Hacker News Reader

Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Just FYI, while cost of living is a problem pretty much everywhere in the Bay Area, the infamous sanitation issues are isolated to an incredibly tiny portion of the Bay Area.

View on HN

The homelessness and drug use I hear about in SF really boggles my mind. If california were a nation, it's GDP would be higher than the entire nation of india. Why in god's name can a place as rich as SF and the bay area not address their problems? Seriously? This isn't hard. Look at Portugal. Are you really telling me this couldn't be done on a smaller scale in California? Do they simply not care?

Cynically, the answer that a lot of wealthy people have to the problem of inequality is to cut the lower tier loose - loose from bail, prisons and restrictions. Cut them loose from prosecution. SF and NYC, two cities with Progressive badging, have much bigger problems than cities with smaller budgets but wiser (and national) housing, healthcare and child care systems. Has anyone asked themselves why it's legal in California to pitch a tent on a sidewalk or shoot heroin on the sidewalk (in NYC, too, now), but stuff like this is barely seen in cities like Paris, London and Lisbon? And why we ceased prosecuting property crimes, with predictable results?

The answer, I think, is that Progressives in the American cities wear their homelessness and drug problems like a badge of honor. The messaging appears to be: look at how tolerant we are, and if you want to blame someone you can blame the rich. They should do better to learn from our European friends how to spend tax dollars to help the needy.

What is that even referring to? My sewer works just fine and trash is picked up regularly.

Poop everywhere

Poop on streets is very common in San Francisco. Most of the bay area doesn't have that problem, though.

Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

Is this animal poop or human specifically?

Human

There is actually very little evidence for this. It is likely that it is mostly dog poop.

EDIT: the comments in response are non-sequiturs. The map does not display mostly human poop. It is mostly dog poop. I know I know, you see people poop all the time. But that’s not what the map is.

I've literally seen someone defecating on the street in the TL. But that's the TL. Elsewhere, yes, it's probably dog.

I was there for 4 days in 2019 and I saw someone poop right in front of me. A number of other social issues were apparent as well.

Oh yeah, the Bay Area is actually paradise.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtyW4FRn78

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPuMceGWtOQ

Market south to Bryant, and 10th st north to the waterfront (i.e. SOMA) is a pretty prolific area, I frequently see the city deploying porta-potties to keep it under control due to the campsites that pop up. Also yeah Tenderloin, Lower Nob Hill, Design District, civic center, pretty much that whole "fertile" crescent. It's no surprise that the city gave twitter huge incentives to put their headquarters in between civic center and central soma.

I walk my kid to and from daycare in that area and see street pooping if not every week, three times a month. There's a reason why people move away from the city when they have kids. We are not far off from doing the same after almost seven otherwise very enjoyable years here.

I've "only" seen two discarded needles on the street the entire time I've been here though, one was outside of a major grocery store just before Thanksgiving.

The rest of the peninsula is pretty vanilla and mundane though. As are the parts of the city not an hour's walking distance from market street. It was very interesting visiting manhattan though, I'm not sure where everyone there goes, but their SOMA-style areas seemed overall cleaner than ours, which leads me to believe it's partly a city management issue.

Regardless of what the map is about, the statement "poop on the streets is very common in San Francisco" is both about human and dog poop. The frequency with which people encounter human poop on the sidewalk in SF is very, very abnormal, even if dog poop is more frequent. One of my best friends owns a house on a street which is not a bad part of town by any means (both sides of the street are lined with immaculately-kept victorians that zillow thinks are worth $3+ million) and he has to clean human poop off of his own sidewalk about once a month.

Both.

Honestly it's a game to identify which. Accidentally left my garage in an 8 unit apartment building open once. Had to clean up the poop 15 minutes later.

Human, if you're wondering still.

Even in San Francisco it’s mostly in a small geographic area, although it does happen to overlap closely with high foot traffic shopping and tourist areas.

Most of _San Francisco_ doesn't have that problem. One of the really weird parts about SF is that the worst part of town is right next to the tourist area, and all the tech companies congregated in the area that had really cheap office space because no established companies would touch the area.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com