Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis | Hacker News Reader

Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

renthop.com

109 pointsleelin245 comments

I echo the point that this is merely a symptom of SF's inability to be a little bit more hardnosed and solve its problems.

As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop in broad daylight on a Saturday in downtown (and blocking the sidewalk, and creating piles of junk).

The operator said that she would report this to the "neighborhood outreach / management team" or something similar I've forgotten the name of. And she said they would likely be dispatched to resolve it within 2-3 days.

I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.

Any other rational city, and the police would be cuffing these guys and hauling them in for questioning about clearly stolen bikes. But here in SF, it's "too inequitable" to be targeting homeless people for actively and visibly engaging in criminal behavior. This is to the point that car break-ins are considered minor acceptable crime.

This city has lost its senses, in the name of thinking it's some post-modern utopia that has to treat everyone equally and naively, and ignore the obvious bullshit going on right in front of our noses.

Just wait until every restaurant is Taco Bell.

<Fry Meme> Not sure if this reference is for Idiocracy or Demolition Man...

It's not clear that these stories take place in different fictional universes.

That's a trend all over the country. I read an article about Seattle almost completely giving up on this type and other non violent crimes. The east coast, like in Boston is getting there too. If no one is about to die, just shut up and deal with it.

AFAIK one of the causes in Seattle (can't speak to SF) is a lack of police resources - the population boom left them kind of far behind. Seattle has ~20 officers per 10k residents. To compare, Atlanta has ~30, NYC has ~40.

I've seen open drug trade and violence unprosecuted. A lot of police officers complain that the DA lets most cases go.

And we just elected a new DA whose promise is to reduce inequality in the system, presumably by ignoring yet more crime.

It's a combination of it being too expensive to hire police officers with the cost of living here, part of the citizenry thinking that "equity" and disincentivizing police from doing their jobs properly = good, and the divide between rich and poor insulating some people from seeing what their decisions cause.

I was not surprised at all at the stabbing / murder on Bart last week. In my travels in Bay Area, I have not seen 1 officer on a Bart train in my entire 10 years here. Even on Caltrain, the conductors have no authority to do anything.

It's like we actively try not to enforce laws here.

Conductors not enforcing laws is mostly a manner of safety and liability. Conductors are not trained police officers, so them trying to enforce laws will probably end up poorly for them, most likely severely injured or killed. And then Caltrain would have to deal with an injured/dead employee and also whatever the perpetrator was doing in the first place.

Requiring police training for a conductor position would probably just make the job impossible to hire for.

Your relative sense of what's possible and proper contributes to the lack of impetus to enforce rules and have real consequences .

Cities on the East Coast, cities in Europe, Asia, conductors are always checking tickets, and in some cases have police powers. In New York, not having a ticket can get you arrested. Same in many other cities.

Here, on Caltrain, all they can do is make you get off at the next stop. You don't even have to show your ID if you don't want to. Tell me what that incentivizes for people cheating the system?

As someone from New York, this information is incomplete and incorrect.

Tickets are not checked on the bus and subway. Fare enforcement is done by NYPD, the local police department consisting of police officers.

Tickets are checked on the commuter rail, but conductors only really are empowered to ask people to pay the onboard fare, which is higher than purchasing a ticket at a machine or at an office outside the train. Conductors can call police, but are not able to make arrests or use physical force to remove farebeaters from trains.

What I meant is that they sure as hell check every ticket, every rider. And people seem to understand that not having one is serious. Not like here.

This has been the trend in Vancouver, BC as well. Property crime under a certain amount has (de facto) been decriminalized, especially if the perps are perceived to be drug addicts or living in the streets otherwise. The main problems here are limited law enforcement budget, and lenient justice system that merely results in catch-and-release operations for the police.

> As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop

First of all, I hope you called 311 and not 911 for this. It's obviously not a life-threatening emergency.

> I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.

As (hopefully) established above, this is not an emergency, so I don't understand why you'd expect a squad of detectives to race out there right away. From your description, it doesn't sound like anyone was in danger. Sorry, but the police are not bellhops that you can just summon when you feel irritated about something that's happening outside.

In most of the country, if you call any number other than 911 to report any crime you'll be told to call 911 next time. When I called in my smashed car window, they told me to use 911 next time. I've heard similar from others.

Anyway, reporting a crime that is in progress certainly warrants 911. There is no ambiguity there.

Where on earth did they tell you to call 911 over a broken window?? Everywhere I’ve ever lived, 911 is for emergencies only. It is not a general “call the police” line. People treating it as such is why many PSAPs are overloaded and sometimes real emergencies get dropped. Please don’t call 911 unless it is a life threatening emergency!

> Where on earth did they tell you to call 911 over a broken window??

The obscure backwater of Seattle.

911 is not exclusively for life-threatening emergencies as you are suggesting. It's for emergencies more generally, and that generally includes crime reports. Particularly reports of crimes that are in progress. The crime I was reporting (the burglarizing of my car) was not in progress which is why I didn't call 911 (and consequently received a brief lecture about using 911 in the future.) But had I witnessed the crime in progress, I wouldn't have hesitated to call 911 and nor should anybody else.

Here is the advice of Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management: https://abc7news.com/when-to-call-911-vs-311/5300051/

    When to call 911:
    * Is there danger to life, property or the environment?
    * Is a crime in progress?
    * Is there a medical emergency / need for immediate help?
    * Is there a fire?

Note that the advice she gives is contrary to the advice I received from Seattle's 311, in that she says to use 311 to report crimes that aren't in progress. However she says that 911 should be used for crimes that are in progress without the requirement that those crimes be life threatening. (And also for injuries which require medical attention but aren't necessarily life threatening.)

So, to reiterate, when it comes to crimes that are in progress there is really no ambiguity.

More broadly, the San Francisco livability crisis is out of control. Poop is only a visible and easily disagreeable symptom of the broader problem.

The local government can patch symptoms of the problem but some of them (housing, mental health, opioid epidemic) are state-level or national problems that the local government have very little power or ability to solve. Some of the law and order issues are issues the local govt can solve, but there isn't an incentive to solve them.

Genuine (outsider) question: how is housing not a uniquely-SF problem? The rest of the country and even other parts of California seem to have affordable housing, at least relatively speaking.

EDIT: RE downvotes, shame on me for not being familiar with SF politics, I guess. It is, after all, the center of the universe. (◔_◔)

It's not at all a SF problem, it's a metropolitan city problem. NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, Boise, both Portlands, etc all have the same housing crisis.

The truth is well-paying (i.e. middle class) jobs are coalescing in a small number of cities which have failed to adapt to the growth. As a software engineer this means I can either make great money in one of the aforementioned cities or a fraction of it in an "off-brand" city. Lucky for me I can afford to pay out the nose for my apartment but this causes incredible pressure on the housing supply, especially for those less well-off.

> It's not at all a SF problem, it's a metropolitan city problem. NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, Boise, both Portlands, etc all have the same housing crisis.

I was responding to the claim that it's a state- or national-level problem. Perhaps you would argue that this meets some criteria for being a 'national-level' problem, but it's not obvious to me.

They're pointing out that in their opinion, the premise you're questioning is invalid, and if you wish to find the answer, look to a new premise.

It isn't necessarily obvious, but in some ways that's because the San Francisco Bay area is such an outlier that it's easy to miss how fast housing costs in metro areas around the country have been rising relative to salaries. The median home value in Sacramento, for instance, is $330K, compared to San Francisco's staggering $1.3M -- but the home price in San Francisco in November 2011 was $633K, whereas in Sacramento it was $183K. (This is according to Zillow, and I picked those points because they're about the lowest points in the last eight years, just before the CA housing market had started to recover.) Housing prices in Sacramento have been going up slightly faster than they have in San Francisco -- and they're not flooded with techies making $200K+ annual salaries. (Granted, there are some techies from here who are probably willing to commute from there at this point.)

And this isn't just a California thing.

"Home prices are rising at twice the wage of growth." https://www.curbed.com/2019/5/15/18617763/affordable-housing...

"Low-cost housing is disappearing from the market." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/housing-crisis-inequality-har...

You can find a lot of these articles around without much effort.

Oh -- do you mean to ask how state/national politics play into San Francisco's housing crisis?

California state law is a big part of the problem: it gives individual cities way too much power to decide what gets built and what doesn't, severely restricting supply. For example, neighborhood associations can filibuster new development into nothingness, even for contradictory reasons like not having enough parking but also not being public-transport friendly enough. Additionally, California has wildly skewed tax law that disincentivizes people from moving or downsizing (look up Prop 13). Add in a lack of public transportation, zoning restrictions, and massive corporate subsidies and you've got a housing crisis brewing.

More than that, Prop 13 incentivizes cities to have commercial real estate instead of residential. Thereby forcing housing to be ever farther from workplaces.

But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.

Which is in itself a symptom of the housing crisis. Instead of fixing the root problem they accelerated it.

Downsizing as you get older is a normal thing in the other 49 states.

Also, Prop 13 inexplicably applies to commercial real estate, and inherited property.

Nothing inexplicable about the application to commercial real estate. The major backers of the law were corporate interests.

Also the inherited property bit was a separate amendment. And there is no limit either.

There are some cities that seem to have better salary/cost of living ratios. I'm thinking of places like Boulder, CO or Provo, UT.

Those are rapidly getting discovered and neutralized.

Denver is generally cheaper than Boulder.

https://news.kgnu.org/2018/08/the-affordable-housing-crisis-...

I believe that certain cities have better ratios but I'm also inclined to think those places are just slightly earlier in the cycle.

One might ask why increasing productivity in a region leads to higher cost of living (rent).

Well, that one is pretty obvious. Landlords will charge the highest prices they can get away with.

The more interesting question is why landlords are supposedly entitled to all of the new wealth. After all they had no role in creating any of it.

Unless we remove the concept of land ownership, there aren’t many viable alternatives that don’t also have unwanted consequences.

At the root of the problem in your question is how does society determine who has a right to live where. Obviously, given the opportunity, most of the world would want to live with on the California coast or similar places.

Obviously, the most basic answer to the question I posed above is “might makes right”. But we have moved past a situation where fight someone to take their land, and instead have to buy it.

Yes, the current system is unfair for most people. Most people will never get a chance to live where they want, and most people are born without the chance in the first place. So why should society let those born to wealthy moms get the spoils?

There isn’t a good answer, other than a better alternative hasn’t been invented yet. But at least in the current scenario, a small percentage of people can move into the places they want, giving enough hope that people aren’t resorting to war. Or they are unable to.

> Unless we remove the concept of land ownership, there aren’t many viable alternatives that don’t also have unwanted consequences.

You can assess land rent (there are methods to do this that are quite reliable) and tax away, say, 80% of it, thus leaving in place enough of a market in land that its ordinary function in facilitating exchanges is not impaired. It's quite easy in fact, the main problem is really getting there from here.

Well, this is what free market capitalism is for. If it weren't for the loads of regulation whole neighborhoods in SF would have been replaced with high-density housing a decade ago.

However, California has decided that "housing as investment" supersedes all else. It's not that there's no viable alternatives: this is by design.

Because of risk. For each landlord "entitled to all of the new wealth" in a few successful cities, there are bunch of these less lucky.

Even assuming your spending exactly tracts cost of living, ratio is only what's relevant if you're going to keep that same cost of living indefinitely. Often what matters more is the net.

What's the other Portland, is it Portland, Maine? Sincere question

Yes, it's not as bad as OR but it's on it's way up -- especially for a small city in an underpopulated state.

The parts of California which don’t have a housing problem are, broadly speaking, the parts of California which aren’t attractive to a ton of people as places to live.

The root cause is prop 13 disincentivizes moving around keeping the supply illiquid, and encourages ninbyism preventing new construction, as you’re basically locked in whenever you currently live.

Not just prop 13, but the capital gains part of the tax code.

Used to be you could sell your house for more than you paid and have 2 years to roll it into buying a new house for the same or more money. Now the difference is taxable capital gains regardless of what your new living situation becomes.

IIRC this changed about 20 years ago.

Wouldn’t people be even more NIMBY if they thought it was going increase their tax rate?

> state-level or national problems

Sincere question: Why does San Francisco seem to be the only one with those news stories (not NYC, LA, Chicago, Miami, etc.)?

There's plenty of attention on the same topic in LA, Seattle, Portland etc. Basically anywhere the climate (political and weather) is favorable for living in a tent on the sidewalk year round.

While the problems are more global in nature, they have affected San Francisco disproportionately worse than other cities.

Some cities have been better at patching these issues than San Francisco has - e.g Austin, TX is forcibly removing homeless encampments from their streets. Seattle have revised zoning and is building new housing to offset housing shortages even though the local NIMBYs oppose muh gentrification.

San Francisco has the right combination of growth, politics and local sentiment that prevents these problems from being solved.

Yeah I seen that the governor was going after the mayor about Austin. Wonder what the solution is though? Actually try to help homeless or just tell them to move elsewhere? I know Key West, FL and Nashville, TN has a busing program to send homeless people to Colorado.

I know even here there's a huge heroin problem. Seen recently that the county sheriff and city police joined together kicking out a bunch of homeless in the woods, and then everytime you go to the supermarket people with signs. Sad, but I know there's been cases of people faking homeless to panhandle so don't know who's real or not. It seems like we have so many resources, and one of the richest nations yet we still have homelessness.

I know in some cities it's illegal to even sit on the sidewalk, what if someone is older or disabled needing to take a break and no benches to sit? Then some cities it's illegal to sleep in your car even if legally parked, but I know there's been challences over that. Some area even put spikes to prevent people from sitting down too. Just seems like instead of dealing with it, they rather want them to move along.

Significant correction about Austin, TX - it is not city removing them, it is Abbot (state's governor) disliked his home city attracting too many homeless people, and decided to override policies Austin's residents voted for. I don't think it is a good solution to base off.

LA and San Diego have both had ongoing major news stories involving hepatitis outbreaks due to unsanitary homeless conditions, I think you are just noticing SF stories.

I don't think the problem is on my end.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=poop+streets&ia=news

These arguments remind me of The Onion's classic "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".

Which is to say SF's problems are definitely a result of SF policies! For housing specifically, only SF is responsible for making construction in SF near impossible.

The problems of the nation and state are of course also present there, but that doesn't change that SF is unique.

That Onion headline rubs me the wrong way... Just because a problem is unique to a country doesn't make that problem easily preventable.

Yes, actually it does. You simply have to act like other countries in which it isn't a problem.

Could it be some countries have unique demographics, climate, or cultural factors not found elsewhere?

I'm not saying SF is blameless, but what works in Japan or Norway isn't guaranteed to work in SF.

It could be, but the broader frustration is that these factors you cite aren't even researched on a local level.

You say the trains run on time in Japan, and people don't respond by researching transit infrastructure in Japan to figure out why that is. They respond by throwing their hands in the air and staying it's impossible, unfundable, politically untenable, whatever fluff reason that's indicative of an unwillingness to think analytically about the problem.

The underlying cause is that there is no thought or scholarship in local government, just electoral risk assessment.

You could actually enforce the laws and put people in safe jails with better living conditions than they have now, outside the city limits. It seems like being more and more lenient is not a solution to a problem getting worse and worse.

I know you think this seems very logical, sane - but you have a tell "outside city limits" - you want these people rounded up and bused out. it's not a solution.

Sane policing, treatment programs, and massive development is the solution.

Out of curiosity why is that not a solution? Why is it inherently better for them to live on the streets of SF than someplace with running water and electricity? It's also obviously better for the citizens of SF to not have to deal with human feces, dirty needles and massive amounts of property crime (at the least).

There's tons of empty space in the US, it seems reasonable to move people who are breaking the law, causing chaos and public health hazards out of highly populated areas.

You can't keep humans in place, who don't want to stay in place. If you paid some benighted town in the Great Plains $500/head to accept your homeless, that town would just buy each transplanted San Francisco resident a sandwich and a bus ticket, pocketing the rest. It would soon become a joke on SF streets, "yeah I just got back from Nebraska!"

I stopped replying because it's just classic entitled NIMBY-ism happening here. You're not going to get through to them.

I think it's entirely reasonable to not want human feces and strung out addicts IMBY.

Is it reasonable to ship them to someone else's "BY"?

if you "shipped" them somewhere, they'd be in an asylum/shelter/jail facility which is set up to handle them, not in a back yard, not downtown, not IN THE STREETS.

Sure, I suggested local jails upthread. You as thread parent suggested "outside the city limits". SF is a "city and county", so it's not possible to have a local jail outside city limits. You're going to have to bribe some other county to take care of the homeless you've charged with crimes. That's not going to be cheap!

It's not cheap even if you manage to get all your jails built in Sunset or some other backwater. Jail is expensive, and the homeless have no official salaries to garnish so you can't use the Ferguson method. Besides which, there's no way the state is going to take any convicted public poopers off your hands to house in their expensive prisons, so you're going to have to keep these criminals jailed for their entire sentence.

Wouldn't it be easier to open some public restrooms?

Some people "just want to watch the world burn" and will mess up anything you try to give them, and those people need law enforcement to stop them, because they won't stop themselves. It's unrealistic to think you can solve the problem with only the carrot.

Shitting is not a voluntary activity. Public restrooms could only be considered "carrots" if they included additional amenities beyond the most basic requirements of elimination and hygiene. Is anyone suggesting that?

There are public restrooms in every Starbucks (and please don't tell me there are not enough Starbucks in SF), it's their policy to let homeless and everyone else to use their restrooms without purchase. Not to mention actual public restrooms, restrooms in shops, parks, porta-potties etc. If there had been long lines of people trying to use those we could agree that there is not enough and we should open more. But it is not the case, is it?

It's more like "why are they downtown?" they have no good reason to be there, and many bad things they're doing which are already illegal. It's not really nimby if i live in the midwest and am just scratching my head like.. "that dude is doing drugs in front of a cop in that video, why isn't the copy arresting him?" Is that compassion? Lol

The suggestion was to put them in jails for defecating on the street, property damage, hard drug use and harassment. I'm not sure if you've been to SF lately or not but it's out of control. It's definitely not just innocent people sitting around, there's a large segment of the homeless population there harassing people, fighting with each other and damaging things. That's definitely breaking the law.

Sure, throw them in a local jail, if you've got any room there. What piqued my interest was this idea that "USA is really big". True, but beside the point. You can't imprison people 2,000 miles away for nuisance crimes.

Lots of people would be really happy for SF to set aside some land in the city for new jails. Still, that seems less practical than just opening some public restrooms...

The ideal is to solve the problem with carrot and stick.

Give them free housing of a sort, so that it’s an improvement over living on the street, but not so that currently-housed people would feel tempted to downgrade their status to homeless in order to get the free house.

The ideal free housing camp is (a) away from major population centres, (b) fairly basic, and (c) compulsory for those who wind up homeless in major cities.

Carrot and stick doesn’t work with someone who is mentally ill.

Yes it does - just not every time.

You can't tread on the citizens of San Fran who are doing nothing wrong, but must put up with the problems caused by other people who have no reason to be there, who are doing illegal acts without punishment like drug use and public defecation.

As an outsider I feel SF (and CA, HI) have this hyper-tolerance for identity and personal freedom that makes any discourse in opinion just unacceptable...

well focus on the identity of the innocent person trying to go to their job without being harassed by people on the streets.

You would probably have to build a wall around SF though. Personally, I am totally fine with that. It may keep some people out and it may keep some people in.

Putting criminals in jail is most definitely a solution. The problem is instantly solved when offenders are no longer present.

"Outside city limits" would be because of the prohibitively high cost of real estate and regulations in San Francisco.

Allowing people to commit crimes with impunity is not a solution. It is effectively punishing law-abiding people.

"massive development" underestimates the mentally ill. "Some just want to watch the world burn", and they will do everything to mess up the world around them. It's best to simply enforce laws and ensure they cannot do that, or at least not downtown. Let them mess up the desert.

Put homeless people in jails? For being homeless?

Yes, most cites and states have laws against vagrancy. Just because something is "public property" doesn't mean you get to live or camp there.

That's what the coasts have come to, I guess.

Reminds me of Belarus. You have to pay fines for being homeless.

Honestly, I hope some homeless people shit in the mailbox of people suggesting such "solutions".

What if the homeless can't afford fines?

It will be put on a tab that makes sure you will never find a way out of homelessness again.

There are plenty of things that are bad for the public health that have been decriminalized... drug use, public defecation, etc. If they simple enforced the laws, they'd have reason to have people stop living on the streets (where they have no reason to be), and start living in places set up to handle them ( asylums, jails, shelters, whatever you want to call it ).

Jails is not the answer to the poop problem. Maybe more toilets?

Lets have compassion for the innocent people doing nothing wrong, who are confronted with injustices imposed upon them by people who are doing drugs and other criminal acts with impunity, while they're just going to work.

Compassion for homeless sure, but what about people who are victimized by the homeless, who have done nothing wrong?

The problem is not so much their poop, it's the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it's huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..)

My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don't know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It's an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..

[1]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503376/all-meat-pet-food..., https://www.treehugger.com/pets/cats-dogs-meat-environmental...

this went from being environmentally sensitive to culling species wholesale real fast

remember last time we culled cats what happened?

What happened?

I don't "remember" what happened last time "we" culled cats, so what happened?

(If you're alluding to the idea that the "black death" plagues were worsened by cat culls, that's an oft-repeated story but somewhat dubious with regard to verifiable facts. Cats themselves can carry the plague bacteria & transmit it to humans – eg https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/08/us/house-cats-spread-huma... – and even regions where cats are superstitiously cherished suffered repeated plague outbreaks.)

lol no

first of all you have to control prey population because pests will balloon with the increased safety and consume resources, strangling the prey population.

secondly if you can't control the whole area Predator population will follow the pest increase, often resulting in larger problems or an out of control spiral of environmental issues

you don't have to go back to pre scientific anecdotes like the stories around the pest, just check the Australia history with cats and rabbits

here's a substantial population study with ferrets in UK https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-011-9965-2

mainland control is only worse

I still can't follow what you meant by the "last time we culled cats". Was that referring to some action by Australians? (Are they the "we"?) Is there a canonical reference to how extensive this "cull" was?

Which "prey" have to be controlled, or else which "pests" will balloon?

Is the capitalization of 'Predator' significant, indicating some sort of sovereignty on a scale matching that of your only other capitalized entities, 'Australia' and 'UK'?

> Australians? (Are they the "we"?)

I also linked a uk study, but this works the same everywhere they tried, including wolves in italy etc

> Which "prey" have to be controlled, or else which "pests" will balloon?

the food chain sits at an equilibrium that's under dampened. the population of opportunistic/scavenger will grow sharply going over capacity. that will cause harm to animals down the food chain (i.e. attack to bird nests) and will cause immigration of nearby predator population, which will again be underdampenend and will grow over capacity.

heck I even linked a paper explaining this, there's plenty references around too.

> Predator

now you're just being an hardass. it was autocorrect.

You've "also linked" a UK study of unclear relevance, but you've still never answered what "cat cull" you were originally referring-to as something we should "remember".

Nor is it clear what's the "prey" and "pest" in the case of house pets. What are you referring-to by those words? Similarly, when you say "this works the same everywhere they tried", what's "this"?

Yes, I'm being a "hardass", because your tone is one of "everybody knows these clear and simple things", but the actual details you've provided are grossly insufficient to know what you're talking about. Even when asked for exact details, you've moved on to other non-responsive digressions.

You are seriously overestimating the clarity of your communication, and overconfident about what anecdotes that others might "remember", and making unwarranted assumptions about what shared-interest/shared-history groups your readers might consider to be part of "we". You're expecting others to intuit lots of specific things in your mind you haven't described in sufficient detail for others to know.

I also don't follow your explanation

Talking about Australia and cats, they have a major issue https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/26/asia/feral-cats-australia..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_in_Australia

Domesticated cats are not a native predator species in North America. Populations of various wildlife, especially songbirds, are well below their historical level in large part due to this predation by an invasive species.

"The animal parts used for pet food may include damaged carcass parts, bones, and cheek meat, and organs such as intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, udders, spleen, and stomach tissue"[1].

These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved. Eating our leftovers is, in fact, the traditional role that dogs have played in human societies.

Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice. We can (and do) also control pet populations with spaying and neutering programs.

1. http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Pet-Food.html#ixzz662tVEXrH

>Humans don't eat any of these animal parts

People don't eat liver where you're from?

It's certainly a less desirable part. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chopped_liver#Chopped_liver_as...

I'm aware that stomachs are used in haggis, or intestines in sausage. That doesn't represent the majority of human meat consumption though.

Black Pudding or Blood Sausage is a complete unknown in the US. Liver is reviled. Gizzards are occasionally sold in restaurants as an appetizer, fried. We don't need the offal from our animals because we can just buy a plastic jug of broth from the store.

I know that argument, but the more there are markets dependent on meat production (like pets food), the more meat production will be hard to reduce

It's like saying "I just give my throwaway to my dogs", this means you'll more or less consciously get more food because you know you need enough throwaway

Or it's also somewhat like saying, "I bought this mango at the supermarket, which came in plane, from another continent. But what am I doing wrong? if I don't buy it, it'll be discarded/wasted". Similar reasoning, the idea is to cut down the downstream demand so we're able to cut down the upstream one

> that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved.

That's not necessarily true, there may some efficient ways to compost/bury/recycle organic material, I don't know how precisely for this case. But compared to the amount of energy for making and transporting dog food to each final consumer? The latter is certainly more polluting

> Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice

Yes, right, well the vast majority people have the choice to not have pets, for those who need a companion, they can try with a plant, it's less talkative but not less sensible

> [...] making and transporting dog food [...]

add to this their packaging fabrication (often in plastics), what it takes later to recycle them, their storage, all the logistics (IT, ..)

Cool, so what are you going to do with all the hundreds of millions of pet animals that already exist?

> Similar reasoning, the idea is to cut down the downstream demand so we're able to cut down the upstream one

That's an inaccurate, backwards analogy. The accurate analogy would be "my pet eats only mango cores, so I'm going to buy the mango even though its from another continent". Which is patently untrue. Pet food demand doesn't drive human meat demand - human meat demand makes pet food cheap and plentiful. Cutting human meat demand would drive up the price of pet food (because there are fewer castoff materials available) and lead to people re-evaluating how many pets they can/should have. Alternatively, it may also lead to investments in healthy animal-free pet foods, similar to fake meat for humans.

Since you're so concerned about the environmental impact of pets, consider also that for many people, their pets are surrogate children. Presumably if they couldn't have pets they might have actual children, which is far more destructive to the environment.

> Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved

Seriously, just the fact of making their food, the food containers/packages (aluminium, plastics or whatever, not talking about the further recycling environmental costs), end-to-end delivery/transport, all of this has a massive impact, e.g. pets industry in US is $75b/year [1], those pet products and services are generating "a great deal of pollution"

Saying pets are environmental-friendly is dangerously wrong, above all in our current state

Pets are like a virtual human extra-population (1 billion in order of magnitude), given they are not wild animals participating in the ecosystem (when they are feral, they disrupt it [2]), nor farm animals. Their footprint is probably somewhere between 3% and 10% of the average person, that's still significant

You're definitely right about human having to reduce their meat consumption, their consumerism in general, pets included. That's the key to environment problems

[1]: https://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp

[2]: pets/'feral' pets impact on ecosystem https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-dog-is...

> Saying pets are environmental-friendly is dangerously wrong,

I didn't say that. They're just not as bad as you make them out to be.

> Pets are like a virtual human extra-population (1 billion in order of magnitude)...Their footprint is probably somewhere between 3% and 10% of the average person,

So like 30-100 million additional humans? You also didn't specify what country the "average person" is from, whose footprint you're comparing a pet to. Either way, it's not that big - barely 1.5% of the human population in terms of impact.

I can only think of two reasons why anyone would suggest "eliminate all the pets" as a serious solution for environmental problems:

1. They already hate pets. Which is a valid (if unpopular) personal opinion, but not a basis to formulate any sort of policy on.

2. They want to alienate people who might otherwise be on board with environmentalism. Because that's what will happen if you suggest to people they have to put Fido to sleep right now to save the planet.

> You also didn't specify what country the "average person" is from, whose footprint you're comparing a pet to. Either way, it's not that big - barely 1.5% of the human population in terms of impact.

speaking for "First-world" countries mostly. I live in France, there is as many pets as inhabitants roughly (63M-66M), figures say 21M of cats+dogs, other European countries are comparable. I compare pets footprint to their owners' basically, and a 10% larger footprint in developed countries is a problem, even 3%, even 1% is something to work on, there is always a start if we want to clean up the planet

About your 1. and 2.

Not specially, I could argue the exact opposite points in return, I'm just pragmatic about it. I'd also want to address the cigarette smoking problem more seriously (my mom died from that), to ban a bunch of cosmetics, all of insecticides, plastic wrappings... Pets seem like an easy lever to deal with, 'seem' because I understand your reaction, people get attached to them, they react with passion more than reason about it, but they must understand the consequences: ecosystem and pollution damages, neutering/spaying doesn't seem enforced in Brasil like showed my previous 'impact on ecosystem' link. Of course, we really can't put every pet owner in the same bag, I'm mostly targeting the way pets become a trend, a norm, e;g. the Shiba trend, the way pets have become so "normal", so present everywhere, internet, TV, young generation are kinda educated with that.. I mean, they wouldn't really question their existence later or their environment footprint, so I'm just here trying to have a critical, in a positive sense, view

"if you suggest to people they have to put Fido to sleep right now to save the planet."

I didn't say that either, I said "cut down"

You were right about arguing against my initial argument about "pets eating one fifth of the world's meat and fish" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#Impact] but I hope you understand all the other "invisible" pollution cost for processing, delivering those food, and all the other pets services pollution costs (vet, beauty, ...). So my point stands with their significant environmental impact, even if pets were fed insect-based food like they suggest in the wikipedia link, there would still be a significant background environmental impact

Mods - can we update the title to “San Francisco dog poop crisis” ? Note that the category of tickets in 311 is “Human / Animal waste”. I personally went through 100 random tickets on the sf data portal and found that 95% were either dog poop or miss classified (eg abandoned car or trash collection). People automatically read the headline and correlate to human waste.

Huh. This whole time I thought the crisis was around human waste.

It is.

I wouldn't mind half the police force being reassigned to fine the sort of people who let their dog shit and run.

My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house.

He eventually had the tiny patch of land paved over.

i have a dog and always pick up her poop. i also hate it when other owners don't.

beyond being a nuisance, dog poop is actually more of a threat to dogs than to people (cross-species pathogens/infections are relatively rare).

what i don't get are the folks who who go through the trouble of bagging the poop and then dropping the bag on the ground.

Yeh! I think it would really help law enforcement community relations if they moved away from ticketing people for violating letter of the law rules (street sweeping hours, etc.) and started ticketing people for stuff that lowers quality of life in the city: taking up two parking spots by not pulling forward all the way, not picking up dog poop, parking in bike lanes, etc.

Didn't we just elect a new DA who has openly stated he will not prosecute any quality of life crimes?

His childhood history of having parents who drove a getaway vehicle to a robbery resulting in a dead police officer apparently has colored his outlook toward policing.

Hope springs eternal.

Why do we need someone with a gun to handle this? I'd much rather see a civilian from Vector Control or a similar city department enforcing this. If people fail to pay up the fines, maybe then the guys with guns can be dispatched to deal with "contempt of court" or whatever.

Ok, I put dogs in there in parens. Open to better suggestions.

I don't think that's accurate as well. Since it is not all dog. Lol, I know it is hard. May be just say "dog and human" ?

Ok, I've squeezed in mostly.

Edit: since other commenters are still questioning this, I've put a question mark on that bit.

Oh come on, we all know it's not because of the dogs. San francisco is in the midst of a homelessness crisis, and all that comes with that.

A response of "oh, come on, we all know.." to someone that said they personally went through 100 tickets is not really contributing much. Worse, actually, as presenting your assumptions without evidence as counterfactuals to someone that purports to have actually done legwork actively muddies the discussion.

Of the more than 100 poop complaints I've filed with 311 the majority have been human sized. The one with a string/tapeworm coming out of it was ambiguously sized and spread out over like three blocks.

Yesterday I submitted one of bloody handprints smeared all over a building on Mission St. Pretty sure those weren't dog handprints. I called it graffiti since I didn't see anything more suited towards "blood smeared all over someone's building".

http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11720974

This was voluminous enough that I think it was probably human:

http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11019074

Out in the western neighborhoods this size was more common (and I'd assume was dog sourced):

http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11541986

And that is a useful set of information to add to the discussion.

I'm not sure how accurate size is as an indicator of species for feces, given that some dogs are quite large with large feces (and some many humans have small feces for dietary reasons), but it's not like the original commenter explained in much detail how they classified the feces either (other than indicating it was through images for many).

Edit: Regarding your second link, I have a pair of 65 pound dogs, and their poop is generally about 1/3 to 3/4 that size. I assume it could be a ~100 lb dog, but agree it's more likely from a person.

I’m looking at the data portal and at least the last 300 waste complaints have no details (details field just says “Human/Animal waste” or is empty) - how did you figure out if they’re dog poop or misclassified?

Edit: E.g this one https://sf311.org/track-case?ref=11716075&email=

Look at the mobile uploads. They have photos attached

What is the methodology for classifying human vs. animal waste?

This. Would love to know but am not willing to scan photos of excrement to do my own analysis. I have my own personal experience of living in SF for 10 years, in the Mission. I’ve seen a lot of human looking fecal matter.

This is why man invented machine learning...

lol, are you combing through photos of poop and categorizing them?? yeah right

I’m sure looking at numbers it’s going to be mostly dog poop.

There should NOT be ANY human poop at all!!!

That it’s even trivialized goes to show the growing acceptance of this phenomenon. On a few occasions I’ve seen people (perhaps transients or whatever) going behind bushes in plain daylight. I’ve seen it on sidewalks and also on public steps. That should not be a thing in a country that emerged from outhouses and such a century ago and understand cholera etc...

SF needs the Portland Loo.[1][2] The homeless-resistant public toilet. Not enough privacy for a drug deal. Water faucet on the outside, not the inside. Prison-grade stainless.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29... [2] https://portlandloo.com/

The idea that drug dealing is such a harmful thing (it's not) that we must deny homeless and poor people the basic human dignity of being able to use a toilet in privacy to avoid people being able to engage in it is an idea that needs to be extinguished.

drug dealing can be harmful, but you are correct otherwise of course.

> Not enough privacy for a drug deal.

That is SF. Drug deals are done in broad daylight.

If anything people might be more worried about doing drug deals in a confined space and not being able to flee making it easier to be robbed.

It's true. I've seen them.

Meanwhile there was that video going around of BART police arresting a guy for eating a sandwich on the platform.

In that case the loo can't be blamed for "increasing drug deals", which is fine.

I don't know why you're downvoted so heavily. Any "drug deal" you'd do in a bathroom you'd do on any street corner.

Like in most cities, in the US atleast.

True I've seen a lot of open drug dealing. Rich people do their drug deals inside their homes.

If its private enough to poop in its not private enough to do a drug deal in? So you can see multiple people's legs that's going to stop things?

"So you can see multiple people's legs that's going to stop things?"

Look, minor concerns like "efficacy" are no matter when the goal is shaming the homeless.

Actually since it's a fixed, semi-private location, it seems really easy to monitor for drug deals. As other comments said it's almost easier to just do deals in public/daylight since not every spot on the sidewalk can be watched at all times.

That’d be great if San Francisco had enough police to monitor for anything.

As it is, drug deals happen in broad daylight on Market St anyway because nobody’s gonna stop them.

Even if you had everything monitored, you still have a drug problem.

Sure, unless we also had proper punishments for drug offenders.

Or, as has been noted many times, we could just legalize the drugs and do away with this problem.

Most of the time such "features" are about addressing the detractors who say they will only facilitate drug deals. Because, you know, that's one major way to shoot down any public goods.

Interesting on multiple people's legs. I know the news says our own area has a drug problem but I guess I haven't seen much of it in person...

There's someone I know that worked as a caregiver for a man that had dementia, and instead of keeping him inside all day decided to take him to the park. Well his adult diaper needed changed, so he went to the bathroom to do that, and a park ranger started banging on the door accusing them of smoking weed wanting them to open the door now! Banging on it, then while finishing up changing the state park ranger started accusing them of being homosexuals.

This was somewhere in California, but I know he moved across the country after his patient passed away and decided to go on a different career path. So kinda interesting how people can see one little thing and then start assuming a bunch of stuff. But apparently the ranger realized he was in the wrong and apologize. Sounded like there could of even been a lawsuit out of it, but he didn't want to go that far and just wanted to move on. Probably embarrassing to deal with. This was back I guess before everyone carried cell phones with them though also.

Why on earth wouldn't you want toilets for the homeless to have enough privacy for a drug deal? The alternative is having the drug deals done in public where I and my kids have to see it happen.

What's wrong with exchanging money and goods that you need to shield your children from? What about the events that happen after, injections of said goods?

Yes, you're right, which is why when I lived in the city I lived away from neighborhoods where that kind of stuff happened, when that activity came to my neighborhood I moved out of the city. The city didn't seem to want to move the drug dealers and users, so I had to move myself.

SF tried to put Amsterdam style open urinals at Dolores Park and neighbors were up in arms.

OK, how about "Uber for toilets"? Clean a toilet, get paid. Cameras and machine learning to check what a clean and dirty toilet look like. Sign up, and you get access to cleaning supplies and can turn the hose on. Works like retrieving dockless scooters.

What's wrong with the city/state having properly paid employees doing the cleaning? Why the need to create _more_ precarious typically underpaid jobs?

I really don't get it.

Because then you get massively overpaid jobs with no oversight, which taxpayers are forced to fund. [1]

SF already has massive taxes and too many overpaid workers, and the city is still a mess. There is no accountability. Throwing more money at it is not going to help.

> San Francisco’s budget totals an astounding $9.6 billion this year — more than the budgets of 13 states and scores of countries around the world [2]

> By far the biggest chunk goes to pay city employees. Almost half — $4.7 billion — is spent on the salaries and benefits of 30,626 city employees.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/how-one-bay-area-janitor-mad...

[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Billions-of-doll...

> Clean a toilet

for that you really need to have the toilets to begin with. SF, and in general American cities, have no public toilets ( i mean the number they have is just a noise around 0).

I wonder how much this has to do with an increase in people knowing that there exists a system to complain about poop, versus the actual increase of poop itself.

The only place I’ve ever seen human feces on a public street is in SF and I’ve been to every major US city.

The only place I’ve ever seen human feces on a public street is in SF and I’ve been to every major US city.

Are you not looking then? SF isn't even the only place in the Bay Area I've seen shit on the sidewalk.

I don't think I'd consider any other city in the Bay Area a major US city. Maybe it's just California then? I've literally never seen this on the east coast, mid-west or south.

San Francisco is worse than any city I've been to but it's hardly the only one (major or not) with shit on the sidewalks. On the East Coast I've run into shit in Brooklyn, for instance.

You've not been looking down then. I used to play "Human or Canine" while walking from the train to my office in Miami. I like to think I got pretty good at telling the difference after a while.

Why would such a system be created in SF, let alone receive attention from the public, if not for the perception that it was already a problem?

I've lived here 10 years, and its everywhere now. You can see this with your eyes, or if you don't trust what you see, you can see it in the city provided data of homeless living on the streets. Its up 17% over the last 2 years (measured every 2 years)

I just got back from SF, last time was 2006. Nonexistent problem then, and when I arrived, I was unaware. It was a whole day before I realized it wasn't dog shit. I thought to myself,"I havven't seen this much dog shit since Buenos Aires, but man they must have a lot of big dogs in SF, kinda strange." Then it clicked. The homeless crisis in SF is like nothing I have seen anywhere, not India, not South America. Felt very unsafe, I'd rather not return.

I just got back from SF, last time was 2006. Nonexistent problem then

No, it was definitely a problem then. I was working in mid-market around then and we definitely noticed when the mechanical sidewalk sweepers missed a shift. Impressively it's gotten worse.

Something about this article pinwheeled Firefox on my mac for two minutes before I gave up and force killed firefox. Particularly strange since I have all javascript, including first party, blocked by default with uMatrix. I had to read it with emacs.

Anyway, the fact that this is even a question people wonder about should be proof enough there's a problem. I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too. All kinds of liter all over the place, rats running around in plain sight. Trash cans getting deliberately turned over and emptied onto the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Vomit and the piss of drunks are common in alleyways. There is no shortage of abject poverty and homelessness. But shit on the streets? Not in Philly; not in this century anyway. This is one respect in which Philly is definitely cleaner.

This discrepancy is something that I've never seen satisfactorily explained. I've heard all kinds of comments about poverty and access to public bathrooms and all those other explanations. But I've never been able to figure out why this impacts San Francisco so much more than a city like Philly. Poverty, homelessness, mental illness, income inequality, and businesses with no public restrooms are not uniquely SF problems.

Edit for clarification:

North and West Philly are filthy. North of Spring Garden or west of 40th or so. And Kensington is a festering wound. The alleys in downtown are filthy too, though the sidewalks of the major streets are generally cleaner. Maybe they've cleaned it up since I lived there; I moved away about 10 years ago. I last visited about 2 years ago and it didn't really seem like anything had changed.

> I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too.

I moved from SF to Philadelphia 2 years ago and have no idea what you're talking about.

None of the things you described are things I've seen more than maybe once in the 2 years I've lived here, and I walk everywhere just like I did in SF.

Granted, all of those things I saw repeatedly when living in SF for 4 years beforehand. The one time I smelled urine in a street in Philly, my brain went "whoa, am I back in SoMa?"

Is it the ability to be on the street year round? Maybe the more comfortable you are living outside, the more likely to use it as a bathroom. Colder climates force the homeless to use shelters and similar resources during winter months.

Maybe, but there are a lot of people living on the streets in Philly even during the winter. During the coldest nights they send vans around to coax people into shelters or at least give them blankets. I'm not sure that can account for the difference though.

San Francisco needs more public restrooms. I think any map of SF's poop should also show how few city-provided restrooms there are, so I made one: https://sf-restrooms-and-poop.glitch.me/

Compare with Australia's National Public Toilet Map: https://toiletmap.gov.au/Find/20547

We call it "culture". Public restrooms don't help, people do it despite those, and often near them. We've had people come in during a change window late at night, and go right outside our office door. The custodian said he passed the person on their way out, and had to clean it up. Then there is that moment you realized someone tracked some into your office after walking to get lunch. It's very offsetting.

I prompted GPT-2 with the headline and date:

Is the San Francisco Shtuation Out of Control? Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am

It continued:

We may be the "parking hell" of San Francisco, but at least we're predictable about it. Just like how we've been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can't be found. Well, we're not going to have a protected bike lane in 9 months because.. well.. UberHittingTaxis is totally derailing it and killing the entire project . That alone has me so pissy and pissed off

I tried GPT-2 again:

We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco shtuation. Very few people know that the birth of frederic Felspike on the last day of 1847, resulted in the birth of a San Franciscan most certainly from all over. He was a true founding member of San Francisco history, at least a half of the San Franciscans who were still

I tried GPT-2 a third time:

by Edmund Kemper Now you can: - Save and share news and news stories from around the Bay Area - Mention SF Asks Now for special news updates when you're posting comments - Choose from many popular templates to create one of your own The San Francisco Sh*tuation ® began in early 2002 as a group of passionate Bay Area residents, many of whom had the same frustration with local politics, media, and society. Our mission is to provide a space

I'm not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn't immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.

(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)

Funny it should mention Edmund Kemper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Kemper

A passionate Bay Area resident, to be sure, but perhaps not one whose byline has ever appeared on a news article. Within the body, though...

That's a nice population density map.

Tracking the increase in number of SF311 "Human/Animal waste" reports over time isn't as meaningful as it seems...because a larger number of poop reports are duplicates!

You need to the Open311 API and not just the DataSF 311 case dump to see this unfortunately. But SF311 closes a large number of tickets with "duplicate of SR #<....>"

So without this data it's unclear if the poop is increasing, or if it's just that SF311 usage is way up and duplicate reports are increasing.

I went to a big tech conference in San Francisco a couple of years back. Walking back to the hotel from Moscone Center, I found myself pacing evenly with what looked to be a bag lady. All of a sudden she loudly yelled "Watch out for that sh*t!"

I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I'd stepped in it. She tried to warn me.

Can human genome be sequenced from human poop?

With sequencing getting so cheap, this might be an cheap data source for Hooli and the likes.

Yes it can, and that method has been used to capture badly-behaved pet owners. There's even a startup for it: pooprints.

Oh… wow. It's like 23andme but for dog poop.

In a dystopian future, pooping at shopping malls and retail establishments could be harvested by data brokers for advertising purposes.

I don't like these cookies at all.

You should check out the latest episode of Rick and Morty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Seat

A huge problem is the lack of public toilets. When I first lived there, I got locked out of my apartment and could not find anywhere to go to the bathroom. I had to wait until my roommate got back. If I did not have a place to go back to, what could have I done except poop on the street?

Wouldn't a restaurant or fast food outlet let you use their bathroom? I think if you make it clear that your options are to take a dump either on their toilet or right where you're standing, they would show you the toilet immediately.

I went to a fast food outlet, the toilet was so full of waste that it was overflowing onto the floor. Super disgusting. All of the restaurants did not have public backrooms. I guess I could have begged them, and they probably would have let me because I was not homeless. But that is not a sustainable solution. Do we really want homeless people begging restaurants to use the bathroom every time they need to poop?

This thread is reminding me that the ease of finding a good toilet in SF varies a lot with the part of town.

In my experience the east side of town, especially the financial district, businesses start being cagey about letting you use the bathroom.

Going westward, when you get to the Lower Haight or so, I can start naming many coffee shops with decent bathrooms and no lock on the door. And decent park bathrooms too.

I am in the middle of an interview process with a company in SF right now. I like the company and the job but I'm not sure about SF. I had already been thinking about the well-known poop problems before I saw this post.

This will be a factor in my decision to take the job or not.

If you live in a nice neighborhood it's not an issue.

I've never seen so many people who feed their dogs corn.

SV should have some startup to create autonomous tool to clean up the poop on the street, which could solve this practical issue

Did anyone else smell poop while reading this?

(there's gotta be a word for that effect)

Well, now it's the Zhou effect. Congrats!

It seems very wrong to describe it in those terms. I mean, what's next, an article in January about how DC has a "frozen bodies on the street" problem?

It's a homeless crisis.

More than that, it's a lack of public toilets crisis. https://sf.curbed.com/2016/12/5/13845276/bathrooms-san-franc... "One for every 0.4 square miles, or one for every 6,857 residents, not even counting tourists, commuters..."

It's an amalgamation of several crises. Homelessness, extreme surge in costs of living, poor healthcare (esp. for psychological problems), public toilets, opiate use, ... I guess such things always are. It's pretty much never a single cause.

Remembers me of mid-nineties Germany (where I've grown up) – in Munich (yes, Oktoberfest), Kindergarten teachers did rounds in the morning to clean up the fenced-in Kindergarten playground, remove the syringes the junkies left. In one of the better neighborhoods, too. Whole squares right in the city where hundreds of homeless did drugs with helpless police standing by. I remember being chased away from a playground in a well-off part of Bremen by an approaching mob of violent homeless junkies. Lots of refugees from the Balkan war, often in an absolutely desolate psychological state. That, too, was an amalgamation of lots of crises – reunification, economy doing poorly, a society built by the rules of Cold War, falling apart, war in the Balkans, huge reluctance to change the tiniest thing.

But Germany really turned things around. A lot of targeted action, lots of reforms, lots of small changes to how the social security net functions, a big invest in robust police services, somehow mostly without the Police violence issues the US have. There are some corner cases where the social services still fail to help, other than that, it's become relatively hard to stay homeless for long. In Munich, you really have to know where to look to find any homeless at all (Hofgarten at dusk; one particular river bridge.) Being poor isn't fun, and it's comparatively harder to get out of poverty (though the US seem to be catching up there.) It's easy and cost-neutral (i.E. part of mandatory insurance or covered by social security) to get help with mental health issues – no doubt that contributed. No opiate crisis to speak of (got lucky there).

A lot of money has been (and is being) spent on it though. It'll be interesting to see whether the US will do likewise, or find a way to make it work on a smaller budget, or simply fail to get things to improve.

There are simply too many puns are floating around in my brain-- and they're all terrible. My wife has always said, "everyone likes a good poop joke", but I think that may have been targeted at preschoolers and not adults.

n=1 but i like a good poop joke

n=2, shit's funny

I feel like if you can even ask that question then the answer is probably yes. This would make for a rare exception to Betteridge's law though.

Even though this is an exception to Betteridge's law, it seems that tome's law still applies!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549

Betteridge's law dictates that if the answer to the question is yes, then the headline is better as a declarative statement: The San Francisco Sh*tuation is Out of Control

How much of the discussion is the open question vs the actual problem?

e.g. "Pete Buttigieg has a AA voter problem" vs. his actually having that problem (which is not conclusive)

The solution to this is usually some overwhelming action to not only mitigate but change the momentum of discussion.

dilemma probably is, if you build restrooms, they will do drug in there.

Is that worse than them shooting up in the middle of the street?

that can be discovered and rescued, but not if they just shoot in a cubicle that no one even knows they are there I guess. That's the only(?) explanation on why SF closed up all public restrooms on Market street

I've seen restrooms in businesses that are installing blacklights instead of standard fluorescent/LEDs to deter people from using drugs in them - because you can't see your veins under a black light.

I believe they use blue LEDs, not blacklights (which are UV.)

> that can be discovered and rescued,

I don't know if anyone would describe being thrown in an American prison 'rescued'.

I assume he meant given medical attention if they overdose.

Discovery isn't a problem here. It doesn't take a crack detective (pun intended) to discover people doing drugs on the streets of San Francisco.

Give them a better place to do drugs; a place where they get free needles and can throw away the old ones properly (so they won't leave them lying about).

Im just curious if there are any examples of this kind of attitude actually working instead of just attracting more homeless people. So far it seems like San Francisco's policy of not enforcing basic quality of life laws has not made homeless people say "oh gee they sure are nice not to arrest me for dealing drugs and smashing car windows. To thank them I will not poop in the street."

Sure, there are plenty of safe injection cities all over Canada. They save lives, not promote homelessness.

https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/public-health-topics/ha...

edit:

> "oh gee they sure are nice not to arrest me for dealing drugs and smashing car windows. To thank them I will not poop in the street."

This is terribly reductionist, and apathy is not at all the same as actually providing help.

With all of that homeless business going, would that toilet would be acceptable enough to use for a normal person? I certainly wouldn't go into one where I can find someone tripping, shooting, dealing, assaulting or smelling worse than the toilet itself.

I'm talking about a safe injection facility, not a toilet.

Supervised injecting rooms have been a great success in Sydney

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/lessons-from-the-heroin-...

I believe safe injection rooms are a net positive because they reduce strain on ambulance services. That's great. But what's next? Massage parlors and day spas? Im sure they'd be able to better find a job if they were nice and limber and smelled nice. Maybe we should just give them free drugs? Otherwise they're just going to steal and panhandle to get money for drugs. Maybe we should just give them cash so they can buy whatever they need? If they're finally out from under financial stress I'm sure they'll be able to turn it around then.

I didn't see anyone shitting on the streets in East Hastings in Vancouver or anywhere else in the world for that matter, but it was everywhere in SF Tenderloin.

take a look at germany. they concentrate asocials in special places that are easy to control, clean, and in high traffic areas where they cannot harm lone passing-by pedestrians. win-win-win

I can't really understand the attitude such as 'if they want to do drug, let them do it in a safe way at least'. It sounds compassionate and all, but isn't doing drug just, WRONG? I somehow feel this is an encouragement to them.

No, doing drugs is not wrong. Caffiene is a drug, beer is a drug, is pot worse? Where does someone else get to draw then line for each of us personally if not ourselves?

An adult has the inalienable right to do what they want with their own body.

This is similar perhaps to viewing the distribution of condoms in high school as wrong. Wouldn't that encourage teens to have sex? But when you look at the data, you see that kids who go to high schools with access to condoms have lower rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs. So, did the condoms encourage sex? Hard to say. Did the condoms reduce the problems that are associated with sex? Yes.

Similarly, do safe injection sites encourage drug use? No, because drug use is going to happen regardless of the presence of safe injection sites. It does, however, make it much easier to transition drug addicts into programs that can help them. The data is there.

So bottom line; if you don't like having dirty needles about and open drug use, support safe injection sites. Likewise, if you don't like teenagers getting pregnant or getting STDs, then support access to sex ed and condoms.

Depending on the drug, not continuing to do it may be fatal (this includes alcohol with a sufficient level of addiction).

Knowing that there is a safe place to go and treatment for it might reduce some inhibitions about it, but I doubt that many, if any at all, would actually start doing such hard drugs because of places like this.

More likely, if someone is in a position where they would consider doing it in the first place, they would do it anyway.

Taking drugs is wrong. It is wrong because it harms the person and the people around them and wider society.

Ideally we'd have no-one who becomes addicted to drugs.

But the existence of substance misuse disorders means we will always have addicts, and by definition addicts take drugs even when they know they are being harmed by those drugs. These people are not encouraged by safe injection spaces, because they were always going to be taking drugs.

How are those harms caused? How can we minimise those harms?

Some of those harms are caused by people not being able to access treatment to get off drugs; they cannot access drugs affordably so need to turn to crime to get money for drugs; they have to inject unsafely because safe injection places are not available.

A safe injection space means people are not sharing needles. People are helped to find better injection sites. Any infections can get medical attention before limbs need to be amputated. People can have drugs tested for purity. Ideally we'd be providing medical grade heroin so people aren't injecting contaminated drugs. People can be reminded about evidence-based drug rehabilitation (mostly substitution and therapy. For some reason the US has an over-reliance on abstinence retreats and 12 steps, which has little evidence of effectiveness).

Although I agree with your conclusion, every adult I know takes either caffeine, alcohol, or cannabis. Calling it morally wrong seems off to me.

I agree with you if I'm honest. I don't think I'm going to persuade parent poster about that, but I hope that agreeing on that builds a bit of common ground which hopefully makes my other points land better. I don't know if this works or if it's transparently manipulative.

I think it would be interesting to make a "voluntary prison" where anyone can go inside and receive free recreational drugs, meals and housing, but they have to have a clean pee test to get out.

If people want to lay around doing clean heroin, watching TV and hanging out with other addicts, give them a safe space to do so with minimal drain on the rest of society. Attach a minimum wage wavier so manufacturers could set up low skill jobs within, and addicts can save up for when they want to leave. Concentrate drug treatment, health, social and educational programs for economies of scale. Tie dose dispensation to biometric data to prevent people from receiving OD-levels of drugs, but allow them to slowly ratchet up if they wish to do so as tolerance builds. I'd imagine this could achieve a net-savings in cost of anti-drug programs and policing, and could be funded by cities which want to export their derelict addicts.

It would be an ugly business, but I think with proper considerations it could be more empathetic than current drug policy.

That’s not a dilemma, that’s a solution to two problems.

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