Comment by justizin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justizin | Hacker News Reader

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Please do not try to understand this through such a narrow lens.

San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness, because there are a lot of services there, and because once people decide that San Francisco is home, they really, really, really do not want to leave.

First of all, there are plenty of human feces in Oakland, but again, let's try and crawl away from that lens. If you become homeless in Oakland, the best advice I can give you is to spend your last $5 on a BART ticket to San Francisco. Oakland and a lot of Alameda County's solution to these sort of problems are a humongous jail called Santa Rita which is comparable to the size of the nearby San Quentin prison. Most of the people in there are there for minor crimes related to homelessness or poverty, and their situations escalate once they enter what is a major portal to our for-profit prison system, which per-capita is the most heavily populated in the world.

I'm glad you acknowledge the problem, but I think you're understanding it through a narrow lens yourself: there are many cities worldwide with the the same levels of homeslessness as San Francisco (or higher), none are as filthy. Hell even in the US Portland has methheads everywhere: they don't shit on the street. SF has a unique problem.

Your claims about for profit prisons may be true, but they don't change the fact that San Francisco is uniquely filthy.

Agreed. San Francisco is the filthiest city I've ever worked in. That the residents appear A-OK with public activity that would at least warrant a visit by social services or the cops in other cities amuses and amazes.

> San Francisco is the filthiest city I've ever worked in.

Literally.

How many of you reading this are in San Francisco and live in an apartment building? Go and check the trash room.

You'll probably find that Recology emptied out the bins today but left garbage, even if tied up neatly in trash bags, piled up against the wall or door.

Disgusting and unsanitary. What happened to common sense? What happened to people doing their job? Seriously, is there some law which says that trashmen are not allowed to place trash bags into a wheelie bin for expensive compacting trucks to get to work?

San Francisco is one of the worst run cities I have ever seen.

BTW, Recology will not pick up trash that's not in the bin because the trash collection service is billed by volume. They'll usually ask the subscriber to upgrade to a larger bin.

[That's what happens when a private company is granted a monopoly to perform a necessary public service.](http://www.trashrecology.com/stop-the-sf-monopoly.html)

SF has the same number of homeless people, as a percentage of the population, as NYC: https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/ahar-2013-p... (page 15)

SF: 7,000 / 840,000 = 0.8% NY: 64,000 / 8,400,000 = 0.8%

Yet NYC doesn't have the perception of human poop plastered all over every available surface in the same way SF does.

Walking down the street in SF near the Caltrain station, right on the street in a parking space I saw a huge pile of discarded construction of waste wood, with exposed nails and sharp edges. In any city with functioning cleaning services, this would trigger a cleanup response, since it is unsafe and a nuisance. Yet this pile of crap appeared to have been there for quite some time.

To me this is the soft version of the broken window theory. If your city can't care enough to clean up its messes, yes people will treat the whole thing like a trash heap.

Contrast.

In Shibuya every single night, 365 days a year, drunk people puke and toss waste all over an area about 4 SF city blocks. Every single morning a team of govt workers clean it to fairly acceptable levels. The homeless also congregate under the nearby train tracks, but there are so many public FREE toilets that no, I have never seen shit on the street.

SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services. Shibuya CITY tax is hefty and rises considerably if your income is above a certain level, maybe 100k, I forget the exact numbers.

>SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services

New Yorkers pay similar taxes as San Franciscans. Yet our service level is substantially better. I think it comes down to city governments that are willing to make trade-offs (versus those that tend to get locked down by incumbent interests and populist temptations).

NYC has plenty of incumbent interests and populist temptations.

It has one major thing over SF that makes it work: It gains much more tax revenue per square mile than SF due to its superior density, which is derived from history and its superior zoning rules.

Houston has far lower taxes than both SF and NYC and I have never seen human poop on the sidewalks. My point is that the tax rate has little to do with it; it's a question of priorities.

Walk down the tourist area of Haight Street towards the park and you'll see pieces of cardboard and what looks like dog poop or human faeces smeared all over the sidewalk. Outside every store is someone smoking marijuana. It's a terrible place to go for a walk with a baby or kids.

> SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services.

No. Coastal California is populated by Democratic voters, people who generally prefer high taxes and more (albeit of questionable quality) government services. SF is dirty because it has never had a Rudy Giuliani to clean it up — and the aforementioned residents would never vote someone like that into office.

(I grew up in NYC, and have been living in both SF and Oakland for the last four years.)

Hear here. ex-NYC too -- SF is a lot like the New York of around 25+ years ago.

It's a bit unfortunate, but getting a substantially cleaner, safer SF would require a cultural shift away from egalitarian principles that are deeply ingrained in the city's DNA.

Note that while downtown Manhattan is approaching a dystopian Disneyland of tourist-friendly homogeneity, there are still parts of the city that are scary no-man's-land, you just don't see them if you visit or live & work in gentrified neighborhoods.

Back in the day, NYC was nice or nasty block by block, just like SF is today.

> It's a bit unfortunate, but getting a substantially cleaner, safer SF would require a cultural shift away from egalitarian principles that are deeply ingrained in the city's DNA.

No it wouldn't. It would just require spending more money on public sanitation.

Of course if you let homeless congregate and don't provide the services to clean up after them the place is going to get filthy. But there are more solutions than getting rid of the homeless.

"San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness"

Getting offtopic but: Holy crap. Talk about cultural differences. The system in my nordic wellfare state makes sure people capable of renting a house and going to the wellfare office will have at least minimum accommodation (without criminalization).

The person doesn't mean homelessness itself is criminal, but as they attest to later, homelessness related crime is. Which is true in Nordic countries too.

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