcomers, the young, the working class, and the poor.

It's common to a lot of "blue states" but California has the worst case. It's rank hypocrisy and everyone involved should be ashamed.

I came up with a way to show the hypocrisy: point out that "red" states like Texas and Arizona are more liberal than California because in those states a working class person can afford a place to live.

Seriously... what kind of brain damage allows someone to advocate us being a "sanctuary state" for immigrants while simultaneously opposing any housing or infrastructure expansion? Where are these people supposed to live? Are they utterly incapable of rational thought?

New York State has a constitutional right to shelter. Perhaps that helps.

We don't even prioritize homes for taxpaying citizens. There's an off-putting mentality that having a roof over your head is some kind of "flex" in California. In San Francisco, there's even a strange pride people have that homeless are on the streets ("look at us, we don't hide them away, aren't we great?!").

Although the weather does play a role, in the sense that if we had bad weather and homeless were freezing to death on the streets, I think sufficient shelters would go up immediately.

I keep pushing for us to follow Utah's lead on this issue: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

>We don't even prioritize homes for taxpaying citizens.

There's way too much oppression against simple or niche home designs. The government backlash against Tiny Homes, for instance. And of course taxing homes to death also probably isn't a good thing. Tax bad stuff like gasoline. Don't tax things we need more of.

Property taxes are capped at 1%, and assessment appreciation is tied to inflation. Lowering taxes isn't the answer here.

Now if you want to talk about impact fees you might be on to something...

That's true, but that is just traditional property taxes on homes in California. As you noted, there are other taxes and even regulatory capture that drives up costs of new home ownership.

> In New York we have more homeless per capita...

At least based on latest 2018 numbers I found for both cities, that's not true.

NYC 78676 homeless with 8398748 residents.

SF 9784 homeless with 870877 residents.

106 residents per homeless individual in NYC.

Only 89 residents per homeless individual in SF.

> And for fuck's sake, it's not the weather. Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer.

I'm certainly not blaming it on the weather either. But this statement kind of misses the point on how exceptional our weather is. Our tent cities get to grow year round without interruption because it's mostly warm enough in the winter and cool enough in the summer to live outside full time.

The rest of your points stand without caveat. We don't build enough housing at all and we're incompetent at building shelters (at least ones that the homeless are willing and able to use)

Can you cite the source? The data often uses differing definitions so you'll might be comparing apples to oranges.

My bad, I was quoting from memory, you are correct about the numbers. That said, they're pretty close.

As for the weather I stand by my statement. While year around nice weather does make an encampment more hospitable, the reason why it's cruel to just bulldoze those settlements is because the people have nowhere to go. Still, I acknowledge your point, weather is surely a factor, I just don't believe it carries as much weight as it's frequently given credit for.

I’m listening to a collection of Malcolm Gladwell essays and was somewhat blown over by one about power-law distribution of homelessness[1]. Basically a small, stubborn minority of the homeless population are financially worth housing (by far). “That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair.” [1] http://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/A%20MillionDollarMurray.pdf

That's an interesting stat. From visits to SF, it seems that a sizable % of the homeless in SF are really just vagrants, whereas in NYC they largely seem to destitute/mentally ill homeless.

It's not quite that simple. The West Coast has seen a huge influx of homeless people (ex. [1] - 12% YoY increase in LA) while the nation overall has seen a drop [2]. If your homeless population is steady or falling it's easier to build enough services for them than if thousands more arrive every year. Also, I agree that more shelters and services need to be built, but it would be nice if the Federal government pitched in since it's pretty obvious we're just absorbing the homeless problems from other states.

[1] https://la.curbed.com/2019/6/4/18652755/2019-homeless-count-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

California's also exporting their homeless problems.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Correction: we're sending a lot of the homeless back to the cities they came from.

(Texas used to brag about shipping their homeless problem to LA.)

California has a big net-influx of homeless because of both relatively generous legal environment and state services (even if there is a shelter crisis) and favorable weather.

Yes, California is trying to send some of the homeless back to where they come from, to little avail.

I'd be surprised if any states didn't do that. Anyone shouldering the cost providing for you is typically thrilled to buy you a one way ticket anywhere you'd like to go.

It's the other way round.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

CA is trying to send some people back and that's being spun as "exporting".

Crazy.

Other places send homeless to California. California sends them back.

Not many advantages to being homeless, but maybe cost of travel isn't one of them.

> The West Coast has seen a huge influx of homeless people

Your source shows an INCREASE of homeless people, but not necessarily an INFLUX, i.e. it's not clear whether the newly homeless are in fact "arriving" (from out of state) or have been prior residents who lost their shelter.

Anecdotally, I don't think I've ever met somebody who had a PLAN to move to California to be homeless there. But I've met a number of people who moved to California with limited financial resources and precarious employment prospects, and subsequently became homeless.

Actually, rehab's are importing the homeless into California. John Oliver did a show on it.

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/12/17/are-drug-rehab-centers...

The LA homeless survey does track where people lived when they became homeless. In 2019, the number who became homeless outside of CA is 20% [1]. AFAIK, they don't release raw data so we can segment by newly homeless, but in 2018, this same figure was 14% [2].

Seattle / King County's survey asks a similar question and it's just 5% [3]. Conservative media up here likes to claim that homeless immigration is a significant problem (it isn't), but it seems like LA is facing a different challenge.

1 - https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3437-2019-greater-los-ang...

2 - https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...

3 - http://allhomekc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Updated-7.11...

The Seattle king county survey also found out that 80% of those homeless lived in pioneer square before becoming homeless. Definitely fishy if you know the city.

AFAIK, the Seattle / King County survey did not ask which neighborhood or zip code they lived in. The questions are listed on the survey PDF I linked earlier.

Do you have a source? Closest I can find is from 2016, and it's 25% of in-county zip codes equalling Pioneer Square, not 80% of all:

"The records show that more than 8,000 clients [of any homeless/housing services tracked by All Home] listed their last ZIP code as 98104, which covers Pioneer Square and downtown. That’s about 25 percent of all clients who gave King County ZIP codes. Putnam says clients sometimes list ZIP codes for the shelters where they last stayed or the neighborhood where they’d been seeking services."

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...

The west coast has always been a popular destination for people with big dreams but perhaps without much means. It isn’t really weird that homeless are just as likely to be transplants as non homeless residents.

I know I’ve read how Las Vegas and places in Texas were giving their homeless one way tickets to cities in California.

This is just anecdotal data but...

I've found East coast/southern police to be way more inclined to the use of force, even excessive force, when dealing with the homeless.

Personally, I 'feel' this difference. On the East coast, when a homeless man approaches me, I feel they fear a negative reaction. There are also way more police. The situation is the opposite on the West coast.

Now, I'm not saying this is what SHOULD be. I really am against police brutality. But I always like to pay attention to unspoken rules, they help me adapt.

NYC is getting worse. We have something like 60,000 beds available, but those are filled beyond capacity every night. The actual homeless population is certain to be higher than reported.

We're starting to see semi-permanent encampments, human feces on the sidewalks and used needles in the gutters. (haven't seen discarded needles since the mid 90s). Storefronts are vacant all over. Anywhere there's a sidewalk shed -- and there are plenty -- there will be people sleeping (and defecating) under it. The cops are completely demoralized and our useless mayor is campaigning for president with 0.08% support.

People are openly wishing for a long, cold winter to keep the sidewalks clean.

New York City is required by law to provide a bed for every person who requests one. When the city runs out of space in standard shelters, they literally rent out hotels [0].

It's kind of nuts, but it makes me very proud of my city. (And, for better or worse, much less sympathetic for the people who still choose to sleep on the sidewalk or in subways.)

---

[0] https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... (This is a transcript of an NPR podcast. I recommend listening to the audio if you have the ability, it's worth your time...)

> Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer.

Come for a walk with me. There are tents and makeshift shelters in the north end of Central Park (west side, north of 96th) and in the parks along both rivers if you know where to look.

Well, I'm guessing the shelters don't let you shoot up, so...tent cities form.

> Build. More. Homeless. Shelters.

Making the existing ones safe enough that the homeless don't actively avoid them should probably come first.

People are being turned away from the shelters.

Could the Andrew Yang 2020 "Freedom Dividend" solve the homeless issue? Yes.

Extra $1,000 a month allows these homeless people to move to smaller/rural areas and get cheap permanent housing.

We can even create a program where if you help a homeless person on the street get into an apartment, you get a $250-500 referral reward from their dividend.

Many ways to incentivize people to help the homeless. This solution sounds better than increasing congestion/traffic with more high density buildings to house the homeless in SF,LA,SD city limits.

We need involuntary commitment and drug treatment. Mental illness and drug use are the backbones of this, and essentially homeless people need to be treated period, regardless of their objections. Maybe even long term.

Trying to build more shelters does nothing; the core is problem homeless who cannot function in society. Shelters only work as a temporary measure to allow people to get back on their feet, but if they have no feet to get back on...

Why not deal with homelessness closer to the root of the problem, of which there are many?

In the current political climate (really the last 20+ years, but more so lately), politicians do not solve problems, they create them.

And, the problem of homelessness can't be solved in SF or NY or LA, because I've read of cities putting their homeless on buses to SF (or elsewhere).

This is a national problem and needs to be addressed nationally and at root causes. Everything else we do is papering over the problem.

What do you do for people who refuse to go to a shelter for any number of reasons and just want to continue doing what they’ve been doing for years now?

Not trying to put you on the spot with a “if you don’t have a solution...” trope, it’s just something I’ve always wondered.

> What do you do for people who refuse to go to a shelter for any number of reasons and just want to continue doing what they’ve been doing for years now?

How about you start with the part where there aren't enough shelter spaces right now? Once you get to have only people who don't want to stay outside shelters, you can start asking them why they don't shelter.

NYC has ~95% sheltering rates, Bay Area is at 33%, GP literally quoted that in their comment. Bay Area homeless folks are not so different than NYC's that they'd magically be 3 times less likely to get into a shelter. Hell, you click the link, you know that Chicago's at 74% sheltering, Denver's 84 and DC's 85.

Meanwhile LA's sitting pretty at a good looking 25% sheltering rate.

I've never stayed in a shelter but I know people that have. A lot of homeless will sleep in a makeshift shelter in the winter rather than a shelter because shelters are ass in every way.

> Without wishing to return to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, we ought to consider what was lost when the courts discouraged Americans from thinking of “homelessness” in light of the old laws against vagrancy.

Ah, so we're back to imprisoning the homeless (at huge expense) rather than providing, say, public toilets or shelter facilities. Not only is the WSJ not learning from history, they don't want to learn from history.

That's because the article is written by this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Kesler

We need better mental health care, and cheaper housing.

Dr. Drew was on Scott Adam's podcast recently talking about this. Apparently even free housing is insufficient because most of the people relevant to this discussion will not accept even free housing. Nor will they accept mental healthcare even when provided for free. The only way to get them into the mental healthcare situations is to compel them by force, and that is not something people are interested in.

Correction: Scott Adams, not Rogan

Dr. Drew hasn't been on Rogan

> Dr. Drew was on Rogan recently talking about this.

I'm trying to find that episode on YouTube, but no luck. Google searches show that they don't like each other much. Got a link?

Sorry, I had the wrong podcast. A youtube search for Dr Drew plague has several interviews with him, but I was thinking about his appearance on Scott Adam's podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72x2LfvSfE4

People aren’t interested in compelling the allegedly mentally ill by force, unless they pose a threat to themselves or others, because it is unconstitutional and contrary to the values of a free society.

A given citizen disregarding the norms of society does not give society permission to use force against that citizen, or to subject them to forced medical treatments.

Again, if the person poses an active threat that is a different scenario. But there’s a good reason most Americans don’t want to start rounding up the seemingly mentally ill.

This is a tragedy of the commons problem. A few people living or even defecating on the streets isn't a serious public health problem. But there is a legitimate and reasonable concern that the situation in California right now is going to result in the return of the plague.

> ... allegedly mentally ill ... ... disregarding the norms of society ... seemingly mentally ill

I think you are giving yourself too much leeway with your weasel words here. I lived in San Francisco and saw first hand the homeless problem. These are not a group of free-spirits, bucking the norms of society and living an honest drifter lifestyle. Maybe you would like to call to mind the counter-culture described by beat poets like Jack Kerouac. Or maybe you want to warn against the kind of authoritarian cruelty fictionalized in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

However, it is my experience that the people living on the streets in the Tenderloin aren't down on their luck Woody Guthrie types, pining for a pre-technology, more social friendly USA that valued simple folk.

I think we need to avoid painting ourselves into corners with false dichotomies. It isn't like the only options are to round them up and lock them away in a mental hospital or to leave them completely free on the streets. And like it or not, the middle ground may require some intervention that is forceful.

Mental healthcare may be relevant to this issue. But the cost of housing is not.

These people cannot hold jobs because they are mentally ill. They need state provided institutional care, otherwise they will remain on the streets.

That's a caricature. In fact there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless, and many homeless folks not only can hold jobs, but work them already. Yet they're on the streets anyway because of financial pressure, look like the "these people" you want to lock up, and would probably get picked up under the same ordinance.

Shitting on the street and being homeless are two issues here.

The proposal in the linked opinion piece is literally to lock up all homeless because some of them shit on the street.

You can't treat them as two issues while insisting on a remedy that doesn't.

Yes I agree. We should use the term street shitters to differentiate. I see a huge issue when talking about homeless is that people have different ideas what we are talking about and get easily offended.

"In fact there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless"

Near infinite in the sense that there are near infinite ways of dying. You could be hit by an asteroid. You could fall off a cliff. But that obscures the fact that most people die from some sickness or disease.

I've done volunteer work with the homeless. There are 2 major causes of homelessness: mental illness and drug addiction. Everything else is insignificant in comparison.

It sounds like you've only done volunteer work with specific types of people.

The homeless people who simply can't afford housing and thus live in vehicles, and have jobs, want to stay under the radar. It's unlikely you'd make contact with them during volunteering unless you specifically sought them out. You're not going to find them at soup kitchens, homeless shelters, skid row, etc. They're normal people like you and me who just can't afford to live in a building, and are taking the next best option.

The group that stays under the radar... is likely not the same set that shits on the street?

I kid you not, there are some seriously crazy people in SOMA who have a schedule. Morning, mission and 5th. Evening, mission and 6th.

This kind of people doesn’t contribute to defecation crisis, and they tend to not stay homeless for very long anyway (unless they start doing drugs).

They likely are not, but I wasn't saying they were. I was responding to someone who was claiming that these types of homeless people don't even exist, which is far from true.

About 20% of the population has a mental illness issue. Almost 10% of the population have an addiction. Obviously the vast majority of these people aren't homeless.

Being homeless is a good way to turn a minor mental illness or addiction into a major one.

That’s also a caricature. Some of the homeless are indeed able to hold job, and pay bills, etc., and just need a little extra help.

They are not usually the ones defecating in the streets.

Others need serious mental help.

The line between the two is not the subtle “infinite variety” you make it out to be.

Dude. Most of the time people complain about homeless it is the crazy people that shit on the streets. Don’t change the subject by saying people that sleep in cars or on friends couch’s shouldn’t be criticized too. They aren’t.

That is why I propose a new term for the people most of us complain about. I use the term crazies or untouchables.

Huh? I’m not sure who you’re replying to.

There are a number of people who are mentally ill, are unhoused, and need professional mental health help on an ongoing basis. They also need compassion, not a loaded stigmatizing label.

The other folks down on their luck need shelter beds and housing they can afford.

>there are a near infinite variety of reasons for being homeless

Ah, the old "flatten that distribution graph and treat every point as equally probable" argument. Arguments like these are so intentionally misleading that it's easy to construe them as malicious. You'd rather make an asinine point than use language that addresses the true distribution of the problem set, because it doesn't capture every single fringe case you can think of.

Nah, the core of this are problem homeless who can't hold jobs or are even coherent much. Someone who is just down on their luck and could recover if they had a job is not someone who drops their trousers n the middle of the street to shit there.

This may only apply in New York, but last I heard, most homeless people have jobs.

by doing that too much you drag down a city to rat's hole, more homeless coming, working people move out, economy slows down, less money left to help those in need, similar to what socialism does: great on paper, horrible in practice. should we not care for those homeless? NO, should we always put them first? NO. it's a balance of arts, going in any direction a little too far will break it.

> should we not care for those homeless? NO, should we always put them first? NO. it's a balance of arts, going in any direction a little too far will break it.

Bay Area is currently doing very little except complain about homeless folks.

NYC has more homelessness per capita, but they've both built shelters and had a strong policy of sheltering homeless folks. As a result, ~95% of NYC homeless people (>63000 people) sleep in shelters, versus ~33% in Bay Area and ~25% in LA. And it's no surprise given Bay Area has lost shelter beds in the last decade. Which is compounded by the overall lack of housing.

The west coast is singularly bad at it: Chicago is at 74% sheltering, Denver is at 84, DC is at 95.

can you provide source for the percentages? thanks.

CA is leading the path towards socialism, i'm surprised it's lagging behind to take care of the homeless there, which should be a core action item for that ideology. Maybe they're just good at talk the talk, as always.

Seattle seems no better as far as homeless is concerned. Austin is becoming a favorite destination city for homeless nowadays too, tents up everywhere in hot summer.

> can you provide source for the percentages? thanks.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...

Where do you poop during the year you’re pulling your mental health out of the gutter though?

Maybe in a Utopia the homeless would use shelters but many refuse to for very reasons.

How many exactly? Do you have concrete data?

My understanding is that the vast majority of the homeless in NYC do sleep in shelters because... well, NYC has plenty of shelters.

That's also what a comment above notes, quoting an SFBay article[0]: 67% of Bay Area homeless are unsheltered, 5% in NYC.

So there might be a small number of homeless folks who can't / won't live in shelters, but that's what it is: a small minority.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...

Hundreds of shelter beds go empty every night in LA because many of the homeless would rather stay high/drunk than be sooner for a night. They used to be a small portion of the population but now comprise the bulk of LAs skid row population.

Could criminalize sleeping on the streets if beds are available at a local shelter.

>Ah, so we're back to imprisoning the homeless (at huge expense) rather than providing, say, public toilets or shelter facilities.

It's weird to frame it as a "rather" when in fact you need both. You need to have public bathrooms and come down hard on shitting on the street.

That framing is likely based on the assumption that people would rather use a toilet than defecate on the streets, so if there are adequate facilities for them to do so, no further action is needed to encourage that behavior.

There are public toilets in some of these cities. San Francisco has had self-cleaning public toilets for a long time, but probably has the worst feces problem of any first world country. On Google maps, it appears there are at least 20 public bathrooms in SF within a few miles radius. That's way more than I see when searching for the same thing in Santa Monica, another homeless mecca that doesn't have anywhere near the same problem with defecation. I'm skeptical that these toilets have much of an effect. Don't get me wrong, I do think there should be public toilets, and perhaps more of them. But if the homeless were that easy to reason with, perhaps we wouldn't have so many on the streets in the first place.

Our public bathroom facilities are pretty sparse compared to some in other countries. Taiwan for instance has fantastic public restrooms in every subway stop.

there are toilets in the BART stations, but they’ve been closed for “security reasons” for the last 18 years

There should be at least one clean and safe public toilet per block that has a "defecation crisis".

Instead, SF has maybe one public toilet per 20 or 30 blocks in the most concentrated downtown areas, if that. I personally know of only maybe 3 or 4 public toilets in all of SF.

Toilet use at private businesses is also sometimes an option, but often in neighborhoods with large homeless populations those businesses either restrict toilet use to customers or only let the staff use their toilets. Of course, homeless people can rarely afford to keep spending money to purchase things from these businesses multiple times per day just to use their toilets, not to mention that virtually all these businesses close for the night in SF, making it impossible to find a toilet in some areas at night.

Bingo. SF has had a big homeless population for some time unfortunately, but the poop on the streets is fairly new. What changed?

1. ADA private right of action spawned a class of professional plaintiffs that sue businesses over (in many cases) minor technical ADA violations like not having a coat hook at the right height in the bathroom. Many, many businesses closed their bathrooms to the public because of this.

2. Less intervention by police. In SF, the police won't arrest you for shooting heroin in a bathroom or trashing it. If the business owner calls about someone doing this, the police won't respond. The simple solution is to close the bathroom to the public.

3. Street defication effectively legalized. Similar to #2, the police won't arrest you if you poop on the street. This is different than most cities, and different than what was historically true in SF.

"1. ADA private right of action spawned a class of professional plaintiffs that sue businesses over (in many cases) minor technical ADA violations like not having a coat hook at the right height in the bathroom. Many, many businesses closed their bathrooms to the public because of this."

I'd like to see the stats on the number of frivolous ADA lawsuits that caused businesses to close their bathrooms.

In my personal experience, few businesses have no bathrooms whatsoever and the businesses that make their bathrooms off-limits to the public or require you be a customer to use the bathroom tend to be in areas with high homeless populations. In areas where there are few homeless the businesses almost never have a problem with a non-customer using their bathroom.

This tells me that these businesses primarily have a problem with homeless people using their bathrooms, not any kind of fear over being sued over ADA violations.

"3. Street defication effectively legalized. Similar to #2, the police won't arrest you if you poop on the street. This is different than most cities, and different than what was historically true in SF."

Do we really want to fill our already overcrowded, mortally dangerous prisons with more homeless people? Why not just build more bathrooms, shelters, and affordable housing?

The ADA thing is relatively new. If you go anywhere in California, not just areas with a large homeless population, you'll find most businesses do not have a public restroom. This is different than every other state I've been to. This is because California has the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which makes each ADA violation subject to $4000 statutory damages, regardless of the actual damages. Thousands of these cases are filed every year in California. California businesses don't want to be exposed to this liability, so most of them have closed their public restrooms.

This lack of bathrooms creates a sort of death spiral. In high homeless areas, the few remaining ones have to serve more homeless people. Dealing with a parade of homeless people using public bathrooms as a shower or shooting up causes the remaining businesses to close their bathrooms. It becomes more difficult for homeless people to use the bathroom, so rather than go to the trouble of finding one, many use the street.

On the enforcement side, I'm not really trying to be proscriptive, just descriptive. Jail is not a nice place. The threat of being arrested though is a deterrent to crime. If there is no deterrent to pooping on the street, and the alternative is difficult, people are going to poop on the street.

"If there is no deterrent to pooping on the street, and the alternative is difficult, people are going to poop on the street."

So what is the alternative when there are no public bathrooms around?

To me it doesn't sound like there is one. So why arrest people when they have no choice?

As I said, I was being descriptive, not proscriptive. Obviously in a civilized society, everyone has access to a bathroom. Also obviously in a civilized society, people use the facilities provided and clean up after themselves.

Those that are incapable or unwilling to do this either go into drug treatment, get mental healthcare, or if they are unwilling to do either of these and insist on being a public nuisance, they go to jail.

SF is failing to accomplish any of these things despite a gigantic budget.

"As I said, I was being descriptive, not proscriptive. Obviously in a civilized society, everyone has access to a bathroom."

I don't know which civilized society you were describing, but it's not San Francisco.

I would agree that that would be ideal, though.

"Also obviously in a civilized society, people use the facilities provided and clean up after themselves. Those that are incapable or unwilling to do this either go into drug treatment, get mental healthcare, or if they are unwilling to do either of these and insist on being a public nuisance, they go to jail."

Except society's problems are not solved by sending people to jail. Quite often they just get worse.

First, the punishment of sending someone who shits on a sidewalk to a jail where they are likely to be raped, beaten, or killed is far out of proportion to the crime they've committed. Few would agree that rape or death was an appropriate punishment for shitting on a sidewalk, yet that's precisely what many people send to US jails face. Hopefully you'd agree that in the very civilized society you speak of, spending time in jail for shitting on a sidewalk would have little probability of bodily harm, rape, or death to the perpetrator. But we don't live in that society.

Second, many people who are sent to jail get out worse than they came in. They are more likely to commit crimes, and are often denied job opportunities or places to live because they've been convicted of crimes. Now, that might not matter as much for homeless people, except that if they're ever to have a hope of being integrated back in to society they shouldn't have the extra stigma of having been incarcerated (especially not for something they couldn't help, like simply going to the bathroom when there were no bathrooms around).

Third, it costs a great deal of money to keep someone in jail, the money would be better spent on bathrooms, housing, and mental health care.

"SF is failing to accomplish any of these things despite a gigantic budget."

If there really is plenty of money, it's clearly being misspent. At least we can agree on that, though I have a feeling that if we looked at the details there'd be plenty to disagree about over which money is being misspent, how to spend it, which programs to cut, and which to fund.

My intent is not coming through correctly here. What I'm saying is that to the extent that we have a bunch of people that don't have anywhere to use the bathroom, SF is not civilized. Now it's also not true that there is literally nowhere to use the bathroom, but various policies have made it more difficult to find a place and many homeless people who may also be high, drunk, or crazy, don't make the effort.

As for jail, jail is a nasty place. It is certainly a destructive form of punishment. We don't have many other forms of punishment though in our legal system. In SF, it has been decided that because jail is a bad punishment, that not punishing at all is superior. This gets you rampant car break-ins, shoplifting, and people being assaulted on the street. The purpose of jail is not to put people in jail, it's to convince people to not commit crimes because they fear it. For drug addicts, a stint in jail often is what forces them to kick the habit. Unfortunately the SF city jail is full of drugs.

I'd be all for alternate methods of punishment that are less destructive. Make the street pooper clean up the street for a couple of days, say.

Budget-wise, SF spends almost $300 million a year on the homeless. I can't tell you where it all goes, but that is a lot of money to spend for the result SF is getting.

When I lived in San Francisco and brought family and friends to enjoy walking the streets of the city, one logistical problem was finding toilets they could use. There are, for all intents and purposes, no public toilets in the city (e.g. we went to an underground public transit station and they worker there told us there was no bathroom available); one time my mother had to use a porta potty put in front of someone’s house for construction workers doing home improvements because there just was no other restroom around.

SF does not have ample public toilets. 20 bathrooms in one of the largest cities in the world is nothing. Many of them are single stalls. We need one per block.

What percentage of HN users live in the Bay area?

Half.

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

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

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

Could it be dogs or could it be people?

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

It's people.

Yes, for the most part dog owners are pretty conscientious. My neighborhood is full of dog-walkers but I rarely see feces, even in the park next to my house. The only doggy-poo beef in my neighborhood, based on NextDoor threads, is some of them put the dog feces in people's personal trash cans right after the trash has been picked up, which can be kind of annoying if you keep your trash bin inside your house (I always take it to the public trash bin when I see it). But even that is a minority of dog owners, after that thread I haven't seen that happen even once (it used to happen regularly).

It's more than half dogs. People in SF just don't care. Also, it wasn't such a good idea to give shelter animals to the permanent homeless. Now not only can they not get into a shelter, but now something else is dropping turds on the street and not being picked up.

> Under that understanding, no one had a right to camp out indefinitely on public property, much less to defecate on it. Public property belonged to the public—to everyone—and couldn’t be privatized for the benefit of one or more vagrants, however poor or sick. Though that principle would need to be applied to modern circumstances, it is the indispensable starting point for thinking about the shocking problems of the Golden State.

Anyone else find this to be a rather entirely perverse way of thinking about public spaces? Public space is meant to be used by the public and a homeless person has just as much right to use it as anyone else, for as long as they want to. I might be annoyed that they have taken over my favorite park bench but thats part and parcel for living in a society and I don't have a right (morally, if not legally) to use ordinances to stop them

Obviously, it's a whole different issue if we're talking about public health but the solution is to build more public bathrooms and shelters, not criminalize existence.

And to nitpick: considering how much of the west coast is wilderness owned by the Federal government and managed by BLM, you sure as hell do have a right to defecate on public property. It's literally in our nature.

Using != abusing. Camping in a public space means taking part of it for yourself, permanently. In other words, you're taking away the right of the rest of citizens of using that part of public space.

Defecating is a public health issue, too.

Exactly. People defecate in the woods all the time, but they have the decency to at least dig a hole and cover it. Just because it's natural to take a shit doesn't mean we should be stepping in it.

Even shitting in the woods isn't great, it's just that most people won't use the better but grosser alternative (shitting in a sealable bag).

In parks where restrooms are provided, like the Grand Canyon, shitting outside of restrooms isn't allowed. Anywhere the foot traffic gets high enough, the park service will put in restrooms and require people to use them to defecate, because the alternative is pretty bad. Even in the wilderness.

Where do you draw the line? Sitting or sleeping on a public bench all day sure, and i don't think that is what anyone is complaining about. But a tent? a city of tents? all the trash and waste meaning the park is unusable by anyone else?

Replace homeless humans with sheep and cows, and you’ve literally described the basis for the phrase “tragedy of the commons”.

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