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   From: lets-poop-together@abc.com   
      
   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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   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   
               
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)