Why Is San Francisco..Covered In Human Feces? The Guardian
"Why is San Francisco ... Covered In Human Feces?" By Nathan Robinson, The Guardian, Aug. 18, 2018. People aren’t pooping on the streets because they unlearned basic hygiene. Rather, the incidents reflect shameful levels of inequality in the city.
It’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. (*Gentrification's toll: 'It's you or the bottom line and sorry, it's not you' Rebecca Solnit,' Read More).
San Francisco Launching New 'Poop Patrols' to deal with dirty streets.
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...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.
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...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. - Read More,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/18/san-francisco-poop-problem-inequality-homelessness
"Am I In The Bad Part Of Town? Tourists Shocked By What They See On Streets of San Francisco," San Fran Gate, June 15, 2018, https://upload.democraticunderground.com/12162703
San Francisco Poop Map.
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San Fran, LA, Seattle and Hawaii especially, and also other places. Govt. initiatives must address the problem of rising housing costs and increasing homelessness, and the lack of mental health services, a vast and serious crisis for years since Reagan's cuts began in the 1980s. The ugly, shocking aspects of America can't be 'side-stepped' any longer!
The new UN Report by Philip Alston documents disturbing levels of poverty, inequality, human rights abuses, and revived tropical diseases in parts of the US that approach third world status.
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"American March to Inequality: Why UN Alston Report Alarms Trump Plutocrats," June 23, 2018.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/23/american-march-inequality-why-un-alston-report-alarms-trump-plutocrats
Alston writes: *US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world. *Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the “health gap” between the U.S. and its peer countries continues to grow. *U.S. inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries. *Neglected tropical diseases, including Zika, are increasingly common in the USA. It has been estimated that 12 million Americans live with a neglected parasitic infection. A 2017 report documents the prevalence of hookworm in Lowndes County, Alabama. *The US has the highest prevalence of obesity in the developed world. *In terms of access to water and sanitation the US ranks 36th in the world. MORE...
I wrote about all this just a few years ago: Average household net worth of whites: $110,000. Average household net worth of African-Americans: $5000. The wealth gap between white and African-American families tripled between 1980 and 2009, according to the Century Foundation:
