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t’s an empirical fact: San Francisco is a crappier place to live
these days. Sightings of human feces on the sidewalks are now a
regular occurrence; over the past 10 years, complaints about
human waste have increased 400%. People now call the city 65
times a day to report poop, and there have been 14,597 calls in
2018 alone. Last year, software engineer Jenn Wong even created
a poop map of San Francisco, showing the concentration of
incidents across the city. New mayor London Breed said: “There
is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up
here.” In a revolting recent incident, a 20lb bag of fecal waste
showed up on a street in the city’s Tenderloin district.

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Rebecca Solnit
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A city covered in poop is so disgusting it has to be almost
comical. But the uptick in street defecation is the symbol of a
human tragedy. People aren’t pooping on the streets because they
have suddenly forgotten what a bathroom is, or unlearned basic
hygiene. The incidents are part of a broader failure of the city
to provide for the basic needs of its citizens, and show the
catastrophic, socially destructive effects of unchecked
inequality.

It’s impossible to talk about street feces without talking about
homelessness and housing. While there aren’t actually more
homeless people than there have been in the past, the
gentrification of San Francisco has had a severe effect on the
homeless. Development has pushed homeless residents out of
secluded spaces, and there is less and less space for them to
inhabit as “places where homeless people used to sleep becoming
offices and housing”, in the words of a city official. The city
routinely clears away encampments, causing people to wander
around the city in search of a new temporary space.

Poop on the streets has another obvious cause: a lack of
restroom access. Many businesses restrict their bathrooms to
customers only, precisely because they don’t want their
facilities to be frequented by the homeless. But the
“privatization of bathrooms” means people are left without
obvious places to go. There are even websites offering tips on
how to go to the bathroom in San Francisco, such as by
pretending to be interested in furniture at Crate & Barrel or
finding the “hidden gem” of a bathroom on the second floor of a
Banana Republic. The city has installed 25 small self-cleaning
public toilets and recently commissioned a set of futuristic-
looking new bathrooms, but a few dozen toilets for a city of
870,000 is woefully insufficient. Bathroom access should be
considered a basic right, and it’s worth considering the idea of
banning “customers only” toilets. In a city with generous public
spaces and a commitment to equal access, no one would ever have
to use the street.

In a city with generous public spaces and a commitment to equal
access, no one? would ever have to use the street
But bathrooms are only part of the problem. Housing itself is
just as much a contributor. San Francisco spends hundreds of
millions of dollars a year on anti-homelessness initiatives, but
it has only managed to keep the number of homeless people from
growing further. There are still 7,500 homeless residents who
have no chance of finding accommodation in a city where a studio
apartment costs $2,500 a month. This kind of inequality demands
a radical solution. For all the talk about encouraging
developers to build affordable housing, a better plan may simply
be to have the city build housing itself. As Peter Gowan and
Ryan Cooper put it in a report for the People’s Policy Project,
“social housing” has gotten a bad reputation over the years, but
partly because it has never been invested in properly. Gowan and
Cooper say the solution is simpler than it looks: cities with
housing crises need to simply build houses.

A broader problem, though, is the lack of interest that many San
Franciscans seem to have in improving the lives of the homeless.
Many seem to view this population as a simple inconvenience,
such as the tech bro who complained to the mayor about having to
see “homeless riff-raff” or the rich woman who took out a full-
page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle to report having seen a
homeless man with a pair of scissors.

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There is a self-interested reason why such people should want to
do something about homelessness. No doubt city officials were
spooked last month when a major medical convention was canceled
due to organizers’ fears of the homeless. But there are
“solutions” that simply put the problem out of mind – like
Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to give every homeless person a one-
way bus ticket out of the city. And there are those which will
actually mitigate the effects of inequality. These will cost
much more, and demand some self-sacrifice from the city’s uber-
wealthy.

San Francisco has begun to take measures to address the problem
of street defecation. The city has launched a “Poop Patrol” to
make sure the sidewalks are kept clean of waste. But the problem
is a systemic one, and is the predictable consequence of being
one of the least affordable cities in the country. It’s what
happens when desperate people have no place to go.

Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/18/san- francisco-poop-problem-inequality-homelessness
 

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