San Francisco Poop Map
arcgis.com
arcgis.com
If this is similar to http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/ (from 2017) this is a map listing reports made by individual 311 calls. Wasteland map was 2008-2015, this latest map is just one year.
Could be interesting to see how the number of reports change over the years.
I tried clicking around a cluster to see if multiple reports were made for the same incident, and so making it look worse that it appears, but they appeared to have different dates. The date format wasn't human readable though.
I'm not sure what they were worried would happen in the toilets that wasn't happening on the streets, because people were definitely doing all the things on the pavement, but I felt like it wasn't really helping the shit situation.
- Density of public toilets.
- Perspective of homeless people as more dangerous/violent in SF compared to NY or London. Resulting in them not being allowed to use coffee-shop, station, library toilets.
- Problem is too large to police in SF thus passed a critical mass where it can't be policied.
There a few factors that make homelessness in SF particularly difficult to solve in my opinion:
- Very large unsheltered population relative to total population. SF is only ~850,000 people and of those, ~4,500 people are sleeping on the street on any given night [1] and another ~3,500 in shelters (low end estimates based on point-in-time counts, probably much higher numbers over the course of a year). In other words, around 1% of the city's population is unsheltered and a lot of that population is concentrated in a few areas. That's not counting the many people who are technically homeless but not actually living on the street.
- There are a lot of services to treat the symptoms of homelessness (shelters, food programs, drug programs, etc) and tons of money spent, but nothing is realistically working towards just permanently housing these 7,500 - 8,500 people en mass. So there's no end to the money spent and relatively small permanent results. Of course housing in general is in very short supply in SF, which makes this harder.
- SF is so expensive that the idea of someone going from living on the street to affording permanent residence sounds more like a miracle than a realistic option.
- Many of the unsheltered have mental issues and would require legal intervention to get them off the street, which is not currently happening.
- There is a far left contingent of the population who thinks the idea of criticizing how someone lives or trying to more strongly intervene to get them off the street is wrong/immoral/whatever.
- The problem is so bad (and has been for so long) that I don't think anyone is really thinking big enough or working on anything radical enough to make a big change. Obviously lots of money is spent and lots of individuals work really hard on the issue, but no one has figured how to really change the overall situation.