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Comment by michaelscott | Hacker News Reader

> San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets.

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.

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We have an access road that was sized for utility trucks. We had to widen it slightly because of obscure California regulations.

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.

Too many bureaucrats and construction profiteers, not enough good laborers.

>not enough laborers

Not enough wages. If the free market is good enough for everything else, why not for labor?

It's being absorbed by the bureaucrats who have made it cost $1.7M to build a single toilet.

All government entities in the US are ultimately controlled by private corporations.

There's a non-market, political outcome that's the dominant factor in the labor market -- the degree to which the federal and state governments enforce or incentivize undocumented workers.

There’s plenty of good laborers, they just never get invited to the table

The good laborers are union workers, which drives the cost up significantly.

The actual labor costs for the workers are not the issue, they already don't make a lot and wages have stagnated for decades while costs have soared. Also, there's plenty of non-union areas that STILL have incredible costs.

Profiteering from subcontractors and suppliers is the issue. All of these bids are public, this isn't exactly forbidden knowledge.

So underbid them. You just found a golden goose.

"The actual labor costs for the workers are not the issue" How do you know? The article explicitly calls out union labor costs. By "profiteering" are you complaining that someone made a profit because there is nothing in the article to indicate excessive profit.

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.

Actually, the construction workers found multiple issues with the plans, and were on the hook for some of the repairs.

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.

I think we agree. I would consider the construction workers to be laborers. They're adding value. Profiteering would be collecting profit without adding value i.e. engineers and the licensing board in this case.

> collecting profit without adding value i.e. engineers

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.

Why do you seem to believe that only manual laborers can add value?

Because in this specific case they are the only party who did anything helpful to the people who were trying to turn money into a road.

I don't think he meant that you have to do labor to add value.

^^^

Perhaps because they are the ones that actually convert the plans and raw resources into a useful building? Plans for bathrooms and buildings can be easily pulled from a shelf of existing plans, tweaked a bit, and sent out, but building the actual structure can never be avoided.

Tell me you don’t know anything about construction without telling me you don’t know anything about construction

Mission accomplished. I never stated anything about my knowledge of construction. However, for whatever little it’s worth, I do know more about it than most people I encounter, especially in a forum like HN.

And now I see the political money cycle that sustains this and prevents the state legislature from passing laws to clean up all the accumulated case law cruft.

I sincerely wonder if we have 'democratized' infrastructure and construction too much.

>"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.

>> 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 arts commission is a thorn. A roadblock. And an energy drainer.

Or, how about spend the money ONCE and create a set or two of architectural design standards for use in city projects? These would include aesthetic design, massing, scale, accessibility, safety, etc.

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).

> just need to delegate authority and let them act mostly autonomously

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.

similarly, NYC decided to pay McKinsey $4mm to answer the question of whether large, stinky festering piles of trashbags would be better in containers.

Source, my dear friend. The world is just too weird for me delineate between real and unreal at this point.

i know its hard to believe but https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-orders-4-million-mckinsey-stu...

Tangentially related, Folsom, CA still knows how to build stuff in a hurry:

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...

California can move mountains when they really need to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUROM87vTA covers the Oroville dam disaster and recovery (the disaster was averted, and the recovery was fast).

In things that are NOT obviously life and death is where it gets bogged down by people "trying to help".

I mean the answer to this is not as simple as "yes trash belongs in trash bins". How do you organize trash pickup? Where do these receptacles get placed? How large should they be? Is this for business and residential? Do trash routes need to change as well? NYC is massive and what will probably work in a neighborhood in Manhattan may not work for one in Staten Island. It's not at all a simple exercise.

I'm not here to defend McKinsey, but sometimes the real world is complicated and requires some observation and orientation before deciding on an action [see quote and 0]. I'm not certain if McKinsey is better than trial and error, and McKinsey has likely/certainly faked solutions [1], but they are the IBM of consulting [2].

“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...

Litigation is the enemy here. I’ve been in this from top to bottom and it’s always legal precedents that fuck everything up. Governing bodies, be they local or regulatory, are forced to broadly interpret legal precedent established in high profile situations, or small, specific legal settlements which have occurred at a local level. Lawyers then take this case law and work with bureaucrats to craft regulations and ordinances which have zero possibility of running afoul the case law, and these can become so odd and counterintuitive when broadly applied that they have wildly negative effects on the whole. A high dollar project can spend the money the develop legal justifications for getting a code variance and ignoring the precedent set by case law, but the 95% of the rest of us are forced to design, construct, and accept the baked in laws to gain the privledge from the city to operate under their purview (which ultimately puts them on the hook for any lawsuit in their jurisdiction - as they always come after cities before individuals, and the cost of fighting these always exceeds the cost of settling them). So contractors are left constructing shit they know won’t work, engineers are signing off on shit they know won’t work, and cities are authorizing construction on shit they know won’t work, all to avoid taking on the responsibility doing your job right, and to avoid the horrendous consequences that would result from the people willing to go along with this system being in the position of making actual design decisions themselves, with no legal safety nets when they fuck up. It is the very definition of a broken, unsustainable system, and there are even more levels of red tape around environmental reviews I didn’t come close to getting into. It’s a lawyers dream, the most profitable contractor in your local jurisdiction is so solely because they are the best at exploiting loopholes in the system to overbill clients, it drives away anyone who has the skill or desire to fix it, and its and civilizations worst enemy.

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.

Maybe Shakespeare was right.

> a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes.

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.

> 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?

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.

The difference is that with normal supply and demand for housing, shifting the supply curve right will both lower the price and increase the quantity.

Not the same for artificial supply of zero cost housing.

Another problem with "just providing housing" is that there are a good number of these people who need a lot of support and have a hard time functioning in society. Here, they tried giving homeless residents housing vouchers to apartments, and it lead in a significant drop in quality of life for the people who lived there, with a rise in violence and crime in the buildings (this is based both on newspaper articles about the program and talking with residents). I've known people in buildings like that who are looking to move after living there for decades.

Of course it would induce demand, especially when the benefits are an order of magnitude better than in other jurisdictions. It might even attract people to be "homeless" for free housing in one of the most desirable cities in the country.

If food became twice as cheap, would you consume twice as many calories?

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.

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.

Induced demand is just another way of saying the supply is too low - and increasing the supply doesn't "increase the demand" it just reveals demand that was already there (and being unfulfilled).

> demand that was already there (and being unfulfilled).

This is true of anything with supply and demand and a >0$ price.

Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do.

Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.

SFO is the airport. I'm very confused by this comment. We're not all working at Google right now.

MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all

People sometimes use major airport codes as shorthand for a city or the metropolitan region the airport serves.

People who live in San Francisco don't use SFO to refer to the city.

The airport is actually a couple of cities away (there are a lot of cities in the Bay Area).

People who use airport codes to refer to cities don't care.

I would hope not, considering many major cities are serviced by multiple major airports.

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.

SJC doesn't really serve SF. You can say OAK sorta does, but not really. It's pretty clearly SFO. Also, the BART line to SF is called SFO (used to be called whatever terminating city until they realized that's stupid).

And anyplace without a major airport is "flyover country" often to the chagrin of people who live there.

We have the best pizza in ORD

Indeed ORD-style pizza is the best.

I'd say the worst

It is not pizza, so it cannot be best or worst pizza.

On that we agree, but it's still bad, whatever you call it

We have a datacenter there, so I'd totally know exactly what city you meant by that. I wouldn't say we always call Chicago ORD, but it definitely happens.

Back to that same old place, sweet home ORD.

From my experience doing so is a good way of coming across as a douche tech-bro (“yeah, I’m so cool I use code names”). Particularly when the comprehensible way would be to write SF rather than SFO.

I should get a Patagonia that says "SFO" on it. I already have the EECS Supreme shirt.

SFO is commonly a shorthand for San Francisco, LA for Los Angeles, SD for San Diego.

SF, not SFO

Username checks out.

no, SFO is an airport

SFO, LA, SD. One of those is not like the rest.

Nobody refers to San Diego as SAN, even though LAX is used for LA, the airport, and the train station?

Just be glad you don't live in Cumaná I guess.

I lived in the bay for a year. the city is for the winners of the startup and stock lottery and those who want to rent to be near them.

100% believe this.

I've lived here off and on since 1993. I work for startups but haven't hit the lottery.

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.

its hard to appreciate anything else when you are bleeding through the ears due to expenses.

I don't know about you, but people don't charge me money to talk to them. All I have to do to meet people outside of my work peer group is go somewhere different.

I agree, SF area has a lot of non-tech-related people and activities that should be enough to at least enjoy your non-work hours, but same with other areas. Moved to San Diego, and now I'm happier all around.

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.

SFO is the airport, not the city. We call it SF, or San Francisco.

People in tech companies with many offices tend to call cities by the nearest airport, cause that's what the local office (or datacenter) is called.

Yes, I worked in Moutain View, AKA MTV.

And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.

Maybe you call it that if the entire point of the city to you is just the office, haha. I do hesitate to call my home city "LAX."

I call it BUR.

At least LAX is in Los Angeles. Not true of SFO.

While SFO isn't in the city limits, it is owned by the City and is in an unincorporated section of San Mateo; the SF police have a significant presence (probably the largest force) on site.

>> 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."

Cisco™ is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems™.

I've never heard anyone from there call it San Fran. That's almost as weird as calling the state Cali.

He's explicitly attempting to trigger people who agree with Herb Caen ("Don't call it Frisco").

Born and raised in SF. NIMBYism is indeed a huge problem. It’s the hidden underbelly of a city with otherwise modern and diverse thinking.

I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm a simple kind of person in a small town, so to us here this is all kind of crazy. Is a city as big as SFO still governed by politicians who live in it, or at that size does local government take people from other areas? I always read a lot about SFO as being on the cutting edge of progressive initiatives usually toward humane goals. Is this common?

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.

SF is governed mostly by the people who live there.

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.

Thank you for your perspective on this. In my locale, this type of thing is hard to imagine, we'll feed anybody who can hold a fork here. We have almost zero resources for indigents here, so homeless and others without are a bit rare.

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?

https://hsh.sfgov.org/ And that's just the resources from the city. There's a bunch of non-profits and a generally permissive public attitude.

As to that question... it's a difficult one to answer. My understanding is that it's both difficult to study and politically sensitive.

>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.

I think we need to also keep things into perspective, there are an estimated 8k homeless in San Francisco, about 1% of its population.

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.

Most homeless conversations center around those with drug addiction and mental health issues. Poverty as such is not the primary ingredient.

Some of the data seem to possibly indicate that poverty could in fact be the primary ingredient though. Also, rich families with kids that have mental issues or drug addictions are much less likely to end up in the streets, so it's definitely part of the formula.

> 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...

I've only visited San Francisco, but I think one thing to consider is actually that it's a really small city with just too much going for its size.

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.

Be careful as the city square mileage can be misleading.

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.

> Be careful as the city square mileage can be misleading

As in exaggerating it's livable land size? Or the other way around?

For example, if you look at lists of "largest cities in the US" [1] you'll find Columbus in the top 15 or so. But if you actually visit, it's no larger than Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, or other similarly sized metro areas.

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...

Fair enough, that was my point though, San Francisco is really dense, and has no room to expand. So you're looking at a city too big for its own good in some ways, as in, everything is a lot harder to manage when not only is it one of the largest in population, but also smallest in area resulting in really dense population and also no available land for growth.

> The city is fully built as well, there's no lots left

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.

Trivial sounds inappropriate. It doesn't get any more complicated then that scenario in this case.

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.

How would the NIMBYism contribute to that cost? I can see construction costs being somewhat higher with COL and regulations, but you could solve this problem with one of those toilet trailers or a porta-john (or cinder block and other materials are relatively cheap). Seems like they want a certain "look".

My understanding is that NIMBYism also takes the form of adding multiple barriers to changing the neighborhood. Environmental permit, safety permit, approving architectural proposals prior to implementation, limitations on who does the construction, how the materials are sourced, approvals on construction times and schedules, etc. The people building it might need to hire lawyers to draft proposals formally to local committees to do multiple rounds of approval at multiple stages. These all have the intention of liberal policies (better materials for the environment for example) but the effect is that the community is conservative with development.

[eta: I'm not making an opinion about what is good/bad/should be done. Just expressing what I understand is happening.]

I thought most of the permits would be be moot on cost if it's the city paying itself for permits.

Not really, they have to pay someone to write the proposal to receive the permit.

Ah, that's much more involved than the permits I've dealt with in other places for small (eg not a development dealing with traffic flow) projects.

What’s that old onion headline? “78% of Americans support public transit for everyone else”?

> I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.

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.

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

I almost spat out my drink when they said: ... and then I went to Seattle. The light rail extension fiascos are the most publicly facing examples of this. Dear god SF must be bad when Seattle looks like a well oiled machine.

Seattle did bury the viaduct and add a light rail and build a stadium, so they have accomplished more than SF has, apparently.

> Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do.

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.

Here's a quote of the city planners' process to remove parking from in front of bus stops, a sevev year effort worn bearing doe every single stop:

> 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.

This one is stupid, you can walk in between cars.

Try taking a wheelchair between cars.

If I were in a wheelchair, I'd be terrified of cities like SF who only grow vertically and are opposed to any types of accommodations requiring construction.

I wouldn't feel safe around there either. Also, SF is naturally very hilly.

CA in general is like the leader of red tape, with SF as it's poster child.

You're right. I used to work there. Hated the experience, but I can see why it's like that.

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.

Thank you for this frank breakdown of what's going on. This seems like a good possible explanation for the testimonials I'm reading in this thread. I'm still struggling with what is espoused by those from SFO area and tech culture compared to the reality of what's going on.

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)

I’m not sure I’m getting the full gist of your questions, but to one point: Yes I think people generally avert their gaze to the people and the issues, perhaps because of shame or sheer disinterest. I personally want to financially contribute to make things better, but it’s unclear how to get accountability with my spending. Giving cash on the street seems inefficient and likely to be used for the ‘wrong’ things. Organizations in the city and the city itself don’t appear to be doing much at all due to incompetence or bureaucracy.

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.

> If anybody is dedicated to 'social justice', to remove/resist facilities to relieve oneself just seems so far off the mark.

I don't know but would wager that it's not those people. All sorts of people live in SF, like anywhere else.

> 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.

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?

You pay for something, then you’re allowed to use the bathrooms.

Many places don't have one for customers.

That’s, in my experience, rare.

I worked there in 2016-2018 and returned several times 2020-21, and yes it's been this way.

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.

The Philippines has pay toilets ("comfort rooms") everywhere. I've always wondered why the US has capitalism for everything but toilets. It really makes things more convenient as people have an actual incentive to offer toilets to the public, and the prices are low by local standards.

there's actually bans against them in most states, from a student campaign in the 70s. Funny little piece of history: https://apnews.com/article/3b2787ac6c32405e8cd7aafe8789cd8e

Yep, sounds about right. If you're a tourist, though, I would say that restrooms are accessible to a similar extent as any European city I've traveled to. They're perhaps more likely to be disgusting if you're in the worst parts of the city. Decent venues stay on top of it, though, and any place with a counter to order from will have a code you need to ask for to gain access.

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.

And the quiet part that isn't spoken of is that all these businesses HAVE to have restrooms for their employees; and if you are nice and (basically not visibly homeless) and nobody is looking, you can often get access to them "as a favor".

Restrooms are the first victim of the tragedy of the commons.

Be careful about trusting what people in this thread are saying. If you only spent a few years here to work, live in a "trendy" spot for startup kids, and mostly spend time in SOMA/FiDi/Hayes then your understanding of the city will be skewed.

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.

“The NIMBYs basically lost” feels like it’s true in a lot of Northern California. Out in Tracy, a local lawyer (who had an office but not a residence within city limits) got a residential growth restriction on the ballot and passed circa 2000. The city took it to court, it was upheld after a few years, essentially zero residential development went on in the lead up to the ‘08 recession because the city had allowed “too many” houses to be built per the terms of the RGA restriction…

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.

Yeah, there's a sour spot where they're not planning for growth but not conserving the neighborhood either. I don't like the idea of neighborhoods becoming urban. It just doesn't work well. The urban area should be planned for density from the beginning, and they go all-out there without fighting the neighborhood for zoning permits. Make it ped/transit-friendly, and put parking on the perimeter instead of wasting valuable space on the inside. Meanwhile there's no reason a quaint neighborhood needs a huge apartment complex.

Most people that own a $2 million home don't want a toilet for homeless people in front of their house.

For 2MM you get 1.5 baths!!!

I wasn't born here but my parents came here just after I was born, and they had lived here before that, I did grow up here, I've lived in other (N. Am.) cities, and I've studied a bit about San Francisco's history (Viva Emperor Norton III!) and I've seen more-or-less first hand SF city politics.

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.

This is largely editorial bias and sensationalism. The original article was clickbait, $1.7m is merely the going rate for a public restroom (think of the big installations with women, men, and family rooms plus a janitor room). It is not what SF spent on a single commode.

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.

It's what I call the difference between "northern racism" and "southern racism".

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.

This reminds me of one party in UC Berkeley hosted by my extremely Democrat-voting, racism-fighting friends. All their friends and acquaintances were there. 20 minutes in, I noticed something was different... every single person out of ~100 attending was white. This is statistically unlikely, given that >50% of the students are (or were?) Asian. And I'd been to plenty of other parties not like that.

Then I realized, that entire friend group is distinct from my other groups, with almost no overlap.

> it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. Can anybody from SFO relate their experience?

Black people have been leaving SF steadily for 50 years. That's the experience.

I think it's not unreasonable to attack effects of homelessness as well as the cause. Some problems are really hard and some are just hard.

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.

I think the OP wanted you to consider the benefit that 1.7 million could have had in providing direct aid to preventing homelessness, e.g. rental assistance or job training.

Certainly even an existing residence or office with multiple toilets could be purchased for ≤$1.7M within city limits.

No way in hell you could buy even a small building in the city for the stated purpose of homeless services for anywhere near that amount of money. Anything homeless “attracting” will have you swarmed with NIMBYs and red tape for years. It will be called a crime magnet. People will say that it will reduce property values. They will sue you to stop the project. The one thing everybody agrees on in the public review meeting is that the place to put the homeless is “not near me”. You will spend way more than $1.7m on lawyers alone for a project like this.

I'd think increasing demand would hurt everyone's bottom line, since non-assisted renters have competition with assisted renters for the same set of properties.

Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?

Funneling free money into rent, any way you structure it, will indeed raise prices unless you also build more housing.

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 don't feel it was intentended attack on OP's part. It seems he was pointing out that even a workaround for this seems crazy. Despite not really addressing the original problem, but only providing some relief - which still is pretty welcome.

The $1.7M toilet is symptomatic of the root cause of homelessness in the Bay Area: you can't build anything within a reasonable time and budget there, even something as simple and small-footprint as a toilet.

The issue is nobody leaning left politically is going to run with the truth that homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse. California still sells the lie that homelessness is caused by lack of housing/affordability.

It can be both. I'd like to see numbers, though. Used to be mental health and drug abuse were by far the dominant cause of rough homelessness. Did the pandemic change that? The homeless population has exploded in many cities in the last couple years. All from crime and drugs?

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.

> homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse

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...

Is this the real SF experience? Or is it media hype?

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.

America is really big. You’ll find a high level of variance across the country just like you will in most g20 countries.

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.

> sound like something I’d see back home in India

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.

Allowing bribery and corruption only ensures that whatever system you end up with requires bribery and corruption to work.

Better to let the system freeze up entirely and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy than monkey-patch the bad system with bribery.

> I have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work.

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.

The so-called "pork" definitely gave everyone an incentive to compromise to a far greater degree.

Transparency and politics can't mix. Zero sum deals where some group wins while another group loses are nearly impossible. Yet those are exactly the deals that need to be done. Example: America cannot agree where to store its nuclear waste.

https://ag.nv.gov/Hot_Topics/Issue/Yucca/

Absolutely media hype. Read the article. Nowhere will you find $1.7m spent on a single commode. It’s just a budgetary set-aside for a future public restroom at the going rate. Leftover funds will go back to the general fund or can be put towards long term maintenance of the public restroom.

I don’t know why people are so willing to spread right wing FUD about Sf, maybe it brings in the clicks I guess.

I've lived in several cities around America, and nothing really compares to how poorly run SF is. There is corruption in every city on earth, so SF isn't special in that regard.

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).

Resident of SF perspective here.

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.

Society is strange. Last year a Canadian woodworker made cabins for the homeless which was destroyed (probably because of some regulation) by the city.

SF and Oakland have both had problems with fires in encampments. I'm betting the... let's call them guerilla housing efforts generally don't measure up on fire safety.

It seems that should be weighed against no home at all.

How do you weigh incipient death-by-fire-with-major-public-hazards against other options? I have no idea how you'd do it or how you'd weight other options.

Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?

> 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.

Given the permanently mild weather in the SF Bay, this number is probably smaller than you think. Whereas fires in homeless encampments are a relatively frequent occurrence.

Being exposed without, say maybe wooden structure to block the wind around you while you sleep, may be a reason homeless build fires.

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...

When I lived in Oakland, my apartment building had several close calls with wildfires caused by poorly contained campfires in a nearby encampment of vulnerable community members housed in tents to keep the wind off as they slept. Given that lockable wooden sheds / "tiny homes" can and do catch fire from things like poorly managed propane stoves in particle board construction, perhaps a better solution is in order. As stopgaps go, this one has a bunch of known drawbacks that lead policy to shy away from it.

Personally, I favor actual housing.

The Canadian woodworker built these structures for people who had no actual housing. Not people who had the immediate option of an actual house and just picked living in the shack for funzies.

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.

Thank you for clarifying that I correctly understood the earlier comment.

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.

btw if the problem is heating, how crazy would it be to provide them with .. warming ?

If that was the problem, I think it would have been solved long ago without as many fires as we see today. Warmth is available in a variety of ways, including and not limited to warming centers and chemical warmers. Propane stoves are a poor way to warm people.

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.

The city should create encampments themselves rather than let them grow organically. Then provide security and sanitation service. Portland may actually try this, all because the city got sued for violating the ADA. Maybe someone should try that in SF.

That's such a good idea that SF already does it! They're called "navigation centers". As you might guess, where to site one is an intensely political process.

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.

Yeah, I think the only way to make it work is to provide plenty of security, right along with the social workers. The NIMBYs in Portland primarily argue against siting a homeless shelter near them because of the associated violence. If the city actually staffed the shelters with enough security, that argument could be dismissed.

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.

That only works if the people in need of assistance don't respond to the on-site security by moving out of the encampment. You wind up having to establish a sizable security-protected area around the blessed encampment, otherwise you wind up with a series of unsanctioned and unsecured encampments anchored by the serviced one. Neighbors tend to object to that kind of thing.

What SF actually needs to do is house people. Unfortunately, its main dysfunction is its flat refusal to actually do this.

Is housing really an option? I mean that seriously. I suppose we could build "projects," like in Baltimore, but I definitely wouldn't call those a success. Right now, most of the Section 8 projects are skimming the better candidates off the top. The hard cases, the truly drug addicted and mentally disturbed (and there are a whole lot of them), will take whatever housing you give them and either ruin it, or move back onto the street, or both. I always hear this appeal to just "house people," but it seems to me there's more to it than that. I think in many, many circumstances, you would have to involuntarily commit them. And then it starts looking like a jail or mental hospital. In my mind, those are probably the best answers, but that ship sailed a long time ago.

Honestly, all SF has to do is stop obstructing projects that are a mere 20% subsidized units. It's become common political practice to pretend that a parking lot housing zero people is preferable to a lot housing a bunch of people, of which up to 20% are impoverished and formerly unsheltered vulnerable community members. Couple it with a fantasy that 100% subsidized is within reach in all cases and you have a recipe for a parking lot staying that way forever and the unsheltered staying that way too.

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.

SROs in SF have a long and storied history and generally one of the good lessons to draw from this history is wood structures are a bad idea for housing homeless people.

Attacking the root causes would mean admitting that they have no idea what they’re doing, that they’ve been running full speed backwards and that their political opponents were 100% correct. Or they can spend more public money and keep running backwards while claiming victory.

This is the even more wild statement to me. Just for the "look"?

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.

Housing is provided. They don't want it. The ones that do move in to government housing often overdose.

Replying to the top comment for visibility… the entire article is clickbait

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.

Wow I agree. When I read I thought it was an Onion article.

NIMBY? More like the government wants to control and tax everything.

Is there any state that has laws to prevent NIMBYism?

This is what decades of single-party dominance turns a city into. It has reached a fevered pitch in the last few years.

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.

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