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America also doesn't have paid toilets like Europe and many parts of Asia thanks to a bans pushed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i.... Before this America had many paid toilets. In Europe and Asia often the toilet requires a nominal fee (sometimes unfortunately expensive though) to keep out drug addicts or other folks at the bottom, but due to the bans from the campaign cities with huge drug problems are hamstrung from offering paid toilets.

I think it's important to have free options but to blanket ban a paid toilet contributes to the restroom issues we see now in urban areas IMO.

Try to find a bathroom in a tourist town in france and then get back to me. In america if you go into most shops and ask, they will let you into the bathroom. In touristy areas sometimes they are dicks about it, but still you can find a way. In france, if you don't have coins on you, they will literally watch your bladder explode. This isn't an american problem, I find it way easier to know where to go in the US (any mcdonalds, starbucks, etc... will let you in no questions asked)

I think we should address the root problem, which is Jack Nicholson, who convinced everyone that mental hospitals are bad.

Both you, and the historical commentary reply are correct.

Mental hospitals _were_ very bad, and the problem continues to be very bad.

However the solution was never going to be END the old social program. We see the results in any major urban area today, it's what everyone in this thread is talking about.

It's far too easy in politics to rally around a common 'goal' of 'stop doing X / being X' (E.G. BRexit) without the 'replacement' action selected. If 'and do nothing' is really what's supported that should be fine as an affirmative assertion. 'Stop doing X and do nothing instead'. Or (as an example) 'End sanitariums and make mental health a public drunkenness level crime while funding the police and jail / hospital systems for treatment'.

The problem is lack of agreement and follow through on a plan leading to the default failure mode of the universe; everything fails in uncontrolled ways.

There was a old This American Life episode which was re-aired recently that covered a court case that possibly changed psychiatric health care as much if not more. The patient in this case got better treatment but sounds very unwell even with medication, at least according to now estranged children.

Act one: Burning Down The Couch https://www.thisamericanlife.org/808/the-rest-of-the-story?2...

newspaper article https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/11/psychiatry-w...

They were bad, very bad

Yes, but surely giving mother nature the task instead is not the proper reform.

Psychiatric medication have come a long way since the 60s, so running wards should be alot simpler than back then with all those insane displine procedures.

The idea behind closing down the mental institutions in the 70s/80s (pursuant to a legal decision about the rights of the mentally ill) was that community-based mental health support should be offered instead. But of course, it never was. For yers mentally ill people were shoved into the prison system; that approach has been abandoned but they've mostly been left to rot on the street instead.

It’s a situation like congressmen who vote for a budget, the take a “principled” stand to block the debt limit. Or taking the Bill Clinton’s “fundamentally changing welfare forever”, by pushing recipients to Social Security Disabilty, and off of the federal and state government’s balance sheet.

In the case of mental hospitals, the closures were supposed to be replaced with community based care, but of course Medicaid and Medicare funding was not set to meet demand.

Part of the problem is that it works like prison, where some of what makes it awful are crazy assholes ruining things for everyone else dialed up to 11.

the doctors and knowledge wasn't bad, (a select few) people and biases were bad. That plus lack of due process to keep them in check lead to yet another form of discimination. The treatment of some high profile cases made a mental ward look worse than a prison.

I don't have a true answer to fixing all of this, but it should definitely be said that it WAS in fact bad. And that the fixtures are not technical in nature.

Mental hospitals may have been bad, very bad, but what if the alternative is worse? I walked into a Starbucks in downtown San Jose a few weeks ago and there was someone in there asking for water. Their clothes were soiled rags. They had sores on their ankles. Their face was smeared with dirt. Is that kind of an existence better than spending time in a mental hospital? Is it really the most humane option to let people slowly die on the street? I know what my answer is.

>Is it really the most humane option to let people slowly die on the street?

Legally, yes. Unfortunately. If nothing else, it is something done in their own power, and no governmental institutions can be accused of breaking the 7th amendment over it.

There are current and forming solutions to this, but the US has always had a fickle relationship with actually voting in welfare options when push comes to shove. Crabs in a bucket; They want the homeless out of sight, out of mind, but don't want to pay taxes that goes towards "free handouts". That mentality needs to change if the US is ever going to make headway on this.

It does seem like there should be some sane middle ground between abusing patients and throwing them onto the street.

It is better that they now live under the bridge and randomly murder people and smear feces all over town.

Clearly this is the better outcome.

Whatever Jack Nicholson convinced you of, I can assure you that reality was far worse.

Most of the US gets by just fine with gas stations and restaurants providing them to the general public with no questions asked. Maybe instead of spending huge amounts of taxpayer funds treating the symptom, San Francisco should ask itself why local businesses find it impossible to keep their restrooms open?

It's not just SF. Was in the Venice/Santa Monica area recently, every restaurant had a prominent sign "Restrooms for customers only. No Exceptions"

My impression is the USA is falling apart. Every year people get more rude, more selfish, break more laws, are less courteous, there is more crime. I'm not sure I believe the "crime is going down" stats. (hope that doesn't make me stupid)

The problem as I see it is people stop reporting crimes because they know the police will do nothing about it. I've had my car broken into 5 times. I don't think I reported it more than once. Further, some places like California, have declared they won't prosecute property crime under a certain amount so again, even less reporting. So, the numbers appear to be going down but in reality they seem to be going up (That's certainly my personal perception but maybe I'm being influenced by sensational news and personal experience. I definitely see objectively going up in traffic violations. People don't seem to give a fuck anymore. They just do whatever they want)

I have no idea how to fix it or influence people to be nicer and more respectful of the law. Maybe it's the bankers getting off from the financial crisis. Maybe it's the police being perceived as part of the problem. All I know is more and more I think I should go back to a 1st world country because this one no longer feels like one.

Further, some places like California, have declared they won't prosecute property crime under a certain amount

Most U.S. states don't prosecute property crime as a felony under a certain amount. In fact, more than half of the U.S. states use $1000 or more as the threshold for treating theft as a felony. At $950, CA actually has a lower threshold than more than half of the U.S. states.

so again, even less reporting.

It's crazy that you took the overturned policy of a single D.A. in a single city and FUD'd that into the policy of an entire state of 40 million people. That D.A. was kicked out of office the following election, and his successor did not maintain that policy. He tried again in L.A., and his staff not only refused to go along, they actually sued him over it and won.

I have no idea how to fix it or influence people to be nicer and more respectful of the law.

Not spreading FUD would go along way.

>Not spreading FUD would go along way.

doesn't fix his car's windows for the 6th time, though.

It's not anything special. San Fransico is one of the top 5 largest cities in the US, maybe even in the world. So while crime may be average or even below average, it is going to feel worse because you will see more instances of it. Because there are more people.

It sounds to me like California is falling apart, not the USA—your experience doesn't match mine at all.

Where I'm at, decreased crime rates are very obvious. Our restrooms are all open, our grocery stores barely have any staff monitoring the self checkouts, and we barely think about locking our doors. People are as friendly as ever.

>My impression is the USA is falling apart

In a theead about public toilets you move within 3 sentences to a vague thesis that the US is 'falling apart' without any metrics to a definition of what that looks like, a framework that is simpke, vague, generalized with very little quantitative datapoints that I cannot help but simply disregard the rest of what you have to say as anything more than hearsay amateur opinions.

If you want to make a comparison between a pair of nation, state your specific metric and bring numbers. Ive had plenty of rude encounters in south america and europe

Have to agree with this assessment of that comment. Of all things to complain about, Americans are not rude on average. Really quite nice, possibly even overbearing at times. Tells me GP hasn’t travelled outside of the US and if they had, sat at resorts the whole time.

>Of all things to complain about, Americans are not rude on average.

on median, no. But the extremities make me think that he US falls below the arithmetic mean in urban areas. If you have 200 polite people and one person with a knife being swung around, guess what impression you get of that area?

We don't calculate "rudeness" in a mathematically logical way.

You'll get a kick out of this comedic rant: https://nitter.net/AmericaWeek/status/1694415737790898349

You can jump to 1:30.

Nice. I'm not a huge fan of Taibbi anymore, but that segment rings true, especially about needing a plan B for mundane things. Basic, mundane things that you used to be able to just do and count on working, like sending an important document in the mail, or hiring someone to install flooring, or ordering food for delivery, or making a doctor's appointment, now have a reasonably high chance of just not working. And it's always due to human incompetence. Businesses don't pay enough -> they don't hire competent workers who care -> nobody knows what they are doing and everyone screws everything up.

It isn't just that businesses aren't paying enough (though I am sure that contributes) is that increasingly we are beholden to large entities and systems to which individuals are just fucking gnats and beneath the notice of.

As an example I've had issues where I've ordered groceries delivered online and had the driver tell us that they won't deliver to us because there isn't parking at our apartment, and I've left the apartment ten minutes later and seen their delivery truck parked literally a one minute walk up the block. We called and complained, and we got a voucher we can use to get some amount off of our next order. Sure. Ok. But now we are still without our groceries.

The thing is the person we were complaining to was front desk call center staff for a large supermarket chain. They have absolutely no ability to do anything to help us in a meaningful way. They do not have permission to tell the delivery driver to cross the fucking street, or to talk to the deliverer's manager, or anything like that. They literally cannot actually solve my problem.

Same with making a doctors appointment. It's now done by software, which helps things scale but when it goes wrong none of the people you personally are interacting with are likely to be able to fix themselves.

This is still ultimately the result of business squeezing every red cent they can out of every link in the chain, which leaves things brittle as hell/designed to work at scale but not necessarily be able to accommodate things even slightly out of the ordinary.

By the way, SF replaced their "soft on crime" DA. And the crime has gotten worse.

Where is your correlation now?

Or, maybe, just maybe, complex problems have complex causes and complex solutions.

If the DA is known to not charge crime, then people will not report crimes that occur because they believe it to be a waste of time. In the year after a special election to replace a DA for being too soft, I expect the crime rate to go up as people test if the new DA will actually take it seriously this time.

If it stays up for several years then I would see a problem, but all I'm seeing right now is the expected result of a forced regime change.

Whatever city or state you’ve chosen to live in seems to be falling apart. Move

> Maybe instead of spending huge amounts of taxpayer funds treating the symptom, San Francisco should ask itself why local businesses find it impossible to keep their restrooms open?

SF businesses already have to deal with a near daily hosing down of human feces from the street in front of their stores. If they opened up their bathrooms to vagrants it would just double the number of places they’re literally cleaning shit up.

That's exactly my point: that is not a problem in most other cities. Which is why other cities can have the bathrooms open. For San Francisco to spend money on truly public bathrooms is putting lipstick on a pig.

> that is not a problem in most other cities

The well-meant and originally-necessary drive to end criminalising poverty overcorrected into absurdity by equating poverty with mental illness, and compassion for the mentally ill with not arresting people who smear feces over restroom walls. This fallacy, which dovetailed with anti-police sentiments, is most pronounced in San Francisco. But it’s also present in other American cities.

Eh, New York City would absolutely benefit from more public restrooms (paid or not). Central Park is a prime example.

> That's exactly my point: that is not a problem in most other cities.

Except it is a similar problem in most cities?

The only exceptions are cities with nasty weather which basically "solves" the homeless problem every winter or cities which basically shuffle the homeless into jail.

I haven't really seen any big city (even in Europe) "solve" their homeless problem any other way.

San Francisco has the problem of inequality and an incompetent management, backed by people who wish the "homeless problem" just magically disappeared overnight.

The toilets and piles of human defecation rolling down the hill are a consequence of the above, and unsolvable until the above is addressed first. You can't borrow ideas from other cities around the world because those don't have rampant inequality.

The obsession with "Inequality" is misplaced envy. The issue is government policies that enable and support lawbreaking.

When some people can afford a place to live and others can’t, I’d say that inequality is a problem. Calling it envy doesn’t address that at all.

So arrest all the homeless then?

Ship drug users off to drug camp? All the drugs you want, free, for as long as you live. Test clean for a week and you're out.

Friendly reminder that sending people to camps with the tacit expectation that they will not leave the camp again alive is something that we all agreed not to want a repeat of in history.

If they break the law then yeah, why not? They’re not above the law.

General principal among civilized peoples is you can't punish people for breaking laws they they are unable to follow through no fault of their own.

"Through no fault of their own" is the point of contention with this topic. One side believes the homeless are mostly victims of circumstance, the other that they're mostly victims of their own poor choices and addictions.

Can the tv news both sides nonsense. Other points of view are the failure of governments to provide services to their citizens. For example what if the government provided for different solutions and support for those with mental and physical illness. What if governments provide stable housing AND emergency shelters. You can't just work harder to afford housing and you can't just go to AA to treat your addiction and underlying conditions.

>Other points of view are the failure of governments to provide services to their citizens.

of which services are funded by and voted in by taxpayers.

So yes, to some extent it is the people's fault.

There are no free public toilets. So the homeless shit in the street. Arresting them for that fixes nothing. Except maybe buys you a day or two without shit, until another homeless person settles in.

There are plenty of public toilets where I live, and the homeless use them the same as the rest of us.

And while certainly not in all cases, it’s at least sometimes their deliberate choice and preference to live a life of zero responsibility.

Envy of what?

Wow. HN is one of the few places I'd expect to encounter someone stuck in Kohlberg Stage 4.

Other large cities in the US have exactly the same problem.

The answer is pretty simple: because when you let non-customers use the toilets, you're letting homeless, mentally ill, drug addicts, or just shitty people use the toilets at a far higher rate. They do insane things like smear shit and blood on the walls and leave used needles lying around, or they OD in the toilet, so it ends up becoming a real pain for the businesses to keep them open and clean for their actual customers. I don't know if Europe has the same issue with toilets, but I do remember having to pay to use public toilets there (in Paris, for example).

Right, but this is a very San Francisco problem. To the extent it is a problem in the rest of US, it's not a big enough problem to outweigh the benefits to the business of offering a public restroom. Even most major cities I've been in don't have trouble providing public restrooms, there's a very specific set of cities that do.

San Francisco and Portland and Seattle could spend tons of money trying to fill a need that most businesses in the US fill for free, or they could spend that money solving the root problem.

I cannot fathom how you could possibly think how fecal vandalism just a San Francisco problem.

Cleaning literal blood and shit off the walls is a shared experience of “retail service” workers everywhere. This is both a hazard to workers and the customers that keep the place running.

Hell I had to do it at least weekly in an expensive sandwich shop in a small midwest city downtown that was 99% middle/upper class whites and no homeless or druggies in sight.

I cannot imagine having open bathrooms in an area populated with those more likely inflict problems.

I didn't say it wasn't a problem elsewhere, I said this:

> To the extent it is a problem in the rest of US, it's not a big enough problem to outweigh the benefits to the business of offering a public restroom.

There are a few cities where businesses have had to take the extreme measure of closing all public restrooms to combat this abuse. Most haven't.

And how exactly would you solve the root problem of _other cities_ sending their homeless populations to those areas? Make it more miserable to be homeless there so they are forced to go somewhere else?

I guess SF just have to stop the practice of dumping their problem on the rest of the country?

"Between 2005 to 2017, the city of San Francisco sent 10,500 homeless people out of town by bus.[1]"

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

According to the Guardian the free tickets to SF are in the 100s, while SF sent 10 000 away.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Law and order is one way. Homeless don't seem to gather in cities with Broken Window policing

So your solution is to criminalize poverty and mental illness. I hope you never lose your job and have trouble paying your rent.

You get what you pay for. You spend billions on homeless services you get more homeless people. You spend hundreds of millions on Law and order and you get law and order. You defund the police and you lose law and order.

It’s not just San Francisco, cities all over CA have similar issues (as well as the west coast - Portland, Seattle, etc).

As a data point, I personally know the owner of multiple restaurants in Minneapolis. He has very happily kept the bathrooms entirely closed to the public since covid -- breaking the law while doing so -- because people are trash and, if allowed, will wreck the bathrooms. Including shitting on the toilet bowl, the walls, floor, etc; drug use; and bathing in the sink, which makes a giant mess that he or his employees have to clean.

The root problem is drug addiction.

And mental illness; which is likely related

The biggest cause of homelessness is the cost of housing.

Sadly, no, it's drug addiction. 90% of the homeless in Seattle are drug addicted, alcoholic, or have mental health problems. About 10% are homeless for economic reasons.

So if I created a drug that cured drug addiction, corrected most psychological disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar, OCD, etc.), and raised IQ by 50 points (to get that "worthless" lower 50% up above the current average, that would be enough?

In fact I have created such a drug. Unfortunately at the moment I have neither the time to write down nor is this post sufficiently capacious to allow delineation of the significant factors involved in the development of the drug. However I do resolve to do so at a later time.

I have been offered billions to NOT release this drug or its derivatives b/c it's use would severely disrupt the USA wage structure: wages would plummet (as a tremendous number of highly-qualified amped-IQ former homeless entered the market), immigrants would suffer and indeed, everyone doing well would suffer. I have refrained from releasing the drug not for that reason but b/c, were I to do so, everyone who posts on HN would then hate me!8-)) But I digress...

My point is that, if we cured this problem(drug addiction) we would only be creating other problems. The only solutions that could work are socially unacceptable. Nonetheless I personally favor the "Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B" solution from "Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy":

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...

> if we cured this problem(drug addiction) we would only be creating other problems.

Like what problems, that they could then hold a job? Drug addicts can't hold a job. Their only interest/activity is drug seeking. This is why they are homeless.

I don't pretend to know how to cure drug addiction, but treating it as an economic problem is like giving cough drops to a lung cancer patient.

O ye of little imagination, how sad and frail thou appearest. Were only there a God to protect thee but I fear there is none and thou shalt die tangled on thine own snares.

Source? that's a pretty big claim.

And besides, this feels like a cause and effect issue. Are they addicted to drugs because they became homeless and it was the most humane way to cope outside of suicide? The alternative scenario where perfectly normal Seattle citizens get baked to the point where they can't keep a job seems fantastical.

Do you have a source for that? The numbers I’ve seen show about a third of homeless being drug addicted, and about a quarter with chronic mental health problems. I would assume there is quite a bit of overlap between those two groups.

How are there fewer homeless on display in Europe? Are the governments there more empowered to use force to take care of the problem?

Likely more subsidized housing for the poor, along with much less expensive medical care.

> JCDecaux is really an ad company. The street toilets are just a way to get ads on public property.

At the risk of going off on a tangent, JCDecaux is actually a marketing company which sells ad space to the highest bidder. Their business model consists of offering municipalities free public equipment/urban infrastructure such as bus stops, public toilets, public fountains, etc, and in exchange have the right to use that to post curated ads.

> The first problem was that that the US required them to be wheelchair-accessable.

I don't think that holds any truth at all. All JCDecaux public toilets I've seen were all designed with accessibility in mind. Why do you think that asking JCDecaux to provide something it already provides everywhere would be suddenly an issue?

https://www.jcdecaux.com/press-releases/world-toilet-day-ove...

> So they were 3x as big and several times more expensive than the smaller units in Paris.[1]

Those are already wheelchair-accessible. What's your point?

> They are noted for working fine in tourist areas, and badly in homeless areas. Making them big enough for wheelchair accessibility makes them big enough for drug deals, too.

I don't see your point. Do you think there are no homeless people in tourist areas where JCDecaux deploys public toilets? People still vandalize those, and also coin-operated ones.

JCDecaux also operated Paris' public bike sharing system; there wasn't any ad space on those (but then it wasn't free).

Requiring water and power seems like a pretty basic requirement for a bathroom! Or are you expecting a sunlit composting toilet?

> San Francisco has tried

I wouldnt say they’ve tried. Trying includes not letting the homeless ruin it.

At this point it seems cheaper to go about solving the upstream problems.

That would involve Americans voting to solve the housing crisis, which they aren't interested in doing.

Fair, but I think a bigger problem is that politicians don't align their policies with public opinion so I'm not gonna blame inefficient or disenfranchised voters. When everything is Kabuki can you blame people for being confused?

Even the Portland loo needs to be cleaned, and unfortunately the populations that uses them poses a hazard to workers.

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/08/30/city-of-portland-...

Same thing happened with accessibility of these in NYC. So please tell me how it’s better for the handicapped that there’s no restroom at all. It’s ridiculous.