The Streets of San Francisco Are Covered in Human Shit (xpost from GD)

[KamaAina]

Poop on Mission Street. Poop between cars. Poop in the alley. Poop in the Tenderloin. Poop in the escalator—so much poop that the escalator breaks down under the strain of all that poop. Everywhere you look, San Francisco residents are saying, there is poop, poop, poop.

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Counterpoint: it's a little funny. There's a nice poetic justice to the gilded paradise of new-money tech-dudes teeming with the inescapable waste of people left behind or displaced by the awful march of disruption.

But the jokes come as a consequence of a pressing and critical problem: Homelessness. And a sore lack of public facilities that homeless people are accessible to homeless people. Will Kane at Ratter, the local-reporting site launched by former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio, dove into the issue last month:

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While tourists and shoppers can sneak into a hotel or store and use the bathroom many people who don't have access to a bathroom during the day "get turned away because they are poor, and they are black," Friedenbach said. "Human beings do not want to defect or urinate in public. It is not natural and they do so out of desperation because they have no where else to go."

http://justice.gawker.com/the-streets-of-san-francisco-are-covered-in-human-shit-1679930931/+tcberman

[Cleita]

1. Sounds like our property. In our case it's dogs, deer and birds.

In your case, if those who don't want the homeless pooping, they should work to provide them some housing with bathroom facilities.

[Auggie]

2. I haven't lived in San Francisco since 2001. It was a public toilet then.

[LeftyMom]

3. Wait, the NYT wrote about the dirtiness in SF?

Oh good lord have they ever walked outside and taken a deep breath in their own city?

[mackerel]

4. All large cities are like that but I think the tenderloin is the worst.

[KamaAina]

5. A place to go — Tenderloin toilets for the homeless get funding through June

http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2015/01/27/a-place-to-go-tenderloin-toilets-for-the-homeless-get-funding-through-june/

San Francisco may finally be making a dent in its sidewalk poop problem.

Buoyed by what Supervisor Jane Kim called “outstanding” results, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to spend $203,200 to extend and expand a pilot project that provides the homeless with a place to go – specially outfitted portable toilets on flat-bed trailers that are staffed by attendants.

For six months, the city paid $150,000 to a nonprofit to provide a pair of the toilets at each of three locations in the Tenderloin, the neighborhood with the worst human feces problem.

Use of the toilets has roughly doubled since the program’s start in July to an average of 167 times a day, according to figures compiled by the Department of Public Works, which is overseeing the program. Requests for steam cleaning in the area – almost always for human excrement – have dropped by one-third, from 27 a day to 15, said Rachel Gordon, a Public Works spokeswoman.