The city of San Francisco provides homeless people with $520/month in cash, via an ATM card that refills on the 1st of the month.
They give away $24 million a year in cash.
It's a genuinely good idea to provide assistance to the homeless, but it should be in the form of Care Not Cash and given away equally across the state. Otherwise, you are funding a drug demand epidemic and likely creating incentives for people with drug problems from around the Bay Area to move here for the cash.
I filed a FOIA with the city to get data on the total cash given away.
I wonder what drug prices are like on the first and second. And robberies of homeless people. And robberies of everyone else towards the end of the month.
Would at least make better sense to direct-pay rent for housing to the landlord and then stagger the remaining cash for everything else on a weekly basis on a different day of the week.
My friend is a cop in an area that deals with a lot of meth and opioid issues. I asked him this and his answer was that it's usually in easy multiples. $15, $20, $25 etc. I suppose this makes sense, given it's an all cash business.
I have a general theory related to this this article. Disenfranchised people do not take care of the society around them. Rightfully so. If my society doesn't seem to give a shit about me, why should I give a shit about it? If this theory holds true, then graffiti, vandalism, pooping on the streets, and so on, are all symptoms of disenfranchisement. Conversely, go to a neighborhood of homeowners, and look at how well-kept everything generally is. You can even compare it to a neighborhood of renters. There's a noticeable difference between homeowner and renter neighborhoods. And it's not an income level thing. We can control the renter vs. owner neighborhood comparison for income level.
My general theory is that, if you want a well-ordered society, distribute ownership more.
> There's a noticeable difference between homeowner and renter neighborhoods. And it's not an income level thing.
I'm actually not sure of this, and it comes from living in the Bay Area. Over the last 8 years, we've seen a large increase in the number of high-income families who are renting, largely because of our screwed-up property markets where a condo that rents for $3K/month might have a PITA of $8K/month if you buy it. We're even starting to get the phenomena of millionaire renters, people who could pass the accredited investor test and yet still don't own their own home.
And I've noticed that when rental areas gentrify, they get nicer. The apartments are more well-kept; there's less junk on streets and balconies; less loitering; nice shops spring up with clean (but often sterile or artificial) interiors.
I think it really is about the money. When richer tenants move in, landlords and property managers have more money for repairs & landscaping. The tenants may not be able to afford a home, but they can certainly afford someone to cart away their couch. They spend more money in the local area, which means that shop owners have more disposable income to hire people for cleaning & repairs.
I think my comment about controlling for income level stands. We need to compare your gentrified renting neighborhood to a homeowner neighborhood at the same income level.
I can't believe this isn't obvious to most people. Equitable (not the same as equal) distribution of resources allows people to invest in their society, community, neighborhood, state, country and the world.
If I were disenfranchised, I sure as hell wouldn't care about society, norms and whatever is of value to the haves.
I completely agree with this statement. Autonomy and a feeling of ownership are essential for most people to feel content. My go to example is a guy running a food truck/burger stand vs a guy working at Wendy's (making the same take home as the burger stand guy).
The guy running his own burger stand can get up everyday and take pride in making the best hamburger he can make. But for the guy working at Wendy's, making the best hamburger he can make isn't his job. His job is to follow the Wendy's standards to the letter, and make the exact same hamburger everyday. If he does his job well, he is essentially acting like a hamburger producing robot. For most people, that will never be fulfilling.
I think we’re in general agreement but I would counter that it’s possible to feel a sense of ownership even at Wendy’s. It all comes down to how the work is distributed. For example, if the manager tells a worker “you are entirely responsible for the grill. We’re counting on you to take care of it,” I think we’re providing the opportunity for the potentially transformative experience of ownership.
Owning your own business is obviously a more powerful version of the same phenomenon, though.
That has a lot of assumptions. You can argue the other way with having a sense of ownership and being responsible is what leads to higher quality in your surroundings.
I can see that. From personal experience, when I’ve been given the opportunity to own something, such as a project at work, I found a sense of pride in it that I wasn’t expecting. So I am suggesting that providing people the chance to own something can be a transformative experience.
A chance to "own" something is a very deep iceberg. Ownership needs to consider a lot of things from an economic perspective, a rights perspective (law), society, and so on.
Basically, I guess I'm just saying – it's really complicated and just concluding giving away resources is missing the forest for the trees.
I probably didn’t provide enough nuance in my original comment. I think we’re in agreement that ownership can be a productive feeling. I agree that giving stuff away isn’t guaranteed to lead to a sense of ownership. The main idea I’m submitting here is that, if we can somehow give more people the opportunity to experience ownership, society will function better. Stuff like what we’re seeing in SF is less likely to happen. If we’re in agreement then the question is, how do we go about giving more opportunities for ownership in society?
I don’t think there’s a shortcut to a true sense of ownership. So I’d lean less on the welfare topology. I would lean heavily in making it more accessible to provide value to society. Setup technology that allows people to provide value to community and society as best as possible.
That’s my high level thought which of course requires a lot of boiling down.
So you want to give the homeowners houses to the homeless people and your "disenfranchised" problem will be solved. Great theory, you should definitely pursue it.
Look closer at my comment and keep the sarcasm to yourself. I’m talking about ownership, not forced wealth redistribution. Ownership can take many forms, from owning a house, to owning a project at work, to building a garden, and so on. I don’t know how to more equitably distribute ownership for various aspects of society, but I have a feeling that it’s part of the puzzle.
Pooping is pretty high up on the hierarchy of needs. Higher than social norms. People are going to poop, sleep, eat, etc wether or not a dignified way to perform these functions is available. Solution: provide a dignified way to perform life necessities.
Here's what I don't understand. I live in DC. There's plenty of homeless people. I see them every day. But there's very little pooping in the street. Likewise in NYC. Homeless people? Sure. Poop in the street? Not so much.
Neither place, in my experience, has an abundance of public bathrooms. There's almost none that are truly public, like a building specifically with a bathroom for the public to use. Most fast food places and coffee shops will have a lock on the door with a code so you have to buy something.
So why is it just San Francisco that has so many people pooping in the streets?
One theory is that the abundance of corner store plastic bags served street people as disposable poop receptacles. With the bag ban the street poop increased.
There used to be plenty, well... enough public toilets in SF. The junkie/homeless problem started in the 60s, and never stopped. With a push by the emptying of asylums in the 80s, and a current resurgance in opiate addiction, the problem just continues. Shelters, enforcement, all have practical limitations. The best option seems to be injection sites, and then a push for open bathrooms. But few actually want to mplement it, no matter how much they may agree in spirit. And we are back to NIMBYism. Bay area in a nutshell.
Having uncontained human poop in public places is also a huge public health issue, for the poopers and everyone else. I'd say that's more important than many social norms as well.
That chart tells the tale. It's quite astounding how it's climbed from ~5,500 incidents in 2011 to ~28,000 in 2018. Keep in mind this is _reported_ incidents.
It's like it's been normalized. No joke. In a residential (western) neighborhood (i.e. not SOMA) within a month I saw evidence of human feces twice [it's not like I'm out and about all day long]. Once on a set of steps, the other someone squatting behind some bushes. It's out of hand [seeing brown streaked tissue is another indicator]. Ridiculous.
Props to the chartmakers for reminding me of the Brown Zune.
Is it easier to report now? Would not be surprised if somewhere between 2011 and 2018, an app was released that lets you quickly report human shit on the sidewalk.
It is certainly easier to report now. The 311 mobile app for San Francisco launched in 2013. "SnapCrap," a 3rd party app focused on poop, launched in 2018.
The strange thing is that the number of homeless has not increased that dramatically in the same period of time. There's something going on here besides the number of homeless people that need to poop
Just build the damn public toilets everywhere, make them free and clean and almost nobody but a small number of the craziest people will poop at the streets.
If we had to choose just a single thing a state should solve this is it - the most fundamental and unconditional yet simple need everybody has - a way to defecate comfortably whenever and wherever and in a city they are, regardless to how much money they have. The only need for every human that is more basic is breathing. It's ridiculous it still isn't done in a well-developed country in the 21-st century.
The slave hysteria and general illiberal views by the government shut down the web sites that allowed professionals control over their business. Pros became independent and prostitution was moved inside.
Now a girl has to hustle on the street where it is dangerous.
Do people seriously hustle like that on the streets of SF? Like there's a special street corner people know about, and you just pull up in your car and demonstrate your financial credibility? I would think there's much more stuff happening on dating apps.
There's a corner two blocks from my apartment in SF where I regularly see women hustling. I've even been approached on the sidewalk in Union Square, which is an area heavily trafficked by tourists.
I agree that there should be plenty of public toilets, but I also fear you may underestimate how small the number of those "craziest" people there are in certain concentrated areas in San Francisco.
It looks like the homeless population has remained fairly steady over the same period of time that reported poop incidents has quintupled. That leads to two likely conclusions: Either people are reporting it more often than before (Has it become easier to report such incidents?) or more homeless are deciding (as much as it can be called a decision) to poop publicly, maybe a further symbol of spite for a society that has left them behind?
I suppose there's also the possibility that homeless have been under counted, but to do so by to such a degree seems unlikely.
I would imagine that it's a mix. A rise in reports (thanks to the availability of the 311 mobile app and such), as well as a rise in incidents. I don't have much to back up the rise in incidents (besides everyone's general feeling that things have gotten worse on the homeless front, and maybe something to do with the opioid crisis), but it certainly feels that way anecdotally
As another anecdote, I've not noticed an increase in human waste over the last few years, but I have noticed an increase in discussions about reporting it.
Another possible cause of the rise (with no evidence to support) could be demographics of the homeless population.
I imagine propensity to poop in public is correlated with other behaviors that make it difficult to get off the street.
If SF is getting people off the street slightly slower than new homeless people are being added to the population, and the set of people being reintegrated are less likely than the median to poop in public, over time we'd expect to see a slowly growing homeless population that is increasingly likely to poop on the street.
There may also be a matter of changing norms; if there's already poop on the street, adding some more (vs making the trek to a public restroom that may be unsafe) isn't as unappealing.
We could always start another non profit to help the homeless and pay all our employees 80-400k. I mean it's not like homelessness is a lucrative industry in San Francisco or anything.
Initially wolves will prosper as the food source is abundant. The net change in poop will go slightly up. Adding wolves to the biosphere will make it more diverse and green. See Yellowstone. Eventually though wolves will consume all of the available resources, birth rates will fall, and migration will start. The poop will lessen. At some point we’ll reach a stasis where the wolf, homeless, and poop is in equilibrium.
You've never watched the homeless fight. I give 3 to 1 odds to the homeless vs the wolf. Meanwhile, I expect the wolves will instead go after San Francisco's few children.
I don't have enough points to downvote you... this is why people hate techies, you view the displaced as a separate species altogether, they are just like you and your family, likely without the same upbringing and privileges
Edit: Thanks guys I understand the proposal is a joke, it's just sick and callous. So all the people riffing on this joke are making nuanced social commentary as well with their analysis of homeless fighting abilities?
Swift's essay is commonly assigned reading in American public schools. The sarcasm of the essay is made clear to every middle school student who reads it.
This challenge is more or less equivalent to the problem of how to make public restrooms broadly available that are either difficult to abuse or that people don't abuse.
Even people who are on the fringes of society because they're difficult or mentally ill or just get a kick out of making things a little bit worse where they can as a fuck you to people for whom things are going better.
It'd be a benefit to everyone, especially people who are on the fringes for other reasons, but really anyone who's ever needed a place to do their business if you can figure this out and really want a change-the-world challenge.
How has no one mentioned the plastic bag bans of 2012 (for SF) and 2017 (for CA)? The homeless use to defecate in plastic bags and throw them away. Now that option is entire unavailable to them. Additionally, I read that diseases like Hepatitis are on the rise, partly due to the increased exposure to other peoples' poop.
I think that what's lost in some of this is that there are not enough private bathrooms in the city. Most stores don't have public bathrooms anymore, largely because of the rise of serial ADA litigation. In California, if your bathroom does not meet a fairly long list of very specific accessibility requirements, you can be sued by a disabled person, and it can cost you tens of thousands of dollars. There are a number of people in California that make their living driving around visiting businesses looking for violations and then suing them.
The response from many, many California businesses is to just close their bathrooms to the public. This means fewer places for homeless people to use the bathroom. This causes homeless people to go to the fewer and fewer available bathrooms. Since homeless people often smell, and may make a mess in the bathroom, without necessarily buying anything, the increased traffic to the remaining bathrooms causes even more bathroom closures.
Combine this with the SFPD's non enforcement of public urination and defecation laws, and general non enforcement of minor crimes, particularly if the perpetrator is homeless, it's inevitable that you will have poop all over the sidewalk.
We need more bathrooms, and we need to start enforcing the law against homeless people. If there is a reasonable place to use the bathroom, and not using it will get you arrested, the problem will go away.
Next up is getting the drugs out of the SF city jail. Many ex-addicts say that they got clean when they hit rock bottom, got arrested, and had no choice but to kick in jail. In SF though, you can get drugs in jail, so one of the only positive things about going to jail is eliminated.
They have some of those throughout the city. However, they require attendants to be on site during operation because people shoot up drugs, prostitute themselves, or sleep in them.
The solution will require much more than some free-to-use restrooms.
You know something, we already have police patrolling the streets, and even if it were only open 16 hours a day, that’s still 16 hours of availability.
So really, we just don’t have enough, and I don’t think anyone really cares if people are actually shooting up drugs in a bathroom. That’s better than doing it in playgrounds or on park trails and leaving the needles strewn around.
It isn’t that we can’t. It completely makes sense to open up more public restrooms. We are simply choosing not to and making excuses for our choices. “The solution” is nothing. If you want people living in the streets to take a dump somewhere other than just the streets, give them a place to actually do it. Make them common. Make them regular. Make them staffed. Make them clean and well plumbed. Make them high throughout so any member of the public can use them. And even add biohazard collection bins if you feel it is necessary.
I have a little girl. I care very much if someone is shooting up drugs in a public bathroom. How can she use such a bathroom safely? Maybe once she's a teenager but long before then she won't be letting me accompany her inside a bathroom. I don't want homeless people shooting up drugs in the park or in public bathrooms, unless "public bathroom" is merely to become a euphemism for something else, which seems to be a different conversation.
Let's assume we do install these toilets. These won't be cheap toilets, they will, for a large percentage of their time in service, essentially be "hard living facilities for the mentally ill". Homeless people and vagrants put very strange objects into public toilets in SF, breaking them constantly. The San Francisco public library had to install grinders[1] to handle the load homeless people were putting on public toilets. And this was after they began to constantly monitor the restrooms[2][3]. How many public toilets should we build and how much should we spend on each one per year?
Mate, I grew up in this city. No less than three times in my time where my age might be counted in single digits did I find needles buried in the sand in the park or along the trails. Each and every time, my mother was pissed. I’m not a parent yet, but I was in the position of being the kid, finding the needles strewn about in our parks. The examples I gave were from my own memories, not some abstract ideas of things that might happen. One notable change: most of the playgrounds don’t have sand anymore. I don’t know if that’s a net improvement, but if someone leaves a needle around, it is much more likely to be in plain sight of the adults around. That is not the case for park trails if you like to go off the beaten path with your kids.
So we have a problem, where we have a large homeless population, many of them addicted to drugs, and literally shitting in the streets. If you don’t have strong nerves, you might find yourself facing a difficult choice between knowing your kid is going to come up against this environment, and possibly encounter needles, or just leaving the city entirely. I’m not telling you or anyone to leave, but it might not be for you. I made it to adulthood without any blood born illnesses from getting stuck with a needle. Nobody killed me in a public restroom, you have a data point of one.
So hey, this is a pretty innovative community, if the bathrooms we have right now are inadequate in every measurable manner, and we’re worried about them becoming hard living shelters, then what combination of police powers, patrols, tech and community reporting forums do we need to prevent that? Is the problem unsolvable or have we just made peace with shit in the streets and don’t want to rock the boat?
Or provide safe injection sites so junkies have somewhere to go.
Our society’s attitude is “if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t deserve help.” That’s so morally wrong I can’t even explain it without going red in the face, but that’s the situation we’re in.
San Francisco alone is spending $50k per homeless person in San Francisco, on top of state and federal benefits. Are you going red in the face because we aren't spending $100k? If $100k doesn't solve the problem should we spend $200k? How much?
You’re looking at this as homeless spending when this is clearly public works and public health spending.
There is shit in the streets, now. If you’re fine with shit continuing to be in the streets, then sure, if the measure comes up to do something about it, go ahead and vote it down. Frankly it is largely in the parts of town I don’t frequent these days, I don’t even have much of a vested interest, but I do have enough pride in my city to at the very least, not want people and their shit to remain on the streets.
I have been homeless in my life, and while my ordeal wasn’t as bad as some, it’s definitely not a good feeling to have no idea where your next meal is coming from.
It’s not about the amount of money, it’s about summoning the political will to implement programs that sound counter-intuitive but attack the root of the problem while spending far less money.
A few examples:
- Safe injection sites reduce crime, restrict the spread of blood-borne diseases, and are cheaper than most forms of outreach. When combined with access to detox and treatment programs, they’re more effective and almost certainly cheaper than police and paramedics responding to hundreds of overdoses a day.
- Homeless shelters as designed are dangerous and ineffective at helping people transition from living on the street. A more effective solution is to provide longer-term, smaller scale housing. Lack of housing stability severely impairs an otherwise capable person’s ability to find a job. While the cost-per-person for such a program would be higher than shelters, I suspect it would actually save money by reducing the amount of time a person needs benefits.
- Mental health. Mental health. Mental health. We ignore the problem and marginalize mentally ill people from society; which leads to homelessness. There are not enough case workers to deal with the problem, and they are so underpaid that most aren’t far removed from homelessness themselves. We also have to recognize that some people will never be capable of independent living — giving them benefits is not “enabling” their bad habits, it’s taking care of a person who cannot take care of themselves.
- Too many outreach programs use a “carrot and stick” approach to providing benefits. For people dealing with profound mental health issues, they may not be capable of meeting whatever requirements are placed upon them, despite their best efforts. The efforts of ensuring compliance with “carrot and stick” programs add costs and reduce the impact of every dollar spent.
- A political recognition and acceptance that some people will try to game the system. Some will be successful. That doesn’t mean these programs are ineffective — provide the benefits, investigate the fraud and prosecute the offenders. We have laws against this kind of fraud already. We don’t need new, complex compliance mechanisms.
The net here is that homeless people’s lives are often in an out-of-control spiral of helplessness and marginalization that generates an existential level of stress. Unless we can break that spiral by providing a stable, safe environment, the homeless problem will only get worse. It takes the political will to actually help people rather than paper over the problem.
Which has literally nothing to do with the "dollars per homeless person spent"
Think about it, if there was a threshold and somehow spending $1 more per year reduced the number of homeless by 50%, that metric would get worse.
It's fine to make the argument that the outcomes are bad but it's lazy and ignorant to divide two unrelated numbers and declare yourself outraged.
Spend some time working with the thousands of underpaid and overworked social/case workers and volunteers in SF if only to get a sense of the scale of the problem.
They could have open holes in the ground that connect straight to the sewage system. Maybe add a simple lever to open/close the hole if odor is an issue. Sure it'd lack privacy, but privacy evidently isn't an issue if people are taking dumps on the sidewalk.
Because it's strictly better than the status quo? Given the choice between taking a crap in public and leaving a turd on the sidewalk vs. taking a crap in public and having it flushed how is the former preferable to the latter? The unfortunately reality is that creating a private space for relieving oneself is regularly abused as other commenters have pointed out. It's an instance of hostile design 1, but one that is evidently necessary.
Its also a form of restroom that is common in many other countries. Such a type of toilet is not new.
The former is preferable because you are providing a disservice to the community that will not allow you dignity, even though they can most obviously afford it.
Counterpoint- "the community that will not allow you dignity" is not a homogenous entity. The city of San Francisco contains multitudes, many of whom are compassionate individuals who take active measures to help those on the streets. By pooping on the sidewalk / in front of City Hall / etc., one indiscriminately targets both those who are compassionate and those who aren't.
Furthermore, one isn't likely to create a community that does allow dignity for all, without first winning the hearts and minds of the less-than-compassionate members of the public. And one isn't likely to win those people over by pooping on their doorstep.
Again, the issue is not affordability but the fact that public restrooms are abused and used for dangerous and often illicit activity
The former is not preferable because it spreads disease, and instills disdain for the homeless among the community thus decreasing willingness to dedicate resources towards services helping the homeless (thus hurting those homeless that do try to maintain good hygiene).
Not to mention, you have a very negative and prejudiced view of the homeless if you think that they desire to cause harm to the city. The overwhelming majority of homeless are not the spiteful, antisocial people you seem to believe them to be. They may often resort to harmful activity to survive (e.g. theft) but rarely have I seen them cause harm for no reason but to make other people suffer. Maybe things like leaving trash strewn about after scavenging through it, but that's more negligent than spiteful.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd be hesitant to conclude that people on the streets don't understand the impact of their conduct. I've seen people that are on one hand doing obviously illegal things like processing stolen bikes, but on the other hand take steps to avoid unnecessarily inconveniencing the neighborhood so as to avoid attracting the ire of residents.
Regardless that's largely tangential to the ridiculous claim you made earlier that open defecation is somehow better for the community than using a squat toilet. Not only are you advocating a highly unsanitary activity that can easily lead to hepatitis outbreaks for example (which would disproportionately affect people living on the streets), you're portraying the homeless as some sort of spiteful group that wants to deliberately inflict suffering on the rest of society. I cannot fathom why you thought that comment was productive.
It seems like there are two possibilities- either they do understand the impact of their conduct and just don't care, or they don't understand the impact of their conduct (whether due to mental impairment or some other cause). Am I leaving any other possibilities out, or is that an exhaustive list?
The reason I ask is this:
If they do understand the impact, then they're intentionally endangering public health, harming quality of life for the city's other inhabitants, and possibly committing a crime for which they are of sound mind and body to be (hopefully) held accountable.
And if they don't understand the impact of this choice, odds are that the same applies their other various life choices as well. And if that's indeed the case, can we as a society please stop treating their choice to live on the streets as one that should be respected? We wouldn't let a child make that decision on their own, so why should we let someone whose mental faculties are arguably just as lacking, if not more so?
I'm not arguing that homelessness should be a crime for which people should be jailed. In fact I'm aware already that the courts in the US have barred cities from jailing homeless when no other alternatives are available.
I don't pretend to know what the solution to homelessness is, but I think we need to at least discuss whether a person who is homeless due to mental disfunction can simultaneously be mentally sound enough to decide for themselves to live on the street. I think "respect their decision to live on the streets" lets us avoid making tough decisions about how to help people who are impaired from helping themselves.
Note that I'm only referring to people who are homeless due to mental illness, not due to other factors (domestic abuse, job loss, etc.).
People that shit on the Market St sidewalk in broad daylight are not doing so because they were looking for a restroom and ran out of time. There’s a little more going on.
If you've been told "no, you cannot poop in our bathroom because you are homeless" at every restaurant/business in the city, would you bother looking for a bathroom the next time you had to shit?
Why bother trying to have dignity if the world doesn't want to let you have any?
The fact that they're also often covered in blood and open sores and surrounded by previously- or currently-used needles is another indicator that perhaps the availability of public bathrooms is not the primary problem.
What if SF employed a few of the homeless to clean them? I’d like to see public money spent invested in people than more unusable/inaccessible utilities. Certainly not a get rich quick scheme, but it’s just a quick thought.
I don’t think that was the argument, so forgive me for the confusion. It’s really more like, “why not employ the unemployed homeless and receive the civic benefit of clean toilets, which might improve the quality of said toilets and hopefully drive up their use” not “toilet cleaners are homeless.”
I once spent time backpacking and had the opportunity to stop in the city. The amount of people who assumed I was transient, and the way the treated me based on that assumption, was astounding.
I don't see how a homeless person would be able to use an establishment's bathroom more than once without being kicked out. Some places even hired security guards to stand outside of bathrooms and check receipts before allowing you to use them.
not sure where "one" came from, there are many of them around portland, concentrated in problem areas. there is typically poop and needles around the toilets (which also have sharps containers that are emptied regularly), and neighboring businesses still get hit fairly heavily.
anecdote time: i had one a block from where i was living, and a block from a grocery store - while checking out, a very desperate person charged up complaining that the grocery store bathroom had been locked for too long. trying to be helpful, I mention the portland loo a block away only to be yelled at by the complainant. it was then that i figured out that the desire for the restroom wasn't for bodily waste elimination (portland loo's have a timer to stop drug use and prostitution in them).
as an aside, the portland loo's are some of the cleanest and best maintained public restrooms i've used - when given the choice between a "standard" restroom and a portland loo, such as on the waterfront, i choose the loo.
However, using Google Maps, I found 4. I'm not sure how many bathrooms you'd normally allocate per person, but I imagine the number of homeless and those out and about would necessitate more than that. How many bathrooms per person are in the typical office building? Should the number of these loos not similarly match the homeless population?
Also, how is a timer in a bathroom at all dignified? If I need 15 minutes to relieve myself, will the Portland Loo kick me out?
the portland loo website linked reports that there are 18 in portland, so still not sure where you got the number one from (see faq at https://portlandloo.com/faq/), and a quick search on google maps shows more (simply entering "portland loo" on maps.google.com shows a lot more than 4). most of them are concentrated where homeless are, as well as homeless services (that, you know, have restrooms as well).
i'm not sure how long the timer is, maybe you can try one and let us know?
my point was that even when restrooms are provided, there are still large problems with defecation. my favorite instances were people pooping on the building housing the (open and available) restrooms, instead of entering the building in a small 1/4 block park - the whole park is now fenced off (there is a Portland Loo one block away, not to mention the bathrooms in the building that was being defecated on - now those restrooms are closed for all).
editing to add that a previous reply also talked about being able to choose between other public restrooms and the portland loo, so not sure why you would think there are no restrooms available.
I'd argue enough restrooms are provided when the number is population appropriate and within a one block distance.
I also didn't say that restrooms aren't provided, but it seemed like it wasn't obvious to everyone why inconvenience or lack of dignity leads to non-use.
> I'd argue enough restrooms are provided when the number is population appropriate and within a one block distance.
the part of this discussion that i have taken part in has been around portland, where blocks are very small, but as noted before even where there are restrooms at more than one per block, there was pooping on the building instead of entering the building - so i'm not sure what would be a "proper" number of bathrooms at that point. at some point, you need to start looking at what other problems can be and look at other ways to solve the problem.
The problem is partially in the way American cities structured. They are either too urban (San Francisco, NYC) or suburban (perhaps Chicago is the right balance, with its alleys where someone can quietly poop). Many soviet and European cities are structured in different way - spots of high and very high density separated by greenery, where a homeless person can safely poop, without creating problems for the neighborhood's dwellers.
This is a solvable problem, but I don't think anyone is approaching it from a sufficiently removed perspective.
Up front, yes, we need to be compassionate to these people (and they are people) and remember that if you're posting on HN odds are you're fortunate enough to extend a helping hand once in a while.
But we cannot sacrifice the city's quality of life by enabling behaviors that endanger these people and others. That's what we're doing right now. Explicitly. There's no "how do we engineer our way out of this problem" by way of designing some new novel public bathroom. Reinventing the urinal isn't a solution to this - it isn't even a bandaid. What's worse, more public bathrooms seems extremely likely to encourage a spiral of dangerous behavior to an increasing degree. We'd just move it from the streets and concentrate it in public spaces that are no longer really public, but rather are just bio-hazardous dorms for the homeless and addicted. Elsewhere in this thread, someone noted that SF essentially already has a pseudo-UBI program for the homeless. This seems patently absurd to me. Forget about this being a literal cash transfer to drug dealers, giving an addict cash is actually worse than just giving them drugs - now they have to go out and score, endangering themselves and very likely others around them.
So what is to be done? First we have to be honest. The overwhelming majority of these people are no longer "down on their luck". They're addicts, with severe mental health issues and no amount of "nudges" will make them change their behavior. We should start with diverting all this money that goes to nebulous initiatives like "housing" and these cash give-aways into funding legitimate facilities staffed with case workers, doctors, job trainers, and police.
And then we should make vagrancy illegal.
I don't say this lightly, as I've had a family member die from opioid addiction. But so many of these people have lost their own agency. They no longer have the ability to care for themselves. If the state doesn't step in, they will be next on the gurney - and everyone here knows it. You know it when you walk past the guy shooting up on the sidewalk on the way home from work. You know it when you see the woman with that "look" holding a sign that says "7 months pregnant, terrified, anything will help". We can stand idle and watch this happen, like we have for so many years. Or we can swallow our pride and realize that this system we've set up out of "compassion" is fundamentally broken and is at its root enabling severe problems - and end it.
They're shitting on the sidewalks of L.A. too, right downtown in front of restaurants.
Meanwhile, any company that opts to set up shop in San Francisco at this point is issuing a big FU to employees and investors. Why would you do this to people? Talk about squandering a ton of money for squalor.
They give away $24 million a year in cash.
It's a genuinely good idea to provide assistance to the homeless, but it should be in the form of Care Not Cash and given away equally across the state. Otherwise, you are funding a drug demand epidemic and likely creating incentives for people with drug problems from around the Bay Area to move here for the cash.
I filed a FOIA with the city to get data on the total cash given away.
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