
People are pooping more than ever on the streets of San Francisco - hourislate
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-human-poop-problem-2019-4
======
the_economist
The city of San Francisco provides homeless people with $520/month in cash,
via an ATM card that refills on the 1st of the month.

They give away $24 million a year in cash.

It's a genuinely good idea to provide assistance to the homeless, but it
should be in the form of Care Not Cash and given away equally across the
state. Otherwise, you are funding a drug demand epidemic and likely creating
incentives for people with drug problems from around the Bay Area to move here
for the cash.

I filed a FOIA with the city to get data on the total cash given away.

[http://www.disclosures.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/CAAP-d...](http://www.disclosures.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/CAAP-data-for-sunshine-request-
March-2019-final-003.xlsx)

[http://www.disclosures.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/CAPI-d...](http://www.disclosures.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/CAPI-data-for-sunshine-request-
March-2019-final-003.xlsx)

~~~
Scoundreller
I wonder what drug prices are like on the first and second. And robberies of
homeless people. And robberies of everyone else towards the end of the month.

Would at least make better sense to direct-pay rent for housing to the
landlord and then stagger the remaining cash for everything else on a weekly
basis on a different day of the week.

~~~
mm_aa
Police officer told me it’s $12-$20/dose of meth. Didn’t verify.

~~~
remarkEon
My friend is a cop in an area that deals with a lot of meth and opioid issues.
I asked him this and his answer was that it's usually in easy multiples. $15,
$20, $25 etc. I suppose this makes sense, given it's an all cash business.

------
kaycebasques
I have a general theory related to this this article. Disenfranchised people
do not take care of the society around them. Rightfully so. If my society
doesn't seem to give a shit about me, why should I give a shit about it? If
this theory holds true, then graffiti, vandalism, pooping on the streets, and
so on, are all symptoms of disenfranchisement. Conversely, go to a
neighborhood of homeowners, and look at how well-kept everything generally is.
You can even compare it to a neighborhood of renters. There's a noticeable
difference between homeowner and renter neighborhoods. And it's not an income
level thing. We can control the renter vs. owner neighborhood comparison for
income level.

My general theory is that, if you want a well-ordered society, distribute
ownership more.

~~~
nostrademons
> There's a noticeable difference between homeowner and renter neighborhoods.
> And it's not an income level thing.

I'm actually not sure of this, and it comes from living in the Bay Area. Over
the last 8 years, we've seen a large increase in the number of high-income
families who are renting, largely because of our screwed-up property markets
where a condo that rents for $3K/month might have a PITA of $8K/month if you
buy it. We're even starting to get the phenomena of millionaire renters,
people who could pass the accredited investor test and yet still don't own
their own home.

And I've noticed that when rental areas gentrify, they get nicer. The
apartments are more well-kept; there's less junk on streets and balconies;
less loitering; nice shops spring up with clean (but often sterile or
artificial) interiors.

I think it really is about the money. When richer tenants move in, landlords
and property managers have more money for repairs & landscaping. The tenants
may not be able to afford a home, but they can certainly afford someone to
cart away their couch. They spend more money in the local area, which means
that shop owners have more disposable income to hire people for cleaning &
repairs.

~~~
kaycebasques
I think my comment about controlling for income level stands. We need to
compare your gentrified renting neighborhood to a homeowner neighborhood at
the same income level.

------
smadge
Pooping is pretty high up on the hierarchy of needs. Higher than social norms.
People are going to poop, sleep, eat, etc wether or not a dignified way to
perform these functions is available. Solution: provide a dignified way to
perform life necessities.

~~~
imgabe
Here's what I don't understand. I live in DC. There's plenty of homeless
people. I see them every day. But there's very little pooping in the street.
Likewise in NYC. Homeless people? Sure. Poop in the street? Not so much.

Neither place, in my experience, has an abundance of public bathrooms. There's
almost none that are truly public, like a building specifically with a
bathroom for the public to use. Most fast food places and coffee shops will
have a lock on the door with a code so you have to buy something.

So why is it just San Francisco that has so many people pooping in the
streets?

~~~
chrisdhoover
One theory is that the abundance of corner store plastic bags served street
people as disposable poop receptacles. With the bag ban the street poop
increased.

~~~
pmiller2
The graph in the article shows a pretty steady upward trend in the number of
poop reports. There's no real spike corresponding to the bag ban.

------
mc32
That chart tells the tale. It's quite astounding how it's climbed from ~5,500
incidents in 2011 to ~28,000 in 2018. Keep in mind this is _reported_
incidents.

It's like it's been normalized. No joke. In a residential (western)
neighborhood (i.e. not SOMA) within a month I saw evidence of human feces
twice [it's not like I'm out and about all day long]. Once on a set of steps,
the other someone squatting behind some bushes. It's out of hand [seeing brown
streaked tissue is another indicator]. Ridiculous.

Props to the chartmakers for reminding me of the Brown Zune.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
Is it easier to report now? Would not be surprised if somewhere between 2011
and 2018, an app was released that lets you quickly report human shit on the
sidewalk.

~~~
nrp
It is certainly easier to report now. The 311 mobile app for San Francisco
launched in 2013. "SnapCrap," a 3rd party app focused on poop, launched in
2018.

------
qwerty456127
Just build the damn public toilets everywhere, make them free and clean and
almost nobody but a small number of the craziest people will poop at the
streets.

If we had to choose just a single thing a state should solve this is it - the
most fundamental and unconditional yet simple need everybody has - a way to
defecate comfortably whenever and wherever and in a city they are, regardless
to how much money they have. The only need for every human that is more basic
is breathing. It's ridiculous it still isn't done in a well-developed country
in the 21-st century.

~~~
conanbatt
Even private toilets are disgusting when they service that population.

I'd like to see you push a mentally ill person from pooping into the street
into the heroine-needle ridden prostitution hub of a public toilet.

Hell, I see the prostitution happen in front of city hall, where there is a
childrens playground in open daylight!

~~~
chrisdhoover
The slave hysteria and general illiberal views by the government shut down the
web sites that allowed professionals control over their business. Pros became
independent and prostitution was moved inside.

Now a girl has to hustle on the street where it is dangerous.

~~~
threatofrain
Do people seriously hustle like that on the streets of SF? Like there's a
special street corner people know about, and you just pull up in your car and
demonstrate your financial credibility? I would think there's much more stuff
happening on dating apps.

~~~
maccam94
There's a corner two blocks from my apartment in SF where I regularly see
women hustling. I've even been approached on the sidewalk in Union Square,
which is an area heavily trafficked by tourists.

------
tonymet
If one thing is shown in this article, it's that brown should be used more
frequently in charts.

~~~
hatmatrix
Don't fool around - use the brown.

------
ineedasername
It looks like the homeless population has remained fairly steady over the same
period of time that reported poop incidents has quintupled. That leads to two
likely conclusions: Either people are reporting it more often than before (Has
it become easier to report such incidents?) or more homeless are deciding (as
much as it can be called a decision) to poop publicly, maybe a further symbol
of spite for a society that has left them behind?

I suppose there's also the possibility that homeless have been under counted,
but to do so by to such a degree seems unlikely.

~~~
jdreyfuss
I would imagine that it's a mix. A rise in reports (thanks to the availability
of the 311 mobile app and such), as well as a rise in incidents. I don't have
much to back up the rise in incidents (besides everyone's general feeling that
things have gotten worse on the homeless front, and maybe something to do with
the opioid crisis), but it certainly feels that way anecdotally

~~~
kylemisc
As another anecdote, I've not noticed an increase in human waste over the last
few years, but I have noticed an increase in discussions about reporting it.

Another possible cause of the rise (with no evidence to support) could be
demographics of the homeless population. I imagine propensity to poop in
public is correlated with other behaviors that make it difficult to get off
the street. If SF is getting people off the street slightly slower than new
homeless people are being added to the population, and the set of people being
reintegrated are less likely than the median to poop in public, over time we'd
expect to see a slowly growing homeless population that is increasingly likely
to poop on the street.

There may also be a matter of changing norms; if there's already poop on the
street, adding some more (vs making the trek to a public restroom that may be
unsafe) isn't as unappealing.

------
burtonator
I have a modest proposal to end this problem.

There are too many homeless in San Francisco.

Additionally, California has too few wolves.

I propose that we release wolves into the streets of San Francisco once per
month.

Only the strong will be able to evade the wolves and the weak and sick will be
eaten.

This will lower the homeless population will simultaneously helping the wolf
population rebound to record numbers.

~~~
akoumis
I don't have enough points to downvote you... this is why people hate techies,
you view the displaced as a separate species altogether, they are just like
you and your family, likely without the same upbringing and privileges

Edit: Thanks guys I understand the proposal is a joke, it's just sick and
callous. So all the people riffing on this joke are making nuanced social
commentary as well with their analysis of homeless fighting abilities?

~~~
jm_l
This is a sarcastic reference to a famous essay published by Jonathan Swift.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal))

~~~
russell_h
It might be more directly a reference to this:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-
loop/wp/2015/03/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-
loop/wp/2015/03/05/rep-don-young-wolves-would-solve-homelessness/)

------
nrook
Meanwhile:

[https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-
sf-p...](https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/10/18304717/shadow-housing-sf-park-
supervisors-vote-reject-nimby)

San Francisco can either have housing, or it can have homelessness.

------
wwweston
This challenge is more or less equivalent to the problem of how to make public
restrooms broadly available that are either difficult to abuse or that people
don't abuse.

Even people who are on the fringes of society because they're difficult or
mentally ill or just get a kick out of making things a little bit worse where
they can as a fuck you to people for whom things are going better.

It'd be a benefit to everyone, especially people who are on the fringes for
other reasons, but really anyone who's ever needed a place to do their
business if you can figure this out and really want a change-the-world
challenge.

------
x3n0ph3n3
How has no one mentioned the plastic bag bans of 2012 (for SF) and 2017 (for
CA)? The homeless use to defecate in plastic bags and throw them away. Now
that option is entire unavailable to them. Additionally, I read that diseases
like Hepatitis are on the rise, partly due to the increased exposure to other
peoples' poop.

------
cameldrv
I think that what's lost in some of this is that there are not enough private
bathrooms in the city. Most stores don't have public bathrooms anymore,
largely because of the rise of serial ADA litigation. In California, if your
bathroom does not meet a fairly long list of very specific accessibility
requirements, you can be sued by a disabled person, and it can cost you tens
of thousands of dollars. There are a number of people in California that make
their living driving around visiting businesses looking for violations and
then suing them.

The response from many, many California businesses is to just close their
bathrooms to the public. This means fewer places for homeless people to use
the bathroom. This causes homeless people to go to the fewer and fewer
available bathrooms. Since homeless people often smell, and may make a mess in
the bathroom, without necessarily buying anything, the increased traffic to
the remaining bathrooms causes even more bathroom closures.

Combine this with the SFPD's non enforcement of public urination and
defecation laws, and general non enforcement of minor crimes, particularly if
the perpetrator is homeless, it's inevitable that you will have poop all over
the sidewalk.

We need more bathrooms, and we need to start enforcing the law against
homeless people. If there is a reasonable place to use the bathroom, and not
using it will get you arrested, the problem will go away.

Next up is getting the drugs out of the SF city jail. Many ex-addicts say that
they got clean when they hit rock bottom, got arrested, and had no choice but
to kick in jail. In SF though, you can get drugs in jail, so one of the only
positive things about going to jail is eliminated.

------
Scoundreller
Soooo, build bathrooms and make them free (as in beer)?

~~~
kradroy
They have some of those throughout the city. However, they require attendants
to be on site during operation because people shoot up drugs, prostitute
themselves, or sleep in them.

The solution will require much more than some free-to-use restrooms.

~~~
SllX
You know something, we already have police patrolling the streets, and even if
it were only open 16 hours a day, that’s still 16 hours of availability.

So really, we just don’t have enough, and I don’t think anyone really cares if
people are actually shooting up drugs in a bathroom. That’s better than doing
it in playgrounds or on park trails and leaving the needles strewn around.

It isn’t that we can’t. It completely makes sense to open up more public
restrooms. We are simply choosing not to and making excuses for our choices.
“The solution” is nothing. If you want people living in the streets to take a
dump somewhere other than just the streets, give them a place to actually do
it. Make them common. Make them regular. Make them staffed. Make them clean
and well plumbed. Make them high throughout so any member of the public can
use them. And even add biohazard collection bins if you feel it is necessary.

~~~
exelius
Or provide safe injection sites so junkies have somewhere to go.

Our society’s attitude is “if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t deserve help.”
That’s so morally wrong I can’t even explain it without going red in the face,
but that’s the situation we’re in.

~~~
jquery
San Francisco alone is spending $50k per homeless person in San Francisco, on
top of state and federal benefits. Are you going red in the face because we
aren't spending $100k? If $100k doesn't solve the problem should we spend
$200k? How much?

~~~
mikeyouse
That's a stupid stat that's obviously wrong and offensive to everyone who
works on these issues in SF, I can't imagine why people keep parroting it.

If you spend $100k and lift 9/10 people out of homelessness, that terrible
math shows you spent $100k per homeless person.

~~~
chrisdhoover
The amount if money spent is excessive because it is not working. If we spent
10% more would it help? If we spent 10% less would it hurt?

~~~
mikeyouse
Which has literally nothing to do with the "dollars per homeless person spent"

Think about it, if there was a threshold and somehow spending $1 more per year
reduced the number of homeless by 50%, that metric would get _worse_.

It's fine to make the argument that the outcomes are bad but it's lazy and
ignorant to divide two unrelated numbers and declare yourself outraged.

Spend some time working with the thousands of underpaid and overworked
social/case workers and volunteers in SF if only to get a sense of the scale
of the problem.

------
IWeldMelons
The problem is partially in the way American cities structured. They are
either too urban (San Francisco, NYC) or suburban (perhaps Chicago is the
right balance, with its alleys where someone can quietly poop). Many soviet
and European cities are structured in different way - spots of high and very
high density separated by greenery, where a homeless person can safely poop,
without creating problems for the neighborhood's dwellers.

~~~
Balero
People defecating in a public park or green space is creating problems.

Telling people to poop behind a bush next to the street is not a solution for
peopling defecating on the street.

------
basetop
SF created a "Poop Patrol" a few months ago...

[https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Set-
to-R...](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Set-to-Roll-Out-
the-Poop-Patrol-490874121.html)

------
auggierose
SF seems to have become a shithole

------
remarkEon
This is a solvable problem, but I don't think anyone is approaching it from a
sufficiently removed perspective.

Up front, yes, we need to be compassionate to these people (and they _are_
people) and remember that if you're posting on HN odds are you're fortunate
enough to extend a helping hand once in a while.

But we cannot sacrifice the city's quality of life by enabling behaviors that
endanger these people and others. That's what we're doing right now.
Explicitly. There's no "how do we engineer our way out of this problem" by way
of designing some new novel public bathroom. Reinventing the urinal isn't a
solution to this - it isn't even a bandaid. What's worse, more public
bathrooms seems extremely likely to encourage a spiral of dangerous behavior
to an increasing degree. We'd just move it from the streets and concentrate it
in public spaces that are no longer really public, but rather are just bio-
hazardous dorms for the homeless and addicted. Elsewhere in this thread,
someone noted that SF essentially already has a pseudo-UBI program for the
homeless. This seems patently absurd to me. Forget about this being a literal
cash transfer to drug dealers, giving an addict cash is actually worse than
just giving them drugs - now they have to go out and score, endangering
themselves and very likely others around them.

So what is to be done? First we have to be honest. The overwhelming majority
of these people are no longer "down on their luck". They're addicts, with
severe mental health issues and no amount of "nudges" will make them change
their behavior. We should start with diverting all this money that goes to
nebulous initiatives like "housing" and these cash give-aways into funding
legitimate facilities staffed with case workers, doctors, job trainers, and
police.

And then we should make vagrancy illegal.

I don't say this lightly, as I've had a family member die from opioid
addiction. But so many of these people have lost their own agency. They no
longer have the ability to care for themselves. If the state doesn't step in,
they will be next on the gurney - and everyone here knows it. You know it when
you walk past the guy shooting up on the sidewalk on the way home from work.
You know it when you see the woman with that "look" holding a sign that says
"7 months pregnant, terrified, anything will help". We can stand idle and
watch this happen, like we have for so many years. Or we can swallow our pride
and realize that this system we've set up out of "compassion" is fundamentally
broken and is at its root enabling severe problems - and end it.

------
PunksATawnyFill
They're shitting on the sidewalks of L.A. too, right downtown in front of
restaurants.

Meanwhile, any company that opts to set up shop in San Francisco at this point
is issuing a big FU to employees and investors. Why would you do this to
people? Talk about squandering a ton of money for squalor.

------
RickJWagner
It seems there's an opportunity for additional employment there.

The waste is a problem, cleaning and disposing is an undesirable task.

All that's left is to make that task pay adequately to motivate potential
employees.

------
automated_toast
I don't live in SF, I don't visit SF. I can't afford SF.

I don't give a shit.

