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?
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?
[1] I can't find the source for the grinders but I do recall reading about the installation of them a few years back, maybe someone can provide a link. [2] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-main-library-t... [3] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-library-s-main-br...