They could come up with the best possible trash can ever invented and it wouldn't move the need on resident's quality of life.
Total waste of money.
Unrelatedly, I find it interesting that, despite the fact that the Chinese name of the city is 旧金山, San Francisco insists on using a different name for itself in its official Chinese communications.
I mean I've only been to San Francisco a few times, but apart from the Tenderloin I thought it was a very beautiful city. Yeah, homelessness and public defecation are a problem, but do these have to be brought up in ANY discussion regarding SF? Groups of people can deal with multiple issues at once.
As a tax payer, I've noted that San Francisco has actually been removing trash cans, that worked perfectly well, because people just dump trash beside them for the city to pick up. No trash can, no dumping? No, they dump anyways.
So the solution isn't to use the old design which seemed to work "ok". Or even talk to other cities to see if they have better options SF could just buy. It was to completely redesign a trash can. Insane. I'm waiting for SF to hire an outside firm to resign the tires on their city vehicles.
So yes, you can solve multiple problems at once, but there are also only so many hours in the day and so many tax dollars to work with and spending any time/money on new trash cans is less time solving actual quality of life problems.
Memories of human waste in the streets is the first thing I thought about after reading this article. I usually see at least one pile when I go into SF and walk around. I've also seen people actively relieving themselves and worse, and I've only wandered around SF maybe a dozen times.
Designing custom trash cans to optimize for esthetics in this context seems analogous to polishing a turd. It sounds like the bigger issue, ignoring potential corruption, is that they expect telemetry and sliding mechanisms in what notionally should just be some bent sheet metal, and assumed the stuff on the market was overpriced.
You're a tourist and you go to tourist places and most of those areas suck. They also tend to have more homeless people than average because tourists give more money to them than locals.
Tourist areas in most cities are also where most crime and homelessness live.
I lived in San Francisco for less than one year and saw people in the act of defecating in public more often than that. This was strictly a matter of walking between my apartment and my job.
Yes, unless public defecation has suddenly become some kind of understandable foible that might happen anywhere.
Want to end homelessness? Give people homes. We can't do that, though, because public housing is "socialism".
Want less crime? Make sure people can afford to live and you'll see less crime. Enforcement of the law isn't the problem here, especially since crime levels are generally at some of the lowest levels in decades.
Corruption is a strawman. You can point at basically anything and complain about "corruption" and people will agree with you. This isn't adding anything to the conversation unless you're talking about wanting to fix specific corruption.
The crime is often due to organized criminal gangs, at least the car break-ins and shoplifting, the most visible and quality of life impacting crimes. Nobody is stealing clothing from malls because they are poor.
And no, corruption is not a strawman. When the city says "we just need more money", saying "stop wasting money on redesigned garbage cans that enrich your donors" is an perfectly reasonable response.
It's excuses like yours that detract from actually fixing the problems.
1. Financial hardships
2. Mental illness
3. Lifestyle change