
Mapping San Francisco's Human Waste Challenge - spking
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/04/15/mapping-san-franciscos-human-waste-challenge-132562-case-reports-since-2008/#5dee68095ea5
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cowsandmilk
The human waste and needles on the street are intimately related in my mind.

Step 1: People start shooting up in public bathrooms, and then passing out on
the toilets

Step 2: Public bathrooms are closed due to the drug problem found in step 1

Step 3: Now everyone begins shitting in the street because public bathrooms
are no longer available. And those people shooting up in the bathrooms are
also shooting up on the street.

In those public bathrooms that remain, you typically see needle disposal
containers; sometimes in every stall. In Seattle on Sunday, I went to the
bathroom in Macy's and every stall had them and I'm pretty sure 3 of the
stalls were occupied by people doing drugs.

The obvious answer is supervised injection sites where people can safely shoot
up, which would then allow public restrooms to reopen and not be constantly
occupied by people with needles. Unfortunately, the republican party at the
national level has worked to actively prevent SF from opening these sites. So,
the author, a prominent republican, should maybe consider telling his party's
national apparatus to get out of the way of SF fixing their local problems
rather than his weird nonsensical admonition at the end.

~~~
yznovyak
Jesus Christ, this sounds horrible. There is definitely huge cultural
difference between me and an average Seattleite, but for me "supervised
injection sites" doesn't look like an obvious answer at all. The thing you're
describing (particularly "3 of the stalls occupied by people doing drugs")
sounds like an egregious safety hazard. I'm a big guy, so probably not the
easiest target, but I would be terrified to think that my mother or girlfriend
could get jumped at in women's restroom. Why don't people demand police to do
something about this?

Yo guys, I know this may sound crazy to you, but have you thought about
imprisoning those junkies? If you're so humane, maybe give them treatment
AFTER you take them off the streets? While you're at it, might as well get the
name of their supplier and imprison him too -- doesn't sound like a rocket
science to me.

I don't buy that police is doing a good job right now -- I've been living in
NYC in 2011-2015 and for whole 3.5 years every Friday and Saturday there was a
guy standing at the intersection outside my work at 15th & 9th peddling coke
and molly (the guy was standing there, sometimes walking crosswalks and saying
out loud "coke, molly, weed"; not yelling, but loud enough that passerby's
could hear him).

~~~
dsfyu404ed
> every Friday and Saturday there was a guy standing at the intersection
> outside my work at 15th & 9th peddling coke and molly (the guy was standing
> there, sometimes walking crosswalks and saying out loud "coke, molly, weed";
> not yelling, but loud enough that passerby's could hear him).

That's too flagrant to be legit. Did he spend Monday through Thursday listing
"solvent traps" on eBay under the username "TotallyNotATF"?

I could understand a dealer "advertising" in the open like that in 70s Detroit
or somewhere else where the primary mechanism of "law" enforcement is getting
paid by a tax on his profits and not by the city but saying "yo I got drugs
for sale" is on a whole different level than standing around.

~~~
yznovyak
I honestly don't know if that was a police trap or not. But considering how
easy it is to find drugs in NYC I wouldn't be surprised if it was legit. Like
... at least half of chess hustlers look like they're on something.

edit: to be fair -- this may be an act to lure in regular people who may think
they have a chance against a tweaker. They don't. Those guys are crazy good.

------
pr0zac
Theres a pretty clear reason for the problem. SF's shelter system is terribly
lacking compared to cities like NYC.

[https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-
street-h...](https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-
homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65)

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RickJWagner
I had a conference in San Francisco last year. One day as I was walking
between Moscone Center and the hotel, a roughly dressed woman was walking on
the sidewalk alongside of me.

"Watch out for that shi*!" she exclaimed. I thought she was crazy, shouting at
random. Then I saw that I'd stepped in human poop.

True story.

------
danenania
Having lived in SF for about a year now, it's actually quite a clean,
beautiful, and safe city _IF_ you just stay away from a big chunk of the
center. My wife and I pretty much try to avoid it at all costs now, which is
sad because there's a lot of good stuff there (architecture, theatre,
restaurants, the tech scene, public transit arteries, etc.) but there are also
plenty of interesting and beautiful neighborhoods to explore that don't have
any of these problems, so we still enjoy living here a lot for the most part.
It's a utopia and dystopia all wrapped up into one.

~~~
maxaf
So, SF is _not_ a clean, beautiful, and safe city, considering that the part
of it with all the interesting stuff also happens to be drowning in a putrid
combination of feces and needles.

It's just like saying that Earth is a lovely place, as long as you avoid
breathing the atmosphere and drinking any of the water. Look at the forests!
Hope your spacesuit's faceplate doesn't become pitted by the acid rain.

~~~
danenania
My point is that all the interesting stuff is not in the center. There is
_some_ interesting stuff there, but there's just as much (if not more)
interesting stuff and urban/natural beauty in other less central neighborhoods
like Richmond, Sunset, Pac Heights, NoPa, Castro, North Beach, Mission-Bernal,
Noe Valley, Lower Haight, and a bunch more. All of those neighborhoods are
safe, walkable, have plenty of things to do, and compare well on just about
every dimension to any neighborhood in any big city in the world. So while the
drug and homelessness problems radiating out from SoMa/Tenderloin are very
serious and not to be diminished, trying to paint the whole city as a cesspool
just indicates that you haven't seen much of it.

~~~
thrax
Shhh!

------
excitom
I work in SoMa and walk to and from the CalTrain every day. Reading this
article you'd think I'd be ankle deep in poop during my walk. It's just not
the problem it's made out to be, not even close. I think people who write
these kind of articles like to take cheap shots at "lib" cities like SF. The
last sentence of the article bears this out.

Edit: Wow, I'm being downvoted for a personal observation that a story is
exaggerated. Sorry if I disturbed your confirmation bias.

~~~
chippy
How does it compare to other cities? Do other cities have dedicated "poop
patrols"? Is the outcry about public defecation about gentrification or is it
a genuine problem? How can we get accurate comparative statistics that also
show how the homeless are treated. Like I have heard that by (almost)
decriminalising public defecation and urination the city puts less stress on
the homeless who wouldn't be able to afford any fines, and in "cleaner" cities
the homeless have a harder life.

~~~
pjc50
> How does it compare to other cities?

This is a very rare problem in literally any other Western city. Even in the
severely deprived ones which have used needle problems. Dog waste and public
urination, maybe.

~~~
nutjob2
You do occasionally encounter it elsewhere, maybe everywhere, even in "clean"
cities but the scale is incomparable to most other cities.

