I echo the point that this is merely a symptom of SF's inability to be a little bit more hardnosed and solve its problems.
As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop in broad daylight on a Saturday in downtown (and blocking the sidewalk, and creating piles of junk).
The operator said that she would report this to the "neighborhood outreach / management team" or something similar I've forgotten the name of. And she said they would likely be dispatched to resolve it within 2-3 days.
I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.
Any other rational city, and the police would be cuffing these guys and hauling them in for questioning about clearly stolen bikes. But here in SF, it's "too inequitable" to be targeting homeless people for actively and visibly engaging in criminal behavior. This is to the point that car break-ins are considered minor acceptable crime.
This city has lost its senses, in the name of thinking it's some post-modern utopia that has to treat everyone equally and naively, and ignore the obvious bullshit going on right in front of our noses.
That's a trend all over the country. I read an article about Seattle almost completely giving up on this type and other non violent crimes. The east coast, like in Boston is getting there too. If no one is about to die, just shut up and deal with it.
This has been the trend in Vancouver, BC as well. Property crime under a certain amount has (de facto) been decriminalized, especially if the perps are perceived to be drug addicts or living in the streets otherwise. The main problems here are limited law enforcement budget, and lenient justice system that merely results in catch-and-release operations for the police.
> As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop
First of all, I hope you called 311 and not 911 for this. It's obviously not a life-threatening emergency.
> I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.
As (hopefully) established above, this is not an emergency, so I don't understand why you'd expect a squad of detectives to race out there right away. From your description, it doesn't sound like anyone was in danger. Sorry, but the police are not bellhops that you can just summon when you feel irritated about something that's happening outside.
More broadly, the San Francisco livability crisis is out of control. Poop is only a visible and easily disagreeable symptom of the broader problem.
The local government can patch symptoms of the problem but some of them (housing, mental health, opioid epidemic) are state-level or national problems that the local government have very little power or ability to solve. Some of the law and order issues are issues the local govt can solve, but there isn't an incentive to solve them.
These arguments remind me of The Onion's classic "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".
Which is to say SF's problems are definitely a result of SF policies! For housing specifically, only SF is responsible for making construction in SF near impossible.
The problems of the nation and state are of course also present there, but that doesn't change that SF is unique.
Genuine (outsider) question: how is housing not a uniquely-SF problem? The rest of the country and even other parts of California seem to have affordable housing, at least relatively speaking.
EDIT: RE downvotes, shame on me for not being familiar with SF politics, I guess. It is, after all, the center of the universe. (◔_◔)
You could actually enforce the laws and put people in safe jails with better living conditions than they have now, outside the city limits.
It seems like being more and more lenient is not a solution to a problem getting worse and worse.
Lets have compassion for the innocent people doing nothing wrong, who are confronted with injustices imposed upon them by people who are doing drugs and other criminal acts with impunity, while they're just going to work.
Compassion for homeless sure, but what about people who are victimized by the homeless, who have done nothing wrong?
I know you think this seems very logical, sane - but you have a tell "outside city limits" - you want these people rounded up and bused out. it's not a solution.
Sane policing, treatment programs, and massive development is the solution.
The problem is not so much their poop, it's the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it's huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..)
My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don't know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It's an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..
"The animal parts used for pet food may include damaged carcass parts, bones, and cheek meat, and organs such as intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, udders, spleen, and stomach tissue"[1].
These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved. Eating our leftovers is, in fact, the traditional role that dogs have played in human societies.
Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice. We can (and do) also control pet populations with spaying and neutering programs.
Mods - can we update the title to “San Francisco dog poop crisis” ? Note that the category of tickets in 311 is “Human / Animal waste”. I personally went through 100 random tickets on the sf data portal and found that 95% were either dog poop or miss classified (eg abandoned car or trash collection). People automatically read the headline and correlate to human waste.
I’m sure looking at numbers it’s going to be mostly dog poop.
There should NOT be ANY human poop at all!!!
That it’s even trivialized goes to show the growing acceptance of this phenomenon. On a few occasions I’ve seen people (perhaps transients or whatever) going behind bushes in plain daylight. I’ve seen it on sidewalks and also on public steps. That should not be a thing in a country that emerged from outhouses and such a century ago and understand cholera etc...
I’m looking at the data portal and at least the last 300 waste complaints have no details (details field just says “Human/Animal waste” or is empty) - how did you figure out if they’re dog poop or misclassified?
I wouldn't mind half the police force being reassigned to fine the sort of people who let their dog shit and run.
My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house.
He eventually had the tiny patch of land paved over.
SF needs the Portland Loo.[1][2] The homeless-resistant public toilet. Not enough privacy for a drug deal. Water faucet on the outside, not the inside. Prison-grade stainless.
The idea that drug dealing is such a harmful thing (it's not) that we must deny homeless and poor people the basic human dignity of being able to use a toilet in privacy to avoid people being able to engage in it is an idea that needs to be extinguished.
Why on earth wouldn't you want toilets for the homeless to have enough privacy for a drug deal? The alternative is having the drug deals done in public where I and my kids have to see it happen.
OK, how about "Uber for toilets"? Clean a toilet, get paid. Cameras and machine learning to check what a clean and dirty toilet look like. Sign up, and you get access to cleaning supplies and can turn the hose on. Works like retrieving dockless scooters.
for that you really need to have the toilets to begin with. SF, and in general American cities, have no public toilets ( i mean the number they have is just a noise around 0).
I wonder how much this has to do with an increase in people knowing that there exists a system to complain about poop, versus the actual increase of poop itself.
I just got back from SF, last time was 2006. Nonexistent problem then, and when I arrived, I was unaware. It was a whole day before I realized it wasn't dog shit. I thought to myself,"I havven't seen this much dog shit since Buenos Aires, but man they must have a lot of big dogs in SF, kinda strange." Then it clicked.
The homeless crisis in SF is like nothing I have seen anywhere, not India, not South America. Felt very unsafe, I'd rather not return.
I've lived here 10 years, and its everywhere now. You can see this with your eyes, or if you don't trust what you see, you can see it in the city provided data of homeless living on the streets. Its up 17% over the last 2 years (measured every 2 years)
Something about this article pinwheeled Firefox on my mac for two minutes before I gave up and force killed firefox. Particularly strange since I have all javascript, including first party, blocked by default with uMatrix. I had to read it with emacs.
Anyway, the fact that this is even a question people wonder about should be proof enough there's a problem. I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too. All kinds of liter all over the place, rats running around in plain sight. Trash cans getting deliberately turned over and emptied onto the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Vomit and the piss of drunks are common in alleyways. There is no shortage of abject poverty and homelessness. But shit on the streets? Not in Philly; not in this century anyway. This is one respect in which Philly is definitely cleaner.
This discrepancy is something that I've never seen satisfactorily explained. I've heard all kinds of comments about poverty and access to public bathrooms and all those other explanations. But I've never been able to figure out why this impacts San Francisco so much more than a city like Philly. Poverty, homelessness, mental illness, income inequality, and businesses with no public restrooms are not uniquely SF problems.
Edit for clarification:
North and West Philly are filthy. North of Spring Garden or west of 40th or so. And Kensington is a festering wound. The alleys in downtown are filthy too, though the sidewalks of the major streets are generally cleaner. Maybe they've cleaned it up since I lived there; I moved away about 10 years ago. I last visited about 2 years ago and it didn't really seem like anything had changed.
> I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too.
I moved from SF to Philadelphia 2 years ago and have no idea what you're talking about.
None of the things you described are things I've seen more than maybe once in the 2 years I've lived here, and I walk everywhere just like I did in SF.
Granted, all of those things I saw repeatedly when living in SF for 4 years beforehand. The one time I smelled urine in a street in Philly, my brain went "whoa, am I back in SoMa?"
Is it the ability to be on the street year round? Maybe the more comfortable you are living outside, the more likely to use it as a bathroom. Colder climates force the homeless to use shelters and similar resources during winter months.
San Francisco needs more public restrooms. I think any map of SF's poop should also show how few city-provided restrooms there are, so I made one: https://sf-restrooms-and-poop.glitch.me/
We call it "culture".
Public restrooms don't help, people do it despite those, and often near them. We've had people come in during a change window late at night, and go right outside our office door. The custodian said he passed the person on their way out, and had to clean it up. Then there is that moment you realized someone tracked some into your office after walking to get lunch. It's very offsetting.
Is the San Francisco Shtuation Out of Control?
Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am
It continued:
We may be the "parking hell" of San Francisco, but at least we're predictable about it. Just like how we've been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can't be found. Well, we're not going to have a protected bike lane in 9 months because.. well.. UberHittingTaxis is totally derailing it and killing the entire project . That alone has me so pissy and pissed off
I tried GPT-2 again:
We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco shtuation. Very few people know that the birth of frederic Felspike on the last day of 1847, resulted in the birth of a San Franciscan most certainly from all over. He was a true founding member of San Francisco history, at least a half of the San Franciscans who were still
I tried GPT-2 a third time:
by Edmund Kemper Now you can: - Save and share news and news stories from around the Bay Area - Mention SF Asks Now for special news updates when you're posting comments - Choose from many popular templates to create one of your own The San Francisco Sh*tuation ® began in early 2002 as a group of passionate Bay Area residents, many of whom had the same frustration with local politics, media, and society. Our mission is to provide a space
I'm not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn't immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.
(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)
Tracking the increase in number of SF311 "Human/Animal waste" reports over time isn't as meaningful as it seems...because a larger number of poop reports are duplicates!
You need to the Open311 API and not just the DataSF 311 case dump to see this unfortunately. But SF311 closes a large number of tickets with "duplicate of SR #<....>"
So without this data it's unclear if the poop is increasing, or if it's just that SF311 usage is way up and duplicate reports are increasing.
I went to a big tech conference in San Francisco a couple of years back. Walking back to the hotel from Moscone Center, I found myself pacing evenly with what looked to be a bag lady. All of a sudden she loudly yelled "Watch out for that sh*t!"
I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I'd stepped in it. She tried to warn me.
A huge problem is the lack of public toilets. When I first lived there, I got locked out of my apartment and could not find anywhere to go to the bathroom. I had to wait until my roommate got back. If I did not have a place to go back to, what could have I done except poop on the street?
Wouldn't a restaurant or fast food outlet let you use their bathroom? I think if you make it clear that your options are to take a dump either on their toilet or right where you're standing, they would show you the toilet immediately.
I am in the middle of an interview process with a company in SF right now. I like the company and the job but I'm not sure about SF. I had already been thinking about the well-known poop problems before I saw this post.
This will be a factor in my decision to take the job or not.
It seems very wrong to describe it in those terms. I mean, what's next, an article in January about how DC has a "frozen bodies on the street" problem?
There are simply too many puns are floating around in my brain-- and they're all terrible. My wife has always said, "everyone likes a good poop joke", but I think that may have been targeted at preschoolers and not adults.
Betteridge's law dictates that if the answer to the question is yes, then the headline is better as a declarative statement: The San Francisco Sh*tuation is Out of Control
Give them a better place to do drugs; a place where they get free needles and can throw away the old ones properly (so they won't leave them lying about).
supernova87a|6 years ago
As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop in broad daylight on a Saturday in downtown (and blocking the sidewalk, and creating piles of junk).
The operator said that she would report this to the "neighborhood outreach / management team" or something similar I've forgotten the name of. And she said they would likely be dispatched to resolve it within 2-3 days.
I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.
Any other rational city, and the police would be cuffing these guys and hauling them in for questioning about clearly stolen bikes. But here in SF, it's "too inequitable" to be targeting homeless people for actively and visibly engaging in criminal behavior. This is to the point that car break-ins are considered minor acceptable crime.
This city has lost its senses, in the name of thinking it's some post-modern utopia that has to treat everyone equally and naively, and ignore the obvious bullshit going on right in front of our noses.
shados|6 years ago
pesfandiar|6 years ago
mav3rick|6 years ago
kevin_thibedeau|6 years ago
larnmar|6 years ago
[deleted]
ryandrake|6 years ago
First of all, I hope you called 311 and not 911 for this. It's obviously not a life-threatening emergency.
> I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.
As (hopefully) established above, this is not an emergency, so I don't understand why you'd expect a squad of detectives to race out there right away. From your description, it doesn't sound like anyone was in danger. Sorry, but the police are not bellhops that you can just summon when you feel irritated about something that's happening outside.
umeshunni|6 years ago
The local government can patch symptoms of the problem but some of them (housing, mental health, opioid epidemic) are state-level or national problems that the local government have very little power or ability to solve. Some of the law and order issues are issues the local govt can solve, but there isn't an incentive to solve them.
BurningFrog|6 years ago
Which is to say SF's problems are definitely a result of SF policies! For housing specifically, only SF is responsible for making construction in SF near impossible.
The problems of the nation and state are of course also present there, but that doesn't change that SF is unique.
paulddraper|6 years ago
Sincere question: Why does San Francisco seem to be the only one with those news stories (not NYC, LA, Chicago, Miami, etc.)?
weberc2|6 years ago
EDIT: RE downvotes, shame on me for not being familiar with SF politics, I guess. It is, after all, the center of the universe. (◔_◔)
danschumann|6 years ago
danschumann|6 years ago
Compassion for homeless sure, but what about people who are victimized by the homeless, who have done nothing wrong?
dividedbyzero|6 years ago
deepakhj|6 years ago
dfcagency|6 years ago
Sane policing, treatment programs, and massive development is the solution.
11235813213455|6 years ago
My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don't know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It's an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..
[1]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503376/all-meat-pet-food..., https://www.treehugger.com/pets/cats-dogs-meat-environmental...
triceratops|6 years ago
These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved. Eating our leftovers is, in fact, the traditional role that dogs have played in human societies.
Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice. We can (and do) also control pet populations with spaying and neutering programs.
1. http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Pet-Food.html#ixzz662tVEXrH
LoSboccacc|6 years ago
remember last time we culled cats what happened?
dmode|6 years ago
mc32|6 years ago
There should NOT be ANY human poop at all!!!
That it’s even trivialized goes to show the growing acceptance of this phenomenon. On a few occasions I’ve seen people (perhaps transients or whatever) going behind bushes in plain daylight. I’ve seen it on sidewalks and also on public steps. That should not be a thing in a country that emerged from outhouses and such a century ago and understand cholera etc...
grandmczeb|6 years ago
Edit: E.g this one https://sf311.org/track-case?ref=11716075&email=
dang|6 years ago
hombre_fatal|6 years ago
My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house.
He eventually had the tiny patch of land paved over.
squidsurfer|6 years ago
cevn|6 years ago
Animats|6 years ago
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29... [2] https://portlandloo.com/
VectorLock|6 years ago
MaupitiBlue|6 years ago
That is SF. Drug deals are done in broad daylight.
sneak|6 years ago
deepakhj|6 years ago
paggle|6 years ago
draw_down|6 years ago
[deleted]
Animats|6 years ago
manux|6 years ago
I really don't get it.
trhway|6 years ago
for that you really need to have the toilets to begin with. SF, and in general American cities, have no public toilets ( i mean the number they have is just a noise around 0).
wuunderbar|6 years ago
dade_|6 years ago
justinzollars|6 years ago
leesalminen|6 years ago
catalogia|6 years ago
catalogia|6 years ago
Anyway, the fact that this is even a question people wonder about should be proof enough there's a problem. I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too. All kinds of liter all over the place, rats running around in plain sight. Trash cans getting deliberately turned over and emptied onto the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Vomit and the piss of drunks are common in alleyways. There is no shortage of abject poverty and homelessness. But shit on the streets? Not in Philly; not in this century anyway. This is one respect in which Philly is definitely cleaner.
This discrepancy is something that I've never seen satisfactorily explained. I've heard all kinds of comments about poverty and access to public bathrooms and all those other explanations. But I've never been able to figure out why this impacts San Francisco so much more than a city like Philly. Poverty, homelessness, mental illness, income inequality, and businesses with no public restrooms are not uniquely SF problems.
Edit for clarification:
North and West Philly are filthy. North of Spring Garden or west of 40th or so. And Kensington is a festering wound. The alleys in downtown are filthy too, though the sidewalks of the major streets are generally cleaner. Maybe they've cleaned it up since I lived there; I moved away about 10 years ago. I last visited about 2 years ago and it didn't really seem like anything had changed.
rtfeldman|6 years ago
I moved from SF to Philadelphia 2 years ago and have no idea what you're talking about.
None of the things you described are things I've seen more than maybe once in the 2 years I've lived here, and I walk everywhere just like I did in SF.
Granted, all of those things I saw repeatedly when living in SF for 4 years beforehand. The one time I smelled urine in a street in Philly, my brain went "whoa, am I back in SoMa?"
blackearl|6 years ago
mambodog|6 years ago
Compare with Australia's National Public Toilet Map: https://toiletmap.gov.au/Find/20547
linusnext|6 years ago
kragen|6 years ago
Is the San Francisco Shtuation Out of Control? Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am
It continued:
We may be the "parking hell" of San Francisco, but at least we're predictable about it. Just like how we've been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can't be found. Well, we're not going to have a protected bike lane in 9 months because.. well.. UberHittingTaxis is totally derailing it and killing the entire project . That alone has me so pissy and pissed off
I tried GPT-2 again:
We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco shtuation. Very few people know that the birth of frederic Felspike on the last day of 1847, resulted in the birth of a San Franciscan most certainly from all over. He was a true founding member of San Francisco history, at least a half of the San Franciscans who were still
I tried GPT-2 a third time:
by Edmund Kemper Now you can: - Save and share news and news stories from around the Bay Area - Mention SF Asks Now for special news updates when you're posting comments - Choose from many popular templates to create one of your own The San Francisco Sh*tuation ® began in early 2002 as a group of passionate Bay Area residents, many of whom had the same frustration with local politics, media, and society. Our mission is to provide a space
I'm not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn't immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.
(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)
pmiller2|6 years ago
fludlight|6 years ago
varenc|6 years ago
You need to the Open311 API and not just the DataSF 311 case dump to see this unfortunately. But SF311 closes a large number of tickets with "duplicate of SR #<....>"
So without this data it's unclear if the poop is increasing, or if it's just that SF311 usage is way up and duplicate reports are increasing.
RickJWagner|6 years ago
I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I'd stepped in it. She tried to warn me.
dzhiurgis|6 years ago
With sequencing getting so cheap, this might be an cheap data source for Hooli and the likes.
cwkoss|6 years ago
DonHopkins|6 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Seat
kaikai|6 years ago
confidantlake|6 years ago
blueadept111|6 years ago
TwoNineFive|6 years ago
This will be a factor in my decision to take the job or not.
mav3rick|6 years ago
linusnext|6 years ago
taobility|6 years ago
khazhou|6 years ago
(there's gotta be a word for that effect)
mzg|6 years ago
ilaksh|6 years ago
It's a homeless crisis.
sp332|6 years ago
ill0gicity|6 years ago
foolproofplan|6 years ago
thereisnospork|6 years ago
tome|6 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549
r00fus|6 years ago
e.g. "Pete Buttigieg has a AA voter problem" vs. his actually having that problem (which is not conclusive)
The solution to this is usually some overwhelming action to not only mitigate but change the momentum of discussion.
v64|6 years ago
pressurefree|6 years ago
[deleted]
blackearl|6 years ago
[deleted]
dang|6 years ago
Edit: the comment was edited. (The original text was "Don't poo-poo this article or the factual fecal findings within".)
LegitGandalf|6 years ago
[deleted]
frostyj|6 years ago
forinti|6 years ago
J5892|6 years ago
baddox|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]