San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
This is a perfect example of why you codify requirements and any review for permitting is as objective as possible. In this case, it's totally subjective and will be abused to get money and other favors from developers that want the project.
This is pure corruption out in the open and they don't even try and hide it. They even mention that they might not need the full $1.7M and they'll find other uses for the money if it doesn't cost as much. This is theft of tax payer money by unaccountable officials.
Any extra money should be returned to tax payers and every single part and labor cost must be documented and justified.
Not quite. You can spread portable toilets for pennies, or even a shipping container with toilets, but that will make any city look terrible.
If you care about making things nice then it becomes necessary to invest resources making things nice which you would otherwise not have to spend if you just drop a portable toilet off the back of a pickup truck.
Spend 15k on Airbnb in a week for one person? Expense approved.
Seems everyone took a cut somehow.
Matt Haney (the State Senator) asked the Parks & Rec Department for an estimate of what would it cost to build the toilet (given that the hookups are already in place). They shrugged and pulled a figure of $1.7M out of their ass. And he just accepted that! Any normal person would have alarm bells go off in their head about such a large amount. Imagine you walk up to a street vendor and ask about a hot dog, and he responds with $1000. You'll laugh at his face and walk away. But the politicians in SF thought this was perfectly normal, and were getting ready to celebrate this event (until the Chronicle published the article that went viral). Kudos to Heather Knight... but it shouldn't have come this far!
Building a whole house costs $1.7M. A public toilet? Definitely not even close.
But hey, it's not their money, so who gives a shit, right?
When I read cases like these, I feel like maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big.
States like Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky etc. are absolutely not immune to corruption, I assure you.
Small-government Republicanism hasn't truly existed in decades.
However, that's not to diminish blame from cities like NY, Chicago, LA, SF. They need to get their flipping act together.
Except this is SF, not the Federal Government, and part of the reason the costs are so high is because PG&E is holding the city hostage. Republicans want giant corporations like PG&E to have more power to hold the government hostage and loot it. Why do you pay attention to what they say, rather than what they do? They never actually shrink the government; the bigger the government is, the more there is to loot, after all.
One thing you'll see when you live in SF long enough (20+ years here) is that they'll come up with all sorts of crazy excuses to justify bad behavior. Blaming PG&E for the $1.7M cost is bullshit.
It’s particularly a problem with the bread and butter of state and local governance: education and policing. Why are cops in Minneapolis—a city that has two greens on the city council and no republicans—murdering black people? Must be Trump’s fault.
Consider that in places like Portland where city government and local people are openly hostile to the cops, the cops are simply quiet quitting. Despite having the budget to hire hundreds of new cops, literally no one applies to work in Portland.
Thus, if your desire is to get cops to stop murdering, you really should vote for the Democrats or greens or whatever. The issue is that the cops just through a massive hissy fit to punish you, the voter, for trying to bring in a safer society.
I was just in South Korea. The cops there are not empowered. Their police stations are usually the most ghetto looking buildings in their community. I could get a cop to look for my lost bags if I needed it, because that's their role in society there. South Korea is one of the safest societies on earth.
Do we have the same structural factors as south Koreans? No, but demilitarized police can still be effective. Luckily hippy blue cities tend to have low violent crime...
The point is that a democrat signed Derek Chauvin’s checks. A democrat has authority over the department’s training and disciplinary policies. Insofar as police unions stand in the way of reform, democrats are responsible for that too.
Those democrats obviously want to shift focus to Trump voters in Kansas with “Blue Lives Matter” lawn signs. But those Trump voters are just heckling from the sidelines. They’re not the ones with actual authority over how Minneapolis runs its police department.
The Republican position is probably more like "With less regulation more companies could flourish and compete in the same space and then market forces would drive costs down" and less about wanting to steal from people.
It's crazy to think ~half the country just wants to empower big business to rob them. Not least because big business tends to support Democrats.
Even based on public policy (and ignoring how their private actions), US democrats are closer to “global centre” but still in many cases to the right of centre.
On economic issues, the Democrat mainstream is center to center right compared to Europe. But overlook that social democracies in Europe went through a long conservative retrenchment after the 1960s and 1970s. Look at the corporate tax rates in Sweden.
If you want to decide the center yourself on every issue then you’d have to take true and accurate surveys of a global population and then stratify them for their various biases (religious or cultural or whatever) then further stratify each cohort by age, family, gender, sexual orientation, and many other variables. The idealogical center to your surveys will just be the mode for your various questions, if true
Now
You'r right. It's more like 90% of the representatives. The republicans are just more brazen about it.
PG&E is not the reason for this particular high cost, but if it was it would be the D's fault. And it's squarely a local level problem. And yet you manage to somehow blame republicans at a federal level...
Why don't you demand some responsibility from your local politicians instead of blaming a caricature of the other party? If PG&E was at fault here, D's are literally doing what you're mad at the Rs for supposedly doing... Incredible.
This framing means absolutely nothing, which is why politicians love it. It just sounds bad, without actually saying anything and pretty much any negative news headline can be accommodated by it.
But it doesn’t actually shed any light on what the actual problems are. In this case, as you point out, there’s an agency issue. The people paying the money have no real representation in the effort to distribute that money. The problem has nothing to do with the size of the government.
Plus, the people who would vote less obstructionist policies often are the ones who live out in Oakland or something and commute in to work, and thus can't vote on the SF policies, so those people get shoved out even more by the high costs. It's a vicious cycle and there's probably no answer to it besides state/federal intervention to force lack of obstruction (e.g. making certain zoning requirements like "single family home only" illegal). For now, the incentives of local voters are stacked in the "we'll take literal shit on the streets if it means higher housing prices" camp.
People should think about this when they go to vote, because several SF politicians are attempting to potentially run for president and other national positions. One of them is already in the executive branch.
The 'both sides' nonsense I see in this thread needs to stop. It is a lie. There is only one side in San Francisco; we all know what side that is; and for someone reason, we're actually totally okay with those very same politicians becoming top dog nationally. Despite all the hand-wringing here by people saying they can't vote for SF politicians because they don't live in SF, everyone sure seems really happy to do it when it comes to the national elections.
Really? If Newsom runs for president, despite being somewhat moderate, he's going to have problems because Republican attack ads will frame him as the former mayor of the most liberal city in the country while showing pics of the TL in the background.
Feinstein is 89, so...
It happens in Texas, NYC and Idaho.
(Hell, most cities, period, do.)
BUT there's more than enough space and money to build some utopian high-density stuff if it weren't for the NIMBYism. You can work part time as a janitor in downtown Tokyo and afford live in a comfortable apartment within 20 minutes of your job (Comfortable by local standards, but Japanese people don't usually use couches or beds. You could afford a place comfortable by American standards with a 45 minute commute)
Man, this area makes me so angry every day. Every time I go to a store or restaurant the people working there are lazy rude slobs because they're stressed out, overworked, and underpaid. I can't even blame them for being a-holes, because a lot of them have been pushed out of their homes and have to endure hours of commute every day just to BARELY scrape by.
I'm getting blasted by political spam now, and it's all about "protecting home values". If I could somehow cause an earthquake to level this region without physically hurting anyone, I'd do it right now. I'm counting down the days until I can leave at this point.
It's unlikely a janitor would be able to afford a comfortable apartment 20 minutes from work. The norm in Japan is for the husband to be the sole breadwinner, and a janitor's salary would almost certainly push them further away from the center. You certainly can live in the center parts of the city, with low prices, but the place you rent is not going to be comfortable. This is a better situation than SF or NYC, obviously.
Tokyo is actually quite expensive. You can't compare the specific prices against American cities, because the wages are considerably lower. Folks work insane hours to get overtime pay to afford their lifestyles. Similarly, the reason the prices don't increase is partially because they keep up with building enough units (and that's partially due to zoning), but also because there's effectively no inflation, and there hasn't been inflation for a long time. Prices don't change, but neither do wages. Home prices are also deflationary, unlike the US.
Tokyo is a great city to use as a good example of building a dense, immensely enjoyable city, but it's best not to exaggerate.
(I currently live in Tokyo and am in the process of buying a home)
That doesn't mean they'll win, but even a bogus lawsuit is expensive and time-consuming.
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_tosses_suit_cl...
Wonder if it cost Paris 1.7 mil as well?
M is ambiguous between the Roman (M = 1,000), the SI prefix (M = 1,000,000), and metres (screen readers).
$1MM (capitalized) or $1mn (more recent) reduces the ambiguity.
Meters is lowercase m. And nobody uses Roman numerals as a suffix. MM is just unnecessary.
Just because you don't use them, or aren't aware they are used, does not make it unnecessary.
Edit:...
>Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed
Indeed it has. But has its use as a suffix existed for just as long? BTW I am also disappointed that the people still use Roman numerals :) (also completely unnecessary, the Indo-Arabic number system is "better").
> The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M. [0]
k and MM are unambiguous. You don't want to stop & think, and you definitely don't want to be off by a factor of 1000. So it makes sense to avoid typing 'M' if you have any risk of being misinterpreted.
It's mostly about the reduction of risk, it's VERY rare to see M used in this way.
[0] https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stan...
This is unfortunate. $60,000 is $60K (capital K not k) using SI suffixes. Please reject M=1000 today.
This is infeasible, and what does it mean to reject something in a written document?
I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: you're arguing against an established convention in a sector of the market which you don't have experience with.
The upside if you're successful is that I don't need to type an additional 'M'.
The downside is that it requires enforcing a blanket standard on an industry, rather than letting it converge over time to an unambiguous standard.
https://old.reddit.com/r/FinancialCareers/comments/usdr2d/le...
Thanks for the explanation though. Next we'll get into how a european billion is 1000 times more than a US billion.
The British billion went out in 1974/5 (Wilson/Healy). One billion is 1,000,000,000 and you shouldn't expect ambiguity there.
In practical terms, it doesn't matter. It'd be extremely unusual to be at the scale of the old billion (1,000,000,000,000)
----
This is similar to a justification of using `i` as the variable for an iterator, or `x` and `xs` for head & tail. There are logical reasons, but it's mostly convention.
Yes, I clean my own toilets at home.
So why is residence a requirement for the janitor??
Even when we focus on the fiscal aspect of it, I don't think a machine is a bad idea compared to a plan of "find some willing to clean up after addicts and the mentally ill at all hours" - how much would you need to be paid to take that job and show up to outcompete the toilet-dishwasher-machine every day? California has tons of other jobs and generous social programs.
And that's ignoring the angle that we're allocating a human life to this extremely unpleasant and automatable task.
Public bathrooms in cities get destroyed and are very difficult to maintain; a lot of cities give up on free restrooms entirely. One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours.
I priced out some relatively minor kitchen/bathroom renovation work in 2018 at around $100k. Put it off during covid times, and today the quote for the same work is well over $300k. Sure, some company with modular units is gonna sell you a stainless steel box public bathroom for that price, but it’s far from the same thing as a proper building.
To those touting ‘cheap’ self cleaning toilets:
https://missionlocal.org/2019/02/how-san-francisco-flushed-a...
https://dcist.com/story/19/07/29/this-self-cleaning-toilet-c...
I'm in a big city in Canada and there was a downtown farmer's market here for a while. Literally smack in the middle of the city, went up and down a few streets on Saturday mornings. Loved going, was a short walk and had lots of good eats, local produce, etc.
But no bathrooms. None of the local places would let you in if you weren't paying, and the only way I could make a head call was at the local YMCA -- and the only reason they let me in was cuz I was a member of their gym.
It's crazy to me how you can be in the center a huge edifice of planning, piping, conduits, etc. and still not be able to find a toilet.
edit: they did normally have porta-johns but didn't this morning. On at least one occasion I'd seen people tip them over, hopefully with no one in them.
In many parts of the United States, you can buy a whole house for $300k.
And you’d likely get anywhere from a third to half the house you’d have gotten in 2019. That’s the point.
This is a shit take, there’s no evidence for this person being out of touch with respect to anything
I still don't see how that will justify the 1.7m public toilet because someone spent 6 figure on minor renovation work.
Lmao what. 300k for minor renovations? Is it a minor renovation on the international space station or something?
Even in the bay area, those prices are astronomical. You're getting ripped off.
Red states are filled with poverty/inequity it’s just more spread out.
Drive through the derelict areas in rural America and you will see similar issues.
After all, in OK or MS you need a car, which is a $2000+ asset, just to even access any public space or resource or make yourself visible at all.
There's much more poverty in those places, but it is hidden away. You can see a slight bit of it at gas stations that are walking distance to poor areas, but for the most part, those are the lucky ones, and the unlucky ones are walking distance to nothing.
I would much rather be destitute in a big city where I can access all kinds of formal and informal resources like temp agencies or subways to sleep on, than in a rural area where I am totally dependent on rides to anywhere.
The advantage of the rural poverty accrues solely to the wealthier, who don't have to look at the poor as much as the urban wealthy and middle classes do. And perhaps that is why we are kinder (well, ok, slightly less unkind) to the deeply poor here, because we actually see them regularly rather than having locked them away so securely we can actually trick ourselves into thinking we don't have them here.
It is deeply ironic that you came to the opposite conclusion by accepting superficial appearances. The trick of hiding the poor by means of car culture sure worked on you.
A $2k car is a lot less than higher average taxes and housing costs.
I was thinking of the rural South, where maintaining some degree of radical poverty even in the face of all kinds of modern development has been a strange national sport of sorts for hundreds of years. The OP seemed to be pitting southern red state rural vs northern cities based on their list.
$2000 is a lot for plenty of poor people. And it's not even that easy to get a reliable car at that price anymore, you know. I'm glad it's hard for you to imagine that, but having to constantly either deal with the lack of a car (which usually means being unable to get to work, and thus earn money to feed the car...) or struggle to keep a car (worrying about a surprise bill) is a huge, huge pain for the poor.
Public transportation? Public transportation to where? Down the road to the grocery store? Someone is about to wait at a bus stop outside the projects to go 500 feet? Just ride a bike or walk.
Can’t get to work? Someone will pick you up and bring you. Overslept? Expect that same person dragging you out of your bed.
You can find shelter for less than $100/month.
Need food? Go out back and get it.
If I ever was destitute, I’d go back to the rural South in a heartbeat and it blows my mind how many people don’t do that very thing.
Bottom line, I’m 99% sure I’ve a better understanding and closer relationship to extreme poverty than you and you have no idea what you’re talking about.
And despite the fact that we have double the poverty rate of NYC it's nowhere near as apparent.
If you own your hovel outright you can be incredibly far below the poverty line and be "okish" for some value of "ok". Especially if you have a number of people banding together on the same property (very common in rural areas) - some on SSI or SSD, some on welfare, some making some money on odd jobs.
You can't really have that in the city or near it; the land is too valuable.
This is why so many commuters forego cities' public transit in favor of driving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R160_(New_York_City_Subway_car...
You lived in rural America and didn't experience families whose only source of meat was what they hunted? Dude, come on. Or families living in ancient trailer homes/campers?
As for the camps, these places aren't really visible or publicized, I bet plenty of locals don't know about our camp town (or choose not to know). It's way out of town and not near any roads.
There are boatloads of programs to support the urban poor. I donate to many of them. If you need a hand up in Portland, it's there outstretched and straining to reach you. What we have in the streets are not poor people who need help. They are sick, or mentally disabled people. And some are just truly bad people.
Growing up, my own family's primary (at times only) source of protein was fishing and hunting. We somehow struggled through without being degenerates.
Nah, you may need a ride every once in a great while, but in most counties you can get by just walking or biking so long as you live in the county seat. Most services are still consolidated within a couple square miles.
The bigger difference is that you can be incredibly poor and still have a house. We didn't have utilities a decent portion of the time growing up because we were so poor, house was in condemn-worthy condition for most of the time we lived there (roof, basement), but my mom's mortgage was, and still is, around $200 a month.
Massachusetts does the same thing but from Boston to places like Fall River.
Homeless are being bussed to SF without any housing arrangements.
It is the state's prerogative to distribute this as it seems fit.
You know what’s demonstrably shown to improve moral and connectedness of a society? Being forced to live next to people who are worse off than you so that your self-interest is to vote and advocate on their behalf so that you’re not living in a shithole.
Sure some do contribute in a qualitative way to culture and social functions, but not as much economically.
Yes, I'm often accused of being an un-empathic robot, but I can't help looking at this in a macroeconomic sense. Just trying to be intellectually honest with what I see around me in the world.
Results indicate that voucher receipt causes a large increase in violent crime arrests for male recipients. They do not, however, indicate that vouchers have an effect on women or on other types of crime. Specifically, we find a statistically significant increase in violent crime arrests for the overall population and male recipients alone. There are no statistically significant effects for female recipients alone. This dichotomy in the effects for male and female housing voucher recipients is consistent with previous research on the effect of the MTO experiment on juvenile criminal outcomes (Kling et al., 2005, Sciandra et al., 2013, Zuberi, 2012, and Clampet-Lundquist et al., 2011).
These places have a lot of violence, social issues, drug overdoses, etc. They may not have homelessness at the same level because housing is cheaper and in many cases involves a trailer or an old house in disrepair.
Got it.
It is really hard to come back to Seattle and see all of the trash everywhere. In the Seattle airport one of the bathroom stalls looked like someone had used the floor as a trash can. There were orange peels, discarded shoes, and various other trash sitting on the floor next to the toilet.
Social problems exist everywhere, but that's no reason to give up on having pleasant and usable public spaces.
This is your alternative.
A democrat could have genuinely good policy that would make an enormous difference for a lot of republican voters. But stances on social issues like gay marriage, gun control, etc, will make them unviable as a candidate. If they switch and support these issues, then they'll lose their primary.
“Why doesn’t the urban coalition simply win rural votes?” is a silly question. They would win rural votes by prioritizing different issues and then the issues important to urban citizens would be less likely to get addressed.
Also, notice how I said political parties and not an urban coalition: these are not the same, and their needs are different. There are rural democratic voices, and they do engage in these issues, but the wider party does not seem as interested in this. And that's why they will continue to loose rural voters in the house this November. They don't care as much to spend the time and resources on these campaigns, and this whole fight against the electoral college and how seats are dived up among states is a ruse to further consolidate power while abdicating accountability on a national level.
Also, when democrats spend money on an extreme opponent campaign (which is diabolical) to make their own party look better, people see through that. It's just sick and could severely backfire on everyone. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/dem...
But you’re missing my point by ignoring coalitions to focus on parties.
Imagine a religion that is a mix of democrats and republicans. Imagine Saturday is a holy day for them where they try not to engage with the modern world as much.
If elections were only held on Saturday this would hurt their community.
This is why farm subsidies are plentiful for example, neither party wants to claw those back and face the consequences.
It’s also why social security is “the third rail of American politics”. Republican or democrat, no senior wants their checks messed with. And having elections on a Tuesday in November is a fine time for seniors and retirees to vote even if it sucks for other people.
At this point, Florida and Texas have record net in-flux migration from California. Can't wait to see this competition completely kick California's butt. It is a shame, I am stuck here, I'd move otherwise. With all my heart, I want to improve California. I just don't see a way.
/s Wouldn't it make more sense for them to ramshackle up together in bobbies place down the road? I hear he's got the good meth.
Because urban areas tend to be blue, and urban areas attract more poverty (costs are higher, easier to get into poverty; but also there are plenty of public services around that make it "easier" to be poor). Poverty is also just much more visible in areas with denser populations.
I assure you that there's plenty of poverty in right-leaning areas in the US. They're just usually not as visible.
Crime has been dropping for decades, and cities are safer than ever. Hell, San Francisco is one of the least violent cities in the country.
The sad thing is that Sinclair is not pushing this narrative in some of the most crime ridden cities, so the sentiment in those places is actually higher.
All speculation, but worth considering nonetheless?
Crime is actually down, but crime reporting is considerably up. It drives local news viewership, which drives their advertising revenue. People don't watch news for good news. Because of this trend, people also think that crime is at all time highs.
Crime is higher in republican controlled areas because poverty, as a whole, is higher, and assistance programs are slashed. Crime (excluding white collar) is primarily driven by poverty. Republican controlled areas do also police more aggressively, and tend to heavily over police particular groups, but that hasn't lowered their crime rate, and has likely made it worse, by further pushing those groups into poverty.
FWIW, I work on a national news media app and advertising CPMs are down considerably year over year thanks to Apple's ATT update, so advertising is not the driver for these business as much as it once was. Many are looking to subscription revenue to fill the void, but even that's not enough to cover the loss.
I know less about the linear (TV) and print distribution side of the business, but my guess is they're also struggling given that their target demo is getting older and older while younger cohorts aren't adopting these legacy distribution channels. https://mobiledevmemo.com/att-is-killing-advertising-perform...
You're correct in that "if it bleeds it leads"; people are fixated by bad news.
I can say anecdotally after living in both NYC and right-leaning rural NY and PA areas where the crime and poverty rates are statistically higher that it's cleaner and these issues aren't as apparent, so something isn't adding up.
The maintenance of these 106 facilities cost around 6,895,000 CHF (~USD) per year. Around 40% of that is staffing costs and 23% is rent to 3rd parties.
Yearly investment in upgrades etc. is around CHF 1,796,000
[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/gud/de/index/gesundheitsschutz/...
It only took me about a year of about 2 hours per day learning german as my third language to feel confident enough to apply for a job that was similar enough to what I got in S.F, I was hired in about a week at a financial institution as an applied data scientist in the fraud deparment. Could probably have tried earlier but wanted to be able to integrated decently into the swiss society without feeling I was leeching too much.
I knew someone in S.F. who married a woman from Switzerland roughly 5 years ago and moved out there...did you work at a software consulting company in S.F.?
Is German or French more common? >
It depends base on the canton, but in the overall swiss german is more spoken than french.
I knew someone in S.F. who married a woman from Switzerland roughly 5 years ago and moved out there...did you work at a software consulting company in S.F.? >
Can't be me, I'm a female ^^.
The ~west speaks French (we call the region Romandie), south-east speaks Italian (canton of Ticino), the rest speaks (Swiss-)German.
https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/hbd/de/index/immobilien-bewirts...
Building a public toilet that remains reasonably appealing over its lifecycle (Zürich plans for a 20 year lifetime) is a non-trivial problem and has a non-trivial cost.
This particular price tag on this particular project isn't super important, but it looks to me like California government projects and public institutions have a pattern of doing this, adding up to a whole lot more than $1.7M.
I'm open to being proven wrong here but it seems like this statement needs to be justified.
Were your parents extremely well off? I don't see how one can make it through life without being wary of the bad intent other people can have without some sort of caretaker that will bail you out.
Can you point to where I say any of this is good or show any sign of support for any of it?
Were your parent's uneducated? I don't see how you could make it through life with this level of reading comprehension.
Yet when I am looking at a project that me and a couple of guys could do over a weekend then be told its going to cost enough for modest person to retire. I don't need extra evidence. I know immediately that corruption is at play. There is no honest answer that ends up at 1.7mil. Sure you will get a mile long list of "explanations" that are all part of the corruption. That pile of money is going into bank accounts at the end of the day and that's all there is too it.
How can a person not see this?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Ex-S-F-Public-Wo...
Probably the mistake is undertaking such a small project to begin with. It sounds like there are many fixed overhead costs (such as environmental review) that must be paid regardless of project size. Maybe you could have a 1,000 sq. ft. bathroom for $2 million, or an entire 10,000 sq. ft. park for $4 million.
Why was this downvoted?
All the waste of money was done above the table and according to official government process. On one hand it's just a bunch of people who DGAF about the big picture doing their jobs and nothing more. On the other hand it walks, floats and quacks like the graft duck.
This looks a lot like the "I'm gonna pay you $100 to F-off" scene from Trailer Park Boys where the money is being given to parties who would usually whine if there wasn't something "in it for them" (the unions, the NIMBYs, the politicians, etc.)
Surely the fact pattern doesn't meat the legal definition of graft but if the entity doing the paying out wasn't the government a negligence tort would probably fly so it kind of begs the question why this fact pattern is acceptable.
https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/467529962c184258d08f16daec...
> General Interference with Organizations and Production
> Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Be worried about the propriety of any decision -- raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
Were they sabotaging German bureaucracy, or American? Neither seems likely.
For example: https://jalopnik.com/citroen-sabotaged-wartime-nazi-truck-pr...
> Of course, he instructed workers to set a nice, leisurely pace when building trucks (likely Citroën T45 trucks) for the Wermacht, but that’s fairly obvious. What was brilliant was Boulanger’s idea to move the little notch on the trucks’ oil dipsticks that indicated the proper level of oil down just a bit lower.
> By moving the notch down, the trucks would not have enough oil, but German mechanics would have no idea, because, hey, the little notch on the dipstick says its just fine. Then, after the truck has been used for a while and is out deployed somewhere crucial, whammo, the engine seizes up, and you’ve got a lot of angry, stranded, vulnerable Nazis, balling up their little fists and redly barking curses in German.
The whole thing also includes lots of non-meeting options; making sprinkler systems go off, clogging toilets, dulling cutting tools, etc.
Anyone who has dealt with children can recognize it immediately, but it can be damn hard to "identify and punish" because they're following the letter of the law.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-san-francisco-pu...
A lot of the money is presumably going into the extremely long public comment process mentioned in the article that building any sort of public works take in the US and which usually ends up resulting in paying to have projects redesigned multiple times when anyone complains. That seems more like incompetence or a failure in the political process than corruption/grift to me. Really the only people that benefit are the planners who end up redesigning stuff multiple times (but who probably don't necessarily really want to have to do that) and the NIMBYs who are able to effectively destroy any project if they're persistent and vocal enough. The politicians or local government officials don't really benefit because their projects end up getting effectively killed. While it's tempting to assume everything is due to intentional corruption, it's actually hard to point to anyone who's really successfully pulling off a "grift" here.
Actually building anything also costs more in the US than pretty much anywhere else, which could be attributed to "grift" but it's so diffuse and systemic that it also seems to fall under "incompetence" as a result of the complete lack of any process that successfully keeps the prices in check or looks at how other countries are doing things better.
Also, it seems like even other countries that have more outright bribery are more successful at actually getting stuff like this built than the US, so even if corruption is a factor it might not even be the biggest problem.
This seems like the usual case of public servants doing everything possible to avoid someone being unhappy with them later. Consultations, union workers, tons and tons of approvals, etc. Remember, you can't really win as a government worker. The priority is not to lose.
You want every little concern addressed? You want layers and layers of accountability? You want the top concern of every person in gov to be avoiding any possible desire to be responsible for something?
You get this.
I've seen this play out many times. No corruption. No grift. Just ass covering.
A culture shift.
You are right more regulations/another layer isn't going to help.
Back to the idea that public servants are indeed servants to the public, and their entire purpose is to spend the public's money in a way that benefits the public.
You might be surprised, however, at what percentage of federal bureaocracy does see themselves as civil servants.
The culture shift can be done. And it is well worth it, for everyone's sake. Corruption represents a Nash equilibrium, once rooted it is very hard to remove.
That's why I'm defending government workers here. We want good, effective government. This requires good, effective people to carry out the work. Making this respectable and letting those people do their job is pretty key to getting that good government.
The principles aren't so different from managing a team of software engineers. Would you enjoy working (in software) in a company where sales and marketing was always blaming the engineers, and HR was always calling the engineers lazy, and management was constantly shifting priorities while blaming engineers for not hitting targets, etc...
So why create the same environment for government workers? Why not treat them with the same professional respect you'd expect/hope for in your job?
And why not call out the politician as the a*hat when he insults the people trying to get the job done?
1. Actual rewards in gov for success. In the public sector, the smartest people try nothing new and do not innovate because that would be a dumb thing to do, as you are punished for failure and not rewarded for success.
Someone who delivers a big win should get a big bonus. The problem is that when that has happened, some article will get written and managers will get in trouble over it.
2. Tolerance for missteps, delays, and schedule changes.
I spend 2 weeks fixing a hard to solve bug for my private sector unicorn? No big deal. Maybe talk about it a bit in retro and move on.
In my public sector job? At least three meetings on why we missed the sprint goal. Why? As someone above wants to cover their ass on missing the sprint goal. And we will write up a several page doc on why we missed the sprint goal.
Someone takes a chance on a much cheaper contractor and it doesn't work out? They can't be dragged to meeting after meeting having to defend it. That is how you get people hiring IBM for failed project after failed project, because at least they can say "IBM is the standard practice."
It jacked up the price considerably. Lots of interests end up with some strange outcomes.
Joe Taxpayer doesn't show up to the planning meetings. Joe Taxpayer doesn't submit anything to the feedback forms. Joe Taxpayer doesn't care enough about any particular project to really win.
The people we have elected(directly or indirectly) are terrified they might be confronted with the consequences of doing their job, and making a choice. I see the same thing at work, and in my church community.
I've found it's often better to have a direct conflict early, than an prolonged indirect conflict. Having the courage to deliberately engage in it is a whole different ball game though.
But people also need to have an actual interest in engaging in the conflict. I refuse to engage at work. You could be shipping passwords in plaintext and I will let you do it, as they are not my users.
In the case of elected officials, it is even worse. Smaller waste can easily go unnoticed, unless you bring it up, fight a lot of people, and get blamed for not finding it earlier. Another thing work has taught me. Cover ups nearly always make sense.
You're saying this process arises by trying to not make people unhappy, not leave concerns unaddressed, having layers of accountability. But people are not happy, concerns (ongoing feces) are not addressed, and given that there isn't a person to blame for the ongoing situation there is clearly insufficient accountability.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-gove...
If you can't build things in the cheaper areas, all that's left are the expensive ones.
Perhaps we could reign that in. Democracy is how we elect leaders. If enough of our leaders decide to do something, then we do it. Maybe we have one public comment period for really big projects. But it gets done. Don't like what they did? Vote them out.
All I can to personally is not vote for or against these various things.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Golden-Gate-Bri...
The detractors did have a point though:
> Any bridge with a clearance of less than 250 feet could blockade the harbor as the size and height of international vessels increased.
How much has the 220 foot air draft restriction affected the Port of Oakland (and SF, if Pier 80 ever got running again)? Does this factor into imports (that aren't bound for NorCal) seeming to goto the much busier container ports in Seattle/Tacoma and LA/Long Beach instead?
https://container-news.com/top-10-the-busiest-container-port...
Meanwhile, there's been a flurry of new construction across the street from my local container port in Old Portland (Maine), which sees 2 orders of magnitude fewer containers than Oakland, but does have a stranglehold on the nation's supply of imported fish sticks. It seems like a key in getting approval to build right on Commercial St has been proposing buildings that look pretty good and fit the area, e.g.
> The eastern span replacement of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was a construction project to replace a seismically unsound portion of the Bay Bridge with a new self-anchored suspension bridge (SAS) and a pair of viaducts. The bridge is in the U.S. state of California and crosses the San Francisco Bay between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland. The span replacement took place between 2002 and 2013, and is the most expensive public works project in California history,[5] with a final price tag of $6.5 billion, a 2,500% cost overrun from the original estimate of $250 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_th...
Seriously all the people moving to the "SF of Texas" because they no longer like SF is hilarious.
The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners).
It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.
Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong.
A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.
This assumes that the cost is due to fees imposed by the government.
From the article:
>> [The costs] include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach.
>> we expect to be able to complete [the toilet] in 2025
> a rejected San Francisco apartment complex...required a more than 1,110-page environmental assessment [1]
It is not socially acceptable to charge a million dollar permit for constructing a toilet. It is socially acceptable to make the process so onerous that it costs more than a million dollars to complete. Think of the environment.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-20/the-landm...
It's great for multiplying the amount of physical things everyone gets to consume as long as the quality of those things isn't taken into account. It's a disaster in the event we actually need to build any physical things for ourselves.
We've been able to pretend this isn't true for the last 40 years as we wore our existing infrastructure down into the ground. It is becoming more apparent now as we fail to rebuild to the state we were in 70 years ago.
Americans can't afford to buy things made by Americans.
Again we papered over this issue with decades of supressed interest rates but the ruse can't last forever.
My theory is that they prey on people that don’t know any better. Less and less people know how to DIY so they have no frame of reference for the real value of labor and get scammed.
And they were unfounded. The self-cleaning and maintenance schedule does not attract homeless. I've literally watched a drug user argue with one because the door forcefully opened automatically after 15 minutes and he marched off to finish his business elsewhere.
Yeah, because it's a huge problem when you have a homeless junkie causing problems where you live.
> And [the concerns] were unfounded. ... I've literally watched a drug user argue with one
You're not helping your argument here.
> Matt Haney, who secured the $1.7 million funding from the state to install the toilet ...
So it is not necessarily a "grift" ( although many are profiting from it and are probably more than happy about the situation being the way it is ) but the result of decades of laws to regulate public work and spending ( ironically ).
This is the "grift" part of it; those "many [...] profiting from it" are often times friends or acquaintances of the officials regulating them
Right, the red tape still exists to this day to allow for grifters to come in who help "expedite" the process for a fee. So it's really the same thing.
https://missionlocal.org/2019/02/how-san-francisco-flushed-a...
If it's not corruption, then I am more worried.
This doesn't get rid of the permitting process, but it has been debugged and is already working in multiple cities.
2. https://pffcdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Portland-Loo-P... - $90,000 + estimated install costs of $4000
but very good point about NIH-syndrome. it's a shame that so much money needs to be spent when another solution has shown to work so well.
Problem is anyone proposing this in government would be cancelled for disgracing the homeless or some shit (I’m homeless, I get a free pass). The absolute worst part of the homeless experience is being in a city during the hours when bathrooms are locked and desperately needing to use one. Not proud of the things I’ve done in times of such calamity.
At least SF has people freely shooting up on the streets, so perhaps they won’t feel as compelled to prevent them from using bathrooms for the same? Anyone know if SF bathrooms get locked?
We need to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or the whole city turns into a toilet.
If not a doggy bag supply outside locked bathrooms, a roomful of toilets with no doors/walls/etc would be better than what we have now. Down with the idea that defecation is a naughtily private affair, bring back public bathhouses!
Now imagine you live in a community with a dozen other hobos, what sorts of policies would you legislate?
You know we aren’t that different, you and I.
Since $2.6B can be too big to think about, Salesforce Tower (tallest building in SF) cost $1.1B to build around the same time and in the same location. It took 5 years to build.
Why did I mention Covid, to illustrate the point that things are more valuable now rather than later, cause you don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to hear that it's going to be useful eventually when they could've KISS'd and made something useful years ago.
As for the bus-station-in-the-sky...talk to any AC Transit planner and they will say (privately) the agency would have much preferred for transbay buses to continue down Market St (i.e. similar to how BART works). But AC Transit is not allowed to compete with SF Muni, so instead a giant bus parking lot was built above some of the most pricey real estate in the world.
So yes, the station is yet another example of Bay Area dysfunction.
Why did your project take 2x as long and cost 5x as much? Because somebody on the internet made snarky comments...
No, this is grift, red tape and incompetence. Go look at other cities in the US, they don't have these costs that are anywhere near SF for the same amount of work.
I can sort of correlate this, well, expression, with a political view. State it more crisply.
Your comment goes against several of these requirements. Be better than this.
/s
It performs pretty badly on public transport, safety, affordability & sanitation. All its pros seem to exist despite the management, and not because of it. (Universities, Jobs, Weather, Nature)
I thought Greater Seattle was badly managed, but it has been funding light rail, missing middle-housing and recently started reversing the crime problem bit-by-bit. Bangalore might get a shoutout, but they did see unprecedented population explosion in a decade and are at least (badly) trying to build their way out of it now.
I'll take a moment to mention one of my favorite comments on HN
"I call them PINO NOIRs: Progressive In Name Only, NIMBY-Only In Reality"Similarly, it's not the community that's involved in these decisions, it's a veto system where only those with abundant time and resources can be heard and have influence in the system, further cementing economic privilege rather than making it more equitable or democratic. For recent academic investigations of this, check out the book Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Einstein et al:
Which red state area is more dense than SF?
You have to evaluate the context of the action. "not building stuff" and "building stuff" can both be conservative at different places or times.
* I drive on the sidewalk
In regular cities you simply can’t afford to be wasteful. But San Francisco and Seattle have endless streams of easy money to burn.
It’s sort of like the oil curse. The governments of gulf states can afford to be uniquely terrible, in ways other governments cannot.
This means there's a steady supply of "tax income" that is not from residents, which I bet exacerbates the problem until such time as companies move to the suburbs.
Some areas have "solved" this by moving much of the actual government to the county level, or by creating intercity agencies to handle things.
I've been thinking a lot about this, and after going through a year long process of trying to get the city (actually the port authority) to simply lock a dumpster at night as they say they do but don't actually.
SF in particular seems to look for fancy big expensive flashy solutions to problems rather than look to other cities who have solved the issue in a simple "KISS" approach.
In the example of the unlocked dumpsters which were and are a serious public health hazard (people and raccoons go though it every night and drag the trash all over the waterfront and immediate area) I kept calling the port just asking them to lock them at night. They said thos was already happening, but clearly wasn't. We went back and forth for months but I got nowhere. The port kept telling me they they got new big Belly Trash Cans and have asked to build a new dumpster enclosure. All that was 2 years ago and the dumpsters still sit open today. All I was asking for was for them to lock the dumpsters they said they were already locking, with the lock that's already on the dumpster. It's not a "build a new building" or buy expensive things problem. It's a simple people doing their job as promised problem.
Back to this. I've been thinking of starting a non profit that distributes 5 gallon buckets with toilet lids on them (they make them for camping, like this: https://www.amazon.com/Camco-Toilet-Seat-Proof-Waste/dp/B07N...)
A non profit that distributed these throughout the city, then picked them up every few days would do far more good than any of these other efforts I've seen proposed by the city. The problem is its not sexy, interesting or newsworthy, it's just work. Working with a startup or design team to yet again invent another solution is, so that's why the people in power do that. Not because its better.
https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/gradonacelnik-zivinica-sveca...
But to talk about the nationwide problem that building anything anywhere takes orders of magnitude too long and too much, there's no smoking gun. It seems to be a combination of factors from understaffed government agencies, to invested interests, to out of date regulations, to just bad engineering and planning.[2][3]
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-pricey-t...
[1] https://www.trashcanswarehouse.com/Municipal-Trash-Cans-and-...
[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/why-we-cant-figure-o...
[3] https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
There are hundreds of designs now for less than $1000 each.
Before the project is put out for bid, it will be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act, according to the Chronicle.
The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” according to a joint statement from Rec and Parks Department and the Department of Public Works, which added that, “While this isn’t the cheapest way to build, it reflects San Francisco’s values.”
Lots of palms greased all the way around.
There's a reason we have transparency in the bidding process for government work. This is cronyism.
this part stands out to me, they have no incentive to say "yes" to anything (apart from a bribe) and every incentive to say "no". if they say "yes" that means projects can actually go ahead and the arts council has nothing left to do[1]. and they can say "no" for any reason they like since the standards are subjective.
liquidate the whole thing.
Could SF purchase them instead?
If they were required by law to keep sufficiently detailed account of the government money they are using, and while making these public by default might be hard to convince people of (due to obvious questions about commercial in confidence information)… just requiring them to exist as government records of the project opens a pathway for the existing FOI processes to grant access to these for public inspection when it’s in the public interest.
I really struggle to image how a FOI request to produce the itemised cost documentation of the 1.7 million dollar public toilet, might possibly not be in the public interest.
Installation - 2k
Rest - …
[0] https://europeforvisitors.com/paris/articles/paris-public-to...
It's certainly getting better with time, but we're far from anything decent
https://theoutline.com/post/8660/san-francisco-pissoir-aesth...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
It seems like it’s a bipartisan past time to waste taxpayers money on foolishly over expensive pet projects.
And then forcing them to waste money by shifting their tasks and priorities followed by blaming them again for the waste.
The military overspending was on hammers. And the politician forgot to mention that these were hammers for use in a munitions factory, where it was rather important that the hammer not generate even micro-sparks.
The politician also didn't mention anything about government overspend on desks for senators. I'm sure his desk didn't come from Ikea, but somehow that wasn't a problem.
To gain power and direct the spending to your team.
Rinse and repeat.
Yahoo doesn't produce much content, they distribute it. This is from the National Review, which is a partisan editorial magazine. It is not bias or incorrect to say it is not journalism. It is a subsidiary of the NRI, which is a dedicated to advancing conservative ideas and politicians (that is in their words - https://www.flipsnack.com/nrinst/2022-my-newsletter.html)
This type of content is fairly well crafted to appeal to certain worst impulses, and manipulate people. There is a US political movement based on creating a long standing state of aggrievement and thrive on this sort of cortisol raising material. It's is a shame to see it getting a foothold here.
The truth is there is always something to get outraged about somewhere, and rather than focusing on them everyone should do their best to live with dignity, integrity, and empathy.
“Accountability” would mean a massive reduction in headcount, budget, and taxation. The likelihood of this happening in SF is….. you know the answer to that.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/local-news/transport-london-w...
3 years of litigation until all the stakeholders agree on all the aspects of this public toilet are not cheap.
And what if the environmental reviews find a bunny family living at the proposed location? Relocating the bunny family will probably cost another million and 2 years of delay.
It's inefficient, ineffective and definitely not cheap.
When many hands, many meetings, and definitely many layers of middleman are involved, it'll cost millions to build a single toilet.
This leads to what you described. I guess it also offers an easy cop out for them if the button will be placed in the worst possible way. "Since Jerry was also on the call and I always thought he has final say."
The final straw was a feature that should have taken 15 minutes. It instead took three weeks, because customer support, product owners and the design team couldn't agree on whether the change was necessary or if it would be harmful. Of course, none of this conversation happened until my change was already mostly done and I had to ask a question to clarify something in the ticket's acceptance criteria.
I got dinged because my work took too long... and I immediately started interviewing elsewhere. When good workers leave because they cannot tolerate bad inertia, all you're left with is people who don't mind or find a way to game it, and the problem gets worse.
At the end of the evening, he'd take the firehose in there to clean up.
Did he not know how to bargain?
He just paid whatever amount people asked him to pay?
The irony in this statement, given the reasons why this toilet costs so much, is absolutely unreal. I had to check the date on this article to make sure it wasn't an old April's Fools skit or something, but it seems red tape and NIMBYism have escalated to such a degree in SF that (a) securing budget for a single toilet that will take 3 years to build is considered a political victory worthy of patting themselves on the back in the press, and (b) a toilet to "ease" rampant homelessness is considered a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes.
Wild.
Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all
The airport is actually a couple of cities away (there are a lot of cities in the Bay Area).
NYC - JFK LGA EGW
PARIS - CDG ORY
London - LGW LHR
Tokyo - NRT HND
SF - SFO SJC
If someone starts refering to a city by the airport code I'd be completely lost because most airports and their codes don't reflect the name of the city they service.
Just be glad you don't live in Cumaná I guess.
100% believe this.
There's a lot of San Francisco (and Bay Area) out there that has nothing to do with the startup scene, and many, many people who have no connection to and couldn't care less about it.
You should have gotten out more.
Running joke between me and the rest of the startup team in SF was that every time we go to an event, people lead conversations by asking what stack I use, which version of Python, and why the heck I'm messing with XMPP. I understood the importance of seeking out non-techies.
And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.
Yes they do. And some also call it Frisco and San Fran.
After 35 years in the Bay Area I have settled on calling it "The City" but will bust out with "San Fran Frisco" on special occasions to just to be irritating to those who desperately want to "fit in."
I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.
This gives everything I've been told or heard about SFO somewhat of a 'superficial' veneer (forgive me for lack of better words, I do not mean offense) based on the assumption that a city governed by its constituents ought to resemble them, but I'm seeing stuff like this where the words and intentions are right, but the actions and results are incongruent. Is this a mismatch between the politicians and residents or is this a "yes, but do it over there" thing?
p.s. congrats on the move! in your opinion, what makes Seattle different? I've been there before, it was a beautiful and welcoming experience. People are friendly like here in the sticks, but there's just a lot more folks.
The core of the problem is that SF has spent decades investing in giving every person, block, and neighborhood ways to participate in planning and changes. Generally this means giving out some kind of veto. So when the time comes to do something "Yes, but do it somewhere else" is the predominant response.
To put it another way - everybody wants more shelters for the indigent, nobody wants one near where they live. The planning system is structured around enabling this.
What are the resources (aside from this restroom) afforded to those without, near SFO? I'm tempted to think about this time when a local made a habit of feeding the deer, eventually they went from not being seen to no longer fearing people and would walk right up to the porch expecting sandwiches and RC Cola. Is it possible the abundance of resources exacerbates the situation where those seeking them arrive?
As to that question... it's a difficult one to answer. My understanding is that it's both difficult to study and politically sensitive.
Unfortunately I think you're right. A lot of delicate conversations fall into this category, and not just in SFO. As time passes my perspective shifts and I begin to realize our actions being at odds with our beliefs is not an ideologically linked trait, it is an innate quality of humanity.
It is as if having the correct belief-system is sufficient and on par with actually living those values- the emotional reward is the same.
It seems most of those are caused by just poverty, not able to afford living expenses pushed people to the streets.
Some amount of them are coming from other cities who get rid of their homeless by sending them to cities like San Francisco, but Sam Francisco also sometimes send homeless away similarly, this happens all over the US, as a kind of way to spread it out more evenly so it's not as visible in any given place.
The fundamental issues of poverty are hard to solve, obviously, every country, city, nation, has always struggled with this. It's also a little more complicated due to some of the homeless also suffering from mental illness or drug addiction, that doesn't always make them qualified to even work, so it's like poverty mixed with what to do with the people that can't contribute to the work force as effectively.
There's also the case of temperate climate, that's pretty attractive to people who live in the streets, but it's also convenient for a city, if homeless are dying of frost bites or heat, you might feel more compelled to give them shelter, but when outdoor tents suffice you might instead choose to shelter them outside like that and just keep moving them around so they don't stay to the same place too long for the neighbors to complain.
I've heard San Francisco has a policy that when they give shelter, it has to be a full apartment with social service support, whereas New York and other cities go for more warehouse shelters, beds in a big room. The former is nicer to people that get to have access to them, but it hasn't scaled, whereas as the latter isn't as nice but has had more success actually sheltering them and hiding them from view I guess.
> Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income
-- https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
> According to responses from a 2019 survey of homeless people identified through the PIT count, a quarter said losing a job was the primary reason they became homeless
-- https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
> When unhoused adults 61 and older were surveyed during the 2019 PIT count and asked why they had become homeless, 22 percent said it resulted from a job loss and 20 percent cited an eviction.
“The fastest-growing segment (of the homeless) is 51 and older who are homeless for the first time,”
-- https://sfseniorbeat.com/2021/06/22/people-over-age-51-remai...
It's only 46 square mile and has over 800k inhabitants. It's the second densest city after New York.
The surrounding Bay area adds 6.7 million more people, a large amount of who regularly go into the city for entertainment or work. I think it's an estimated 160k additional people that come in to the city per day from the outer areas. And there is an average of 131k tourist in the city each day as well.
So you have almost 1.1 million people in a 46 square mile area.
The city is fully built as well, there's no lots left, everything has a building on it with no room to grow, nowhere to expand out.
You could only expand up, but that would require destroying and rebuilding. The landscape is also all hills and valleys, huge slopes, it's not the easiest to work around.
The mayor is born and raised and still lives in San Francisco.
All in all, I just think running a city like that, of that size and yet so populous, that also has so much wealth at the top, a relatively strong middle, but also large lows, it's got a lot of all classes of things, it's just a harder problem because of the sheer scale and density of it all.
Seattle is twice the size at 84 square mile, and has a smaller population at 740k. The city has developed more recently as well, and a lot of the newer development are big tall skyscraper, there's still a little bit of building too small in some places, but it still hasn't reached anywhere the sheer density of San Francisco.
The other problem facing cities such as San Francisco is that despite its density it does a piss poor job at public transit and is still focused on car-first infrastructure. To your point, the surrounding area is ~7 million. It’s physically impossible for all of them or even most of them to drive everywhere without gigantic infrastructure problems. It will simply not work. Ever. It is physically impossible.
As in exaggerating it's livable land size? Or the other way around?
This occurs because the city occupies ~225 square miles [1] and so when you look at density it turns out Columbus isn't much of a big city at all.
If you look at this link from Wikipedia, Columbus is even larger than San Francisco or Boston! Wow so big. But the relevant metric is density, not square milage.
I could have been more clear here but I just wanted other readers to note that you can't just look at square milage or even population, you have to look at those together to get density to help derive insight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
While that may be true, a huge fraction of the city is single family homes. Increasing housing capacity would be trivial were the political will to exist.
You'd have to re-appropriate people's family homes, or buy it from them. You have to destroy, possibly decontaminate, and then rebuild, there's the neighborhood to think about as well, with neighbors having to deal with the construction and the newly obstructed view, etc. Does the infrastructure support feeding water, gaz, electricity, internet as needed for a large apartment complex, and so on.
It is feasible, but can you think of a more complicated situation then this one? As it comes to cities and paths to increase housing, San Francisco seems to be one of the hardest one to accomplish.
[eta: I'm not making an opinion about what is good/bad/should be done. Just expressing what I understand is happening.]
I've never heard Seattle described as a place where "shit can actually get done," but I suppose its not quite as bad as SF at this point.
It sounds like your books are giving you an inaccurate view of San Francisco, because almost nothing is more on-brand for the city than red tape and NIMBYism.
> We can't just paint 1,200 curbs, it's going to be a longer process.
https://twitter.com/aarieff/status/1582408966163660802?s=46&...
This is the method for any change. SF thinks it peaked in the 80s or 90s and any change requires community consensus lest the 50 people that use a bus stop a day are inconveniencing the single car owner that parks in front of the bus stop.
SF was always dense. At some point, all these tech companies moved in, and it became what I call a "commuter city" where a huge proportion of people there during the day don't actually live there or necessarily want to be there. It also shifted the culture, probably for the worse. Of course many living there beforehand might not like that. Yeah some people own property, but generally big business stands to gain the most from the influx, not the residents. I wouldn't be happy in their shoes either, and the only reason I wouldn't be NIMBY about it is I'd just leave. The NIMBYs basically lost; the city grew anyway.
And it comes from every side, not just a "left or right" thing. People with nice houses don't want their neighborhoods to deteriorate. Renters don't want rent to go up. Even the stereotypical SJW people against gentrification... that's NIMBY.
Also, being a dense, very wealthy area with relatively fair weather, SF is naturally a place for homeless people to congregate. Besides the obvious squalor that brings, businesses don't trust just anyone off the street. No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that.
If anybody is dedicated to 'social justice', to remove/resist facilities to relieve oneself just seems so far off the mark. I'm sure a lot of this is due to me not being in a city as dense as SFO, that undoubtedly has to change the dynamic. How much is this a "this is just a great place to live" issue, and how much is this a "this is a great place for easy resources if you're disadvantaged" issue?
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but in a chicken and egg way, I'm curious if a city with this much "not-here" going on, do people give money to initiatives and charities and people who ask for money/food on the street, or is it typically a city where people avert their gaze? I ask this because if resources were hard to be secured without effort, and if the city is generally expensive to reside in, the amount of those without resources should decline, right?
Where my hypothesis / thought-experiment falls apart is from what I can tell, most of California has amazing weather, so even sleeping on a sidewalk it's got to be quite hospitable and paradise-like (as odd as it feels to say)
To another: The folks living in the street are generally not the same as those in the laboring class. So indeed, those without resources working especially in the service industry are declining, and this is becoming quite an issue with cost and availability of these businesses. The people on the street mostly seem to thrive off the excess wealth the city casts off. But to be clear, although it doesn’t freeze, SF is no balmy paradise.
I don't know but would wager that it's not those people. All sorts of people live in SF, like anywhere else.
Is this seriously the reality of SF? Never been there. If yes, that's pretty bad and degrades the city in some aspects to 3rd world place. But then again I am in Europe, many things like crazy homeless people I saw often in LA are unheard of here.
What do you do if you do multi-hour walk around the city? Or hop from one restaurant/cafe/bar to another one?
It's not very difficult to deal with, just annoying enough that at some point you might get tired of it. I walked everywhere, only avoiding a few streets. You can find the cafés or even public seating areas that are hospitable, but it may require a little trial and error.
The one actually hard thing is finding a bathroom. Many businesses don't have one even for paying customers, unless it's a sit-down restaurant.
If you're a local, there's of course social engineering tricks you can use, like going into a branch of your bank to make a withdrawal, then asking to use their bathroom.
Restrooms are the first victim of the tragedy of the commons.
In Sunset, Parkside, Richmond, Sunnyside, Glen Park, etc the coffee shops and restaurants have chairs. Many with the space have outdoor seating. Lots of them have bathrooms too - the ones that don't are for building space reasons not because of abuse. The bathrooms are supposedly for paying customers only (like much of the US) but I happen to know if you have kids they waive that restriction (blowouts rightfully generate pity from anyone who's ever had kids). I've never been asked for ID to enter a store. My local CVS does have some products behind locked covers but only a few more than my parent's small town CVS. It doesn't have a security guard. Everything is just more normal and relaxed.
That said there are areas of the city where things are much more annoying due to theft, vandalism, and so on. Walking into a CVS in Mission/SOMA vs a CVS in Diamond Heights is like two completely different brand of store. Crime has definitely increased.
Fast forward 20 years later, the town grew substantially anyway, within the terms of the restriction. And all the problems that the lawyer and his supporters said their restriction would prevent happened. Traffic, densification (loss of “small town” feel), escalating housing prices, a majority commuter population… and much less of an escape valve to fix it all. The NIMBYs basically lost. And it has a knock-on effect, because families pushed into commuting to support themselves have to look even further out from their Bay Area jobs to find an affordable places. But the same lawyer still shows up to city council and planning commission meetings to remind everybody about how close they are to the limits on how many houses can be built this year.
This city is nuts.
It's always been nuts. (Since the arrival of the Europeans, I don't know what it was like with the Ohlone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohlone )
First it was sort of concentration camps for the Native Americans run by Spanish Catholics.
Then "Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay in 1846 and began the U.S. military invasion of California," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#U.S._Conquest_and_t...
Minutes later gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush was on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
That was a pretty nutty (to put it mildly, very very mildly) time...
Eliding all the craziness between then and the "Bohemia by the Bay" period brings us to the 1950's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Renaissance) which then leads directly to the Summer of Love a decade or so later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love)
There has always been a dark side to the city, from the tortured and murdered Indians, to the Jonestown Massacre. Sick shit has gone down here. It's not all sunshine and roses.
Last but not least, this city has been the catch-all for all the folks who are too weird or crazy to fir in in the rest of the country. There's even an old joke about it here.
It's only in the last twenty years, since all the tech companies and hype have come, literally since the Dot Com Boom (and bust). Remember that?
Before 2000 nobody but the crazies came here to live. I can't emphasize this enough.
All this "What's up with San Francisco?" is a young person's perspective. It's only by totally ignoring the entire history of the city up to ~2000 A.D. that the current situation seems puzzling or strange.
So anyway, to answer the immediate question: Yes, red tape and bureaucracy are wielded here with a perfection of hypocrisy. If you don't know a "fixer" you can waste hundred of thousands or even millions of dollars and years trying to get projects approved.
We do build things: the new Bay Bridge, and a tunnel under Chinatown, but some of the things we build are crap: The Millennium Tower is sinking, the sidewalks are pulling away from the buildings in Mission Bay (Mission Rock?) The new transbay terminal cracked, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center#Extend...
Then there's the recent and ongoing FBI probe into corruption, with the arrest of the director of Public Works among other things ( E.g. https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi... )
So yeah we have things like empty "luxury" condos next to folks living in tents in little shanty towns.
(The condos aren't actually lux, they look nice but the construction is crap, the folks in the office are sales not managers or maintenance, to get maintenance you call a call center in another state or country, the owners are a faceless LLC or other corp, etc. These things are all over the place!)
The city does house and feed some homeless people, credit where credit is due. Some folks have been put up in hotel since COVID and some other things have been done.
But we spend $250,000,000 (a quarter of a billion dollars) on less than 10,000 homeless people. As you can imagine most of that money is not just given to the homeless people themselves. Most of it goes to people who are not themselves homeless. Those people don't actually take any homeless people into their own homes and care for them. I'm not sure exactly what they do with all that money, but I'm sure the folks who get paid to "deal with" homelessness in SF are able to pay their rent or mortgage regularly and on time. (I feel a rant coming on, so I'ma stop myself there.)
So yeah, this is a case where the sensationalism is actually warranted in the sense that the situation here is "sensational" (but not in a good way, unless you have lots and lots of money, then you can avoid the worst of the bad stuff by isolating yourself in the nice neighborhoods and taking uber, etc.)
The educational system here is also wildly mismanaged. I could go on but this is already a long post. We recently recalled three school board members for being too nuts and radical for SF! Also the DA got recalled!
(A friend of my sister works for a school, the new principal of which turned out to be so fucking crazy the kids themselves went on strike! They literally walked out! I don't think this made the paper even locally, and I forget the name of the school, if anyone asks me I'll ask my sister about it, okay?)
To sum up: it's nuts here, it's always been nuts, but at least it used to be mostly fun nuts, and now it's more like a 90's cyberpunk dystopia nuts.
Keep a skeptical eye whenever you see an article trashing SF. We are the boogeyman city for right wing demagogues in the USA.
Edit: Responding to a sibling comment:
> No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that.
Lest people think the whole city is like this, this kind of thing is limited to a few square blocks inside the downtown area. As a gone-native SFer, I would have no problem finding public restrooms anywhere in the city, or a coffee shop with comfy couches soft enough to nap in.
The American South is probably more ethnically diverse than the North. If you're in the South, you are going to encounter black people. They're 13% of the nation but they're up to 30% of the population in some states. Whereas, there are some states further north where the population is mostly white. Like the joke that when Prince died, Minnesota's black population died.
So the areas developed different styles of racism. The South has more of a "know your place" kind of racism. You can live here, you can shop here, you can blah blah blah. But "know your place". Defer to your "betters". Etc. The North has developed NIMBY. "Yes, you are equal to me, but just not here." A "roll up the windows and lock the doors" kind of vibe if you will. Redlining was as much, if not more, a Northern thing.
And while San Francisco is geographically South, it's got a lot of the North mentality about race relations. They want to deal with it by not dealing with it. They should be able to buy houses and shit with dignity, just not here.
And it's a kind of attitude that can pervade while claiming to be fighting for racial equality. And those people may truly believe they are fighting for racial equality. Which is why we should always be a bit introspective and concerned whether our own actions are prejudiced in some manner. Because it can develop despite our best intentions.
Then I realized, that entire friend group is distinct from my other groups, with almost no overlap.
Black people have been leaving SF steadily for 50 years. That's the experience.
In other places where it wont cost 1.7M to build one public toilet, this wouldn't be seen as such a failure or mis-step, just extending public services to people in crisis - as long as it's not seen as "fixed" by doing so.
Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?
Ironically the people fighting the hardest to funnel free money into rent are the same ones fighting the hardest to prevent new housing at all costs, under the delusional theory that "induced demand" means that the law of supply and demand is wrong and the inverse applies.
SF's NIMBY progressives are a weird lot.
I could believe that the non-rough sleeping homeless (couch surfers, as it were) are much more likely to be people who cannot afford a place to live.
Also, politically conservative areas still have homeless problems of their own, so it might be premature to declare it a left leaning policy problem.
You don't even have correlation let alone causation. California is slightly below average with its incarceration rate so not really lax at all compared to the 20+ states with lower incarceration rates. Alaska has an above average incarceration rate and ranks high on homelessness rate. Nevada has a high incarceration rate and ranks high on homelessness rate.
> and drug abuse
California doesn't even make the top 20 list for states with drug abuse problems. Not surprisingly some conservative states are on that list - thanks most likely to widely available and cheap meth.
You want a reductive answer to a complex problem in order to make an ideological point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate...
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/care-coordination/20-s...
Widening it didn’t cost $1.7M. However, the cost per linear foot was within a factor of two of buying a line of Tesla Model 3s. This is in an unincorporated (rural) area, on a farm.
The work lasted one rainstorm before needing extensive repairs.
I’m completely unsurprised that building a hut around existing plumbing and adding a toilet costs so much in the city. I wonder if the price includes a sink.
Not enough wages. If the free market is good enough for everything else, why not for labor?
Profiteering from subcontractors and suppliers is the issue. All of these bids are public, this isn't exactly forbidden knowledge.
Union labor is really expensive. It cost my neighbor who is part owner of the SF ferry building wine shop, over $8K to install a TV set because it had to be done with union labor. And get this, he was not allowed to install it himself because of union rules.
I have another neighbor that works as a location scout for movies and commercials. He says all filming in SF has to be done by union workers and its much more expensive than filming outside SF.
The profiteers were the engineers that designed the system. Each time they screwed up, they got to bill us more hours. Also, the contract with them stipulates zero liability for their incompetence.
The state licensing board should be fired for allowing that.
Also, we wanted to put in a more environmentally friendly, cheaper, and more reliable road technology (specifically, a permeable road), but the county blocked us, then made us pay to put in drainage to mitigate the effects of the obsolete thing they stipulated. Both the mandated obsolete road technology and the drain design immediately failed. The state regularly uses the disallowed permeable technology in this area.
Since then, the county has approved similarly flawed designs at other sites, and the construction firm flat-out refuses to install them.
Civil Engineers DO NOT have the upper hand in any of their designs. They propose, and upper management comments, and they propose again, and upper management comments again, and back and forth it goes. At the end of the day, all they have done is manage a series of comments, and tried to please the client rep with something like a quick and dirty fix to whatever comments they are getting.
Who has the creativity? The client rep, but he is so incompetent/overloaded/unelated that all he does is either manage from high above, or just look for ways to protect himself and the City, or ask the consultant to propose solutions and makes the smallest comments possible on these solutions, while leaving majority of the comments for other offices.
This leads to designs that hardly get a fight history. And more of a sychophant-driven approach just to get nitpickers out of the way.
I don't think he meant that you have to do labor to add value.
>"First, an architect needs to draw plans for the toilet, which will then be presented to the public for feedback. The Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee will be responsible for conducting a “multi-phase review” of the project, like it does for all projects on public lands. According to the Arts Commission’s website, “the committee evaluates each project’s design, scale and massing for accessibility, safety and aesthetic merit.” The review process “ensures that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.”"
I recognize that the verbiage of this quote is probably standard for construction projects in the city, and it sounds absurdly out of place for a project of this scale. That being said, at some point our elected officials just need to delegate authority and let them act mostly autonomously.
Sounds a lot like the representative democracy that created this mess in the first place.
This is really what the whole review is doing, attempting to make the design consistent with the surroundings, which is a worthy consideration. But literally re-inventing this wheel for every project id both wasteful and guaranteed to fail, as every committee will be different. Simply pick one or two, and maybe have a standing process to update it every decade.
Then, it's just specify function, dimensions, etc., and maybe "in SF-City Style A", and put it out to bid, and passe it through maybe one or two approval processes to verify compliance before digging, or even include that in the bidding process - submit your design & costs, meeting these standards. IFF the process is good and fair, they should get many good bidders (ya, big IFF).
Not to be glib, and I expect to be excoriated for such a comment, but I literally cannot think of a way to not be snarky: I believe what you're describing is called ownership.
Particularly in discussions of SF, I find this amazingly long road back to where we started: "If only there was some system where people with the most interest in a particular building could make their own choices!" - "If only people who owned land could build buildings on it!". That system exists - it's called private property.
Bureaucracy exists because no individuals have any ownership over any of this. The pipes and the surface of the sidewalk belong to different authorities - and dozens of oversight committees (the dreaded planning commission) have vague authority layered on top. If no one can own it, and we don't want authoritarian political power, then we have to accept that bureaucracy is simply the only way forward. There are no choices that are not somewhere on the line between "one person owns", "everyone owns" or "the king owns". We must make a choice - and if the choice is "libertarianism is stupid but ALSO authoritarianism is stupid" then hey, achingly slow bureaucracy is on the menu folks. We can't have our cake and eat it too.
https://www.theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-v...
Separately, they completed the spillway upgrades about 10 years after that video was produced, so 1 for 2?:
https://ascecapitalbranch.org/geotechnical-aspects-of-the-fo...
In things that are NOT obviously life and death is where it gets bogged down by people "trying to help".
“Containerizing New York City’s 24 million daily pounds of trash and recycling is far, far more complicated than many people initially realize,” Goodman said. “How do the containers perform in winter weather, which they don’t really have in Barcelona? Who is responsible for removing snow from them on each side? How do they work on narrow streets vs. wide avenues? What about our incredible number of very dense mixed-use buildings, given that DSNY collects residential but not commercial trash?”
0. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/10/03/exclu-sanitation-depa...
1. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins...
2. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/personalc...
Edit: Pardon the typos, I’ve got gig to go do as I was stupid enough to try to address a small part of this on behalf of a city’s residents, and boy have I suffered.
Last year, the city spent nearly a half-million dollars to develop new trash can prototypes because city leaders “weren’t happy with the look” of off-the-shelf cans.
At least the public defacation issue is a true public health concern.
Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?
Up to, but not including, the number of avoidable deaths by exposure that are already occurring.
The last story I was able to find was of someone that died exactly that way, a fire in near freezing weather in SF [0]. If that person had a lockable wooden shed to put blankets and sleep in, she wouldn't have needed a fire.
[0] https://www.kqed.org/news/11906661/woman-who-died-in-homeles...
Personally, I favor actual housing.
Your suggestion that these homeless people should have just went in 'actual' housing instead is absurd, it almost certainly wasn't an option for many if not most of them in the face of the immediate expedient options.
What would you like me to say at this juncture? I firmly believe that the root of the issue at hand is California's, and the Bay's, collective aversion to housing. It's an aversion written into policy. Policy can be changed.
Similarly, people in need can be housed by municipalities sufficiently devoted to doing so in a cost and time-effecitve manner. It just requires the political will to do so and a political system that does not cater to NIMBY impulses.
Please accept my apologies for my lack of clarity earlier. I do not think that people lacking housing should "just go into housing". You are completely correct. That would be utter nonsense. I think the proper policy response is actual housing for people, as opposed to an entrenched policy apparatus devoted to doing literally anything but that. I hope this clears things up for you.
To be honest, I'm being very generous when I ascribe those wildfires to a need for warmth and poor fire management. None of them happened in particularly cold weather.
Oakland tried doing one temporarily. Three months turned into nine with major drug abuse and violence problems. Further, they couldn't actually manage the shrink-the-encampment goal, so eventually they had to clear it.
Of course another argument would pop up to replace it. So the other thing we need to do is quit trying to do direct democracy at every last level of the process. We elect representatives, so we should let them do their thing. And if we don't like it, elect someone else next time.
What SF actually needs to do is house people. Unfortunately, its main dysfunction is its flat refusal to actually do this.
Getting people in housing is often the first step to being able to help them with everything else making their lives difficult. It's remarkably hard to deliver psychiatric care to people who cannot be reliably contacted.
I’m completely unfamiliar with the city. My only experience of America is staying in Atlanta for 6 months during an exchange program, but that was years back.
Some of the stories of bureaucratic meddling and political corruption sound like something I’d see back home in India. Always had this impression that America was above that.
Big cities have lots of problems and lots of desirable features. It’s a toss up.
Having recently returned from Japan to San Francisco, I find myself longing for a city which has less crime and more functioning infrastructure, but having grown up here it’s hard to leave my friends.
I have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work.
Trying to go through all of the legal rigamarole of the Indian regulatory process would mean nothing ever gets done.
Better to let the system freeze up entirely and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy than monkey-patch the bad system with bribery.
I feel similarly, when it comes to pork. We tried to eliminate that from congress, calling it wasteful and corrupting. And perhaps at some level that is accurate. But when we took it away, now all we have is naked ideology. It's not clear to me that this is an improvement, in fact I think it is the opposite.
Bring back the pork.
I don’t know why people are so willing to spread right wing FUD about Sf, maybe it brings in the clicks I guess.
There are much better run cities in the US, but most of the really functioning cities are smaller. The sweet spot it seems in the US are the 100k-250k sized cities, which typically are run much better (I'm sure there are many outliers).
SF has problems. The recent FBI investigation that nabbed Mohammed Nuru and the city's own investigation that nabbed Hui have helped a lot because it has reminded the rats that consequences exist. It's all just rumor but that seems to have damped down on corruption quite a bit.
That said... for the life of the average person there is not as much impact. I don't need to bribe anyone to get something done. I recently installed solar and batteries and we got permits, inspection, and approval including variances for some placement issues. It was all wrapped up within two months. Another example: I've reported problems via the 311 app and the tickets were fixed. One was a burned out and broken light in a playground bathroom (replaced the next week). Another was a water leak on O'Shaughnessy Blvd that took about 3 months to resolve because no department could figure out what line was leaking or who owned it with lots of finger-pointing... but ultimately the 311 people stayed on the ticket, figured it out, and the city fixed the leak.
Corruption tends to happen on large projects or city contracts. Part of it has to do with public project bidding laws that don't allow for reputation to be considered. There's a gaggle of CA contractors who are experts at submitting low bids, then jacking the cost with change orders and delays. They keep winning contracts because they often submit the lowest bid. Sometimes things that seem way overpriced are that way for good reason... like buying rights to the land, digging up the street to run new plumbing which may require relocating other massive utilities, and so on. Other times you have things like the new outdoor trash can design where DPW employees treated it like a fun vanity project instead of buying an off-the-shelf design... resulting in vastly inflated costs. It's possible someone in DPW took a bribe but it's also possible they just didn't care about cost.
The tl;dr: No. Corruption and political meddling in SF doesn't come within an order of magnitude of India... especially not for the average citizen who can usually access relevant government services within reasonable times at the scheduled rates. That said there's more of it than average involving large projects, but recent arrests have helped.
I see a lot of discussion among urbanists of "induced demand" when adding extra lanes to highways. Are we sure there wouldn't be induced demand from providing free housing to the homeless?
Already, the Bay Area & LA are major draws to homeless populations throughout the country. [0]
[0]: Yes, there are some studies that show "70% of homeless people in the Bay Area list most recently becoming homeless in the Bay Area" but many of those people came to the Bay in the first place to access homeless services and that study also relies on a very expansive definition of homeless). These studies are also incentivized to show this as a local issue from an ideological perspective. If you actually ask visible homeless people on the street where they are born, most will not say the Bay Area.
This is an interesting point, but would it not apply more generally to creating more housing for everyone, rather than just when creating housing for homeless? The population of homeless people is just a tiny fraction of the total number of people in the housing market.
Not the same for artificial supply of zero cost housing.
Induced demand is easily applied to traffic because people shift consumption from X to X+Y% miles when trip times are reduced. Housing demand is finite. There is no +Y% additional housing that is being consumed when it is free, because it's only available to people who have none. Google's software engineers aren't going to be using free housing if it becomes available.
It's only available to people who have none across the entire country, plus it lowers the cost at the margin to becoming homeless (albeit only slightly).
> Housing demand is finite.
So is traffic demand. Demand being finite does not mean that induced demand no longer exists as phenomenon.
This is true of anything with supply and demand and a >0$ price.
I'm voting Republican across the board, no matter what, until the Democrats regain some semblance of sanity. The Democrats have taken our vote for granted and are not only sucking the state dry with their corruption (a la Nancy Pelosi) but layering on ridiculous social justice programs that are destroying this state.
ALL of my friends are doing the same, and many people I've met are also doing the exact same thing.
Buried in the article is this:
> In an email to National Review Wednesday, the Recreation and Parks Department said it will consider various options for constructing the toilet, including installing a pre-fabricated restroom. The department said it budgets for the worst-case scenario, so it estimates high. “In the end, the project may well be delivered for far less [than $1.7 million], with leftover funding put toward further improvements or maintenance,” the email stated.
$1.7m is the going rate for an entire public restroom. $1.7m is not what was spent on a single commode. It is merely what is set-aside for the project while in the planning stages.
Then at end of day replace with another truck while the previous goes to get flushed/cleaned.
$1.7 million could build a fleet of a dozen with spare parts for a decade, fuel and labor to maintain/clean.
This is just a small part of the ongoing and very popular conspiracy theory that all progressive government is actually an insane plot to destroy American society, if not human civilization.
There have been convictions with garbage collection and the planning reviews and the mayor has connections to all those people.
It runs deep.
Feces is another issue but … urinating is something we can solve.
Seems to me that this is a problem that may be ameliorated with some form quadratic voting
I would suggest a re-examining of your political compass if this is the conclusion you came to after reading an article saying this boondoggle was based on regulations, committees, and unions.
Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/the-initial-cost-of-arrivecan-...
Here’s the bottom line. The problems we are trying to solve in SF are hard. This place is fully developed. No way around that. Is SF perfect? No, not at all. But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of. We could easily sweep away the problems tourists complain about, do a little fascism, and make all these “problems” go away… by ignoring the humanity behind them. But we don’t. Instead we keep looking the problem in the eye and trying to solve it at a systemic level, as best a super dense 7x7km “island” possibly can.
I would love to hear actual solutions from people who say they could do it better, but I am not holding my breath. They’re usually like people claiming P != NP because “well, obviously”…
This is the problem.
The problem is you're trying too damn hard. Just build the fucking toilet. Less trying hard to do things the perfect way and be better than "almost any other city." At this point you should be looking at Camden or Gary IN for inspiration.
Did you think we are doing anything else? The article makes it pretty clear that’s all that is happening, but it’s making a big fuss over the fact some planning needs to take place, and that the planning website has some corporate-speak about doing our best or whatever.
$1.7m is what it costs to hook up a full service public restroom in SF from idea to completion. It’s not cheap to build on top of fully developed area, you can’t just “dig and hope for the best”. No, you can’t cheat by sticking a commode on top of a storm drain and calling it a day.
Hello! :)
I grew up here, and live here now. I'm left-leaning by USA standards.
> One person even called it a “right wing dystopia”.
As an aside, I think they meant something like "what a right-winger would call a dystopia", not that it was the result of right-wing policies (which makes no sense.)
> The problems we are trying to solve in SF are hard.
Not this one. Pooping and peeing in cities has been a solved problem since Roman times.
A toilet could be a simple as a hole over the sewer: squat and go. That would be better than the current status quo and cost approximately nothing. But we're trying to act like a grown up not-insane town these days due to the influx of techies since the Dot Com Boom.
> This place is fully developed.
What do you mean?
> But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of.
I can't agree. We make loud noises, sure, but when it comes to actually getting things done downtown it's just like any other city. I mean, check out the career of Willie Brown, eh?
It's an open secret (if you've lived here long enough) that city hall has a lot of "soft" corruption. Some of it even makes the papers, e.g. Nuru et. al.
> we keep looking the problem in the eye and trying to solve it at a systemic level
Superficially maybe.
In reality we sweep homeless camps and keep or discard people's stuff. I've heard we recently started requiring homeless to carry special ID cards to access city services. "Papers please?" We have special police on the buses to check people's fares. That is a new thing here. I remember when we didn't waste taxpayer money on fascist policies like uniformed police sweeping public transport checking papers and ticketing or arresting people who didn't pay their fare.
I've heard that now-Governor Newsom wrote a book about his experiences as Mayor here. In it he relates that he found out that the fares we collect on our public transportation system only cover the cost of collecting the fares themselves. It's a break-even process: the fares pay for collecting the fares, everything else in the Muni system is paid for by taxes.
So he asked, why not make Muni free?
The answer, he wrote, is that it's believed that all the homeless people would ride it, and trash it. They buses would become "rolling dumpsters" was the quote, IIRC.
Look that in the eye, eh?
If I seem somewhat aggressive I apologize. I don't mean to pick on you.
> I would love to hear actual solutions from people who say they could do it better
Okay, I was homeless for about 4.5 years, and spent a little bit of that time here in SF.
Here's how you solve it.
First, everyone eats.
Say it with me, shout it loud as you can: EVERYONE EATS!
There are thousands of commercial kitchens in the city. This state produces more food each year than most nations.
"Even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."
Step one: Everyone eats.
Step two: Build houses and give them to people. This city is empty. More than half of it is one story tall. We could easily house a million more people here without sacrificing QoL or open space.
Step three: human recycling center, that's a crass way to put it but whatever. Heal people. Love each other, etc.
That's really step zero: get out of the way of love. All these problems are easy to solve if we just loved each other better, eh?
Peace man, :)
> the city is empty
Maybe so, but you have to convince the residents that doubling the density won’t affect them. I’d be happy to double the height of my residence and house another family or two here, but right now I’m already near the max zoned height.
> A toilet could be a simple as a hole over the sewer: squat and go.
We have storm drains. The problem is any time we offer privacy, they get used for shooting up drugs and people pass out inside the bathrooms. This greatly raises the cost. We could solve this by being super tough on crime but for better or worse we’ve decided not to mass incarcerate.
I agree that SF does homeless sweeps now and then, but it’s generally a last resort, not a first one. And notice is required… other cities will give you much rougher treatment than SF. Or they have severe weather which acts as a more effective deterrent to homelessness than any level of policing.
I’m also seeing a lot more old RVs where I used to see tents, I think that’s an improvement even if I’d still consider them homeless. RVs are also illegal but are much less of an eyesore than tents and probably safer too. There’s probably even roaming services going around and “emptying” the RVs because I’m seeing a lot less urination on the street lately.
And people wonder why SF can't build affordable housing ... :/
I would not set foot there unless all of human existence depended on it.
It is like SF needs a “clean up the city volunteer day” once a month that is broadly attended.
The homeless problem is very bad in California and SF in particular, and it is very concentrated in a small area to the east that looks positively dystopian. But that doesn't represent the whole city. If there is a next time you visit, I recommend spending some time in the panhandle, the Haight, the sunset, basically anywhere bordering golden gate park.
I guess I’m saying something a bit different. When people visit SF from SFO they get on the 101 and within 2 hours they have a feeling of things are broken and that memory sticks. I’m desensitized to those problems so I mostly see the beauty.
If people land at SFO and took 380 onto 280 thn straight to golden gate perhaps their impressions would be different.
Of course the difference is vast, I think you could compare one part of NYC with NYC even and end up with vastly different ideas of trash. And that's kinda what I am going on about; the trash under highways in some part of the city is a meaningless metric.
I was flying from NYC to Denver a few months ago and a Denverite and I struck up a conversation on this very topic after observing multiple people throwing trash on the floor in LGA. Speaking of which, Denver, another city that is much cleaner than anywhere on the east coast.
This is an incredibly stockholm-syndrome take. If you live in a place that isn't a total failed state, normal people actually can use the public toilets!
It is not true in places with functioning government.
A public toilet in the tenderloin is a homeless toilet in all but name. A public toilet in Golden Gate Park is actually a public toilet in the sense that you are talking about.
Also, even if it WAS for people who have nowhere else, that doesn't mean that it should be covered with shit.
Speaking of targeted, this public project almost feels like it was designed to piss off conservatives. Which is a shame, because older tourists are a big segment of the market there. And foreign toursts. And just like climate change and summer homes on the coast, I hate that there will be ironic endings to this for conservatives.
Obviously, the homeless population and climate challenged have it worse. But we didn't need to make others suffer.
Such a shitty situation. Pin sanitation worker pay to software engineering rates or higher and build some fucking toilets.
I really can't believe how shitty major US cities are, nor can I fathom how they got there and how we think it's normal. It can't be just "public funding" because Taiwan isn't exactly a socialist welfare state either, yet the cities are downright urbane.
When I lived in SF, I couldn’t believe the amount of trash on the street. How can so many people litter so much? Then one day, I happened to witness a homeless guy taking all the trash out of every trash can on the street and just dumping them.
That one guy was undoing a week of effort by thousands of people to keep things clean of litter. That kind of behavior should be considered a serious offense, but no one cares, about either the guy or the trash. Have a paper straw! That will fix it.
Sounds like someone made it their home
In a public bathroom, I wonder how much of that happens because of mental issues, and how much is a byproduct of the bathroom not getting cleaned often enough.
Even with all of its problems, I will always love that city.
It's hit or miss. I find large swaths of the Outer Sunset desolate and depressing. Places like this: https://goo.gl/maps/QQbarT8iGEqLfNuN6
SF to me is just empty, cold, and only has big roads for cars.
https://twitter.com/MyFDOT/status/1582832749681201152
California is a failed experiment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interactive-see-after-p...
You can find failed/failing/failing to implement infrastructure in every state in the US, it’s a national issue
It's a good thing the Millennium Tower is still standing.
It is a national problem