cleaning up shit in San Francisco

[mr friendly guy]

literally

The crap job with a $255,000 salary
THIS city’s sickening human faeces problem had become so bad, it has been forced to launch a new crack squad to clean up the nauseating mess.

IT’S a crap job, but someone’s got to do it.

As San Francisco’s poop crisis reaches boiling point, the city has been forced to take drastic action to clean up its human faeces-smeared pavements.

Enter the “poop patrol” — a six-person, “proactive” poop detection and removal squad. Members will be paid a base salary of $US71,760 ($A99,000) which rises to $US184,678 ($A255,000) including benefits, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“What we’re doing is trying to be proactive,” San Francisco public works director Mohammed Nuru told ABC. “We’re going to have a crew that’s going to roam around and just try and look for these locations. We actually have data for neighbourhoods where we get frequent calls.”

One resident told the news station the poop patrol was a “great idea” but asked, “Could we get rid of the poopers as well?”

With up to 7500 homeless people sleeping on the streets at any one time, the city has faced an unprecedented problem — since the start of the year, there have been nearly 15,000 complaints about human faeces.

In one headline-making incident, a see-through plastic bag containing 9kg of human waste was dumped on the pavement. Earlier this month, Adobe developer and Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer tweeted his own experience.

“Nothing makes your morning like walking out of your overpriced San Francisco apartment and quickly having to dodge human diarrhoea smeared all over the street and walls of your building,” he wrote. “I need to leave this stupid city.”

San Francisco mayor London Breed told ABC she had faced the poo problem herself in front of her home and “it is not a pleasant feeling”. “I want to change San Francisco for the better, I want to clean up the city,” she said.

[JI_Joe84]

We had a problem with the homeless in our city. We started groups to help them, medical, food and safe places to sleep and get a shower.
Some turned their nose up at the help, they were "working" by begging on street corners and 4 way stops.
So we made it illegal to stand around and beg for money "to buy a couple McDonald's cheese burgers" except people finally figured out its the drug's they will be buying with you're change and man do they get pissed when people won't just give them money so they can quietly go get drug's.
Now they are pissed but they can be pissed because you can't just spend you're life begging and sleeping in the gutter just to support you're drug habbit.
"Tough love" goes a long ways some times.

[Broomstick]

As bad as piss and shit can be, I say it still can't top the two cold winter mornings in Chicago when I encountered a dead body - one on the sidewalk, one in a subway entrance.

Sounds like San Francisco is having a convergence of social problems. Why can't America take better care of their own?

[Highlord Laan]

Why can't America take better care of their own?

Because that would be communism. TOUGH LOVE and BOOTSTRAPPING THYSELF is the proper way any self-respecting MURRICAN would solve their problems. Attempting some sort of community wide, or worse, nation-wide effort to take on any so-called social problems is a greasy commienazi LIBERAL idea really aimed at making murrika RED and being behind such ideas means you hate AMERICA

Why do you hate AMERICA? Only commies hate AMERICA. I bet you hate Baby Jesus too, commie.

[Zaune]

Are public conveniences not a thing in San Francisco these days?

[Raw Shark]

Am I the only one who immediately thought that every person in this article has a name befitting a Pacific Rim jaeger?

Also, speaking as someone who spent about four hours walking around searching for a decent place to take a shit half a month ago, while offering to empty my pockets to prove I had no drugs, shitting politely can be really difficult.

[Broomstick]

I'm guessing this is an area of sexism where men get the short end - I suspect as a woman people are more likely to let me use facilities that are normally "employee only". Although I, too, have occasionally had trouble finding someplace to piss or shit "politely".

[Napoleon the Clown]

Are public conveniences not a thing in San Francisco these days?

If you're homeless and smell bad as a result of not having easy access to showering? Potentially, yeah. Businesses don't want someone who reeks in there. Society has concluded it does not want to reduce homelessness in an effective manner. Namely, provide people with homes. Instead, sweep the problem under the rug. Can't be building enough apartments that are affordable! Gotta keep building ultra-luxury condominiums.

[Zaune]

I meant as in city owned and taxpayer funded public lavatories that members of the public can use without being a customer of anywhere.

[Rogue 9]

I meant as in city owned and taxpayer funded public lavatories that members of the public can use without being a customer of anywhere.

Outside of public parks, usually no.

[Gandalf]

I meant as in city owned and taxpayer funded public lavatories that members of the public can use without being a customer of anywhere.

Outside of public parks, usually no.

That's odd. I would think some decent public loos would be a better investment than some sort of shit cleaning squad.

[Elheru Aran]

I meant as in city owned and taxpayer funded public lavatories that members of the public can use without being a customer of anywhere.

Outside of public parks, usually no.

That's odd. I would think some decent public loos would be a better investment than some sort of shit cleaning squad.

Public restrooms are definitely a rarity. The closest equivalent in most areas is finding a small business, and often enough you're expected to make a token purchase so you're a "customer". Most public restrooms in parks and such tend to be locked when the park is closed to boot, precisely to prevent homeless people from camping there.

Re homelessness: the US sucks mostly because of conservative fallout from the 50sish on down. The New Deal helped a lot, but the post-war prosperity brought the whole red-meat American success story ideal to the forefront. I'm not talking how things *really* were, I'm talking about the cultural lies people told themselves. That all you had to do was get a job pushing an idiot stick for a few weeks, impress your supervisor and get promoted, learn a few things and boom, you're either a manager or running a successful business... things like that. The whole bootstraps notion has never really gone away in the US.

That said, of late there have been SOME-- not a whole lot, but some-- efforts to alleviate the problem. Things like buying up closed-down motels and renovating them into cheap apartments. Giving homeless people tiny-houses to live in. Leasing parking lots so people can park there and sleep safely in their cars. That latter is just depressing, I know, but it's marginally better than them being on the street, no?

[Ralin]

That's odd. I would think some decent public loos would be a better investment than some sort of shit cleaning squad.

Shit's not going to clean itself. And genuinely public restrooms are unlikely to stay decent for long because they're free and open to the public.

[mr friendly guy]

Isn't it easier to clean public restrooms than the streets? At least the shit will tend to be located in the same areas.

[Beowulf]

Society has concluded it does not want to reduce homelessness in an effective manner. Namely, provide people with homes. Instead, sweep the problem under the rug. Can't be building enough apartments that are affordable! Gotta keep building ultra-luxury condominiums.

They can't build enough apartments, period. Developers are in a business. They want to make money. And those ultra-luxury condos are the only ones that will make them enough at this point to be able go through the decade of red tape et al to get to actually building.

[Ralin]

Isn't it easier to clean public restrooms than the streets? At least the shit will tend to be located in the same areas.

Shit's already laying around in the streets and who knows how many of the homeless would migrate to the new public toilets now that they're in the habit, or how long it would take. And people would rather spend money fighting the homeless than catering to them.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Society has concluded it does not want to reduce homelessness in an effective manner. Namely, provide people with homes. Instead, sweep the problem under the rug. Can't be building enough apartments that are affordable! Gotta keep building ultra-luxury condominiums.

They can't build enough apartments, period. Developers are in a business. They want to make money. And those ultra-luxury condos are the only ones that will make them enough at this point to be able go through the decade of red tape et al to get to actually building.

Which is where government should step in. They should provide incentive for affordable apartments. Keep the building codes and everything up to proper standards, but expedite the process for getting approved and even toss if some amount of money toward construction. The government should at least contribute in some way to making life better for people. The government gets at least as much finger pointing at it as the developers and apartment management companies. It has the power to make acts more attractive. Only so much money to throw at a problem, but making it so that affordable housing is easier to get approval for building in a timely manner should not be hard.

[Elfdart]

I meant as in city owned and taxpayer funded public lavatories that members of the public can use without being a customer of anywhere.

Outside of public parks, usually no.

That's odd. I would think some decent public loos would be a better investment than some sort of shit cleaning squad.

Not with the real estate prices in the Bay Area. No private landowner wants to give up so much as a square foot in the name of public sanitation. Not when there is so much to be made from McMansions and townhouses.

[Sea Skimmer]

That's odd. I would think some decent public loos would be a better investment than some sort of shit cleaning squad.

They've been building them a bit, but due to the issue of people using them as drug dens they've ended up building some pretty damn elaborate and thus expensive ones with self cleaning floors and a door that automatically opens wide after a set period of time.

I recall reading an article about how the original design for this quickly jammed up in service, because people left too much trash on the floor for the self cleaning feature to handle.

A while back most US cities got rid of all the public toilets over drugs and prostitution concerns so it very much is a case of starting over. Around here, if we had public toilets they'd be 100% full of heroin addicts, but we have so many abandon factories and trainyards the addicts have ample places to take a dump that isn't exactly in plain site.

Not with the real estate prices in the Bay Area. No private landowner wants to give up so much as a square foot in the name of public sanitation. Not when there is so much to be made from McMansions and townhouses.

The public has plenty of property to use, they just come up with insane reasons why they should make even building on that more expensive.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/pla ... 985870.php

The reality is a large fraction of the landowners would be super happy to demolish what they have and build 15 story apartment buildings on the spots which would rapidly solve the housing problem in the Bay area, but the amount of local opposition to building anything is insane. California as a state greatly changed the way zoning laws work (specifically for areas around public transport routes and major roads) around three years ago pretty much completely because of the Bay area, but it's only just starting to have practical effects.

[Beowulf]

They can't build enough apartments, period. Developers are in a business. They want to make money. And those ultra-luxury condos are the only ones that will make them enough at this point to be able go through the decade of red tape et al to get to actually building.

Which is where government should step in. They should provide incentive for affordable apartments. Keep the building codes and everything up to proper standards, but expedite the process for getting approved and even toss if some amount of money toward construction. The government should at least contribute in some way to making life better for people. The government gets at least as much finger pointing at it as the developers and apartment management companies. It has the power to make acts more attractive. Only so much money to throw at a problem, but making it so that affordable housing is easier to get approval for building in a timely manner should not be hard.

The government is beholden to the people. Their constituents don't want to expedite things. You have a confluence of NIMBYs, and lobbyists that make see a benefit from gumming up the works. Essentially every project has "affordable" units as part of the development. It still doesn't really help. Projects still take a while to get to breaking ground, and still don't make enough of a dent in the housing deficit to keep the market rate for housing from climbing. SF should look like Manhattan, in order to help reduce the housing crunch, and they don't want to.

[Napoleon the Clown]

They can't build enough apartments, period. Developers are in a business. They want to make money. And those ultra-luxury condos are the only ones that will make them enough at this point to be able go through the decade of red tape et al to get to actually building.

Which is where government should step in. They should provide incentive for affordable apartments. Keep the building codes and everything up to proper standards, but expedite the process for getting approved and even toss if some amount of money toward construction. The government should at least contribute in some way to making life better for people. The government gets at least as much finger pointing at it as the developers and apartment management companies. It has the power to make acts more attractive. Only so much money to throw at a problem, but making it so that affordable housing is easier to get approval for building in a timely manner should not be hard.

The government is beholden to the people. Their constituents don't want to expedite things. You have a confluence of NIMBYs, and lobbyists that make see a benefit from gumming up the works. Essentially every project has "affordable" units as part of the development. It still doesn't really help. Projects still take a while to get to breaking ground, and still don't make enough of a dent in the housing deficit to keep the market rate for housing from climbing. SF should look like Manhattan, in order to help reduce the housing crunch, and they don't want to.

I think we're pretty much in agreement on all of what you said there. The US has a pretty fucked culture when it comes to poverty. There's basically no attempt at compassion to be found...

[JI_Joe84]

Ummm on the public restroom thing, out here in Missouri most every business has a restroom. It's required by law for any place to have a operational capacity of more than like 2 people.
It's pretty easy to find a restroom if I'm traveling, just look for a business, just not a mom & pop sort of place.
The mom & pop sorts reserve their bathrooms for employee's just cause I don't know why.
So unless its totally different over in San Francisco then I say the homeless are just being lazy with their bathroom habits.

[JI_Joe84]

I will say that help getting some one from homeless and living in the gutter to working and living in an apartment (or perhaps a old house that no one is currently living in?)is pretty much non existent unless some one is kind enough to dedicate their time (perhaps life) to operating.
Getting the gov. involved is generally frowned upon because of politicians proclivity to take some thing simple and works and make it go totally fubar. Mostly just due to normal political bickering.
Most Americans are cognizant and utterly disgusted at that particular feature of our government. I find Democrats and republicans want to give all the old politicians the boot and start over.

[Elheru Aran]

Ummm on the public restroom thing, out here in Missouri most every business has a restroom. It's required by law for any place to have a operational capacity of more than like 2 people.
It's pretty easy to find a restroom if I'm traveling, just look for a business, just not a mom & pop sort of place.
The mom & pop sorts reserve their bathrooms for employee's just cause I don't know why.
So unless its totally different over in San Francisco then I say the homeless are just being lazy with their bathroom habits.

As I noted earlier, usually at least a token purchase is called for in order to use a restroom in a private establishment like a McDonald's or a gas station. While you could go in and use it without buying anything, it's not a 'public restroom' in that it's NOT free for all to use as needed. While a 50-cent pack of gum might not seem like much, it's plenty when maybe all you've got to buy some food with is a cap with some odds and ends of pocket change in.

[Rogue 9]

Ummm on the public restroom thing, out here in Missouri most every business has a restroom. It's required by law for any place to have a operational capacity of more than like 2 people.
It's pretty easy to find a restroom if I'm traveling, just look for a business, just not a mom & pop sort of place.
The mom & pop sorts reserve their bathrooms for employee's just cause I don't know why.
So unless its totally different over in San Francisco then I say the homeless are just being lazy with their bathroom habits.

As I noted earlier, usually at least a token purchase is called for in order to use a restroom in a private establishment like a McDonald's or a gas station. While you could go in and use it without buying anything, it's not a 'public restroom' in that it's NOT free for all to use as needed. While a 50-cent pack of gum might not seem like much, it's plenty when maybe all you've got to buy some food with is a cap with some odds and ends of pocket change in.

In rural areas and small towns, at least in the Midwest, nobody really sweats making a purchase; gas stations and especially truck stops pretty much expect to be used as public rest stops. I really only see signs saying you have to be a customer to use the restrooms in urban areas.

Speaking of public rest stops, that's the other major exception to there not being public restroom facilities in the United States. The interstate highway system has periodic public rest stops, usually with maps available, picnic grounds, and public restrooms. But those are extremely inconvenient to get to unless actually traveling via highway in a car, which doesn't help urban homeless populations very much.