As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop in broad daylight on a Saturday in downtown (and blocking the sidewalk, and creating piles of junk).
The operator said that she would report this to the "neighborhood outreach / management team" or something similar I've forgotten the name of. And she said they would likely be dispatched to resolve it within 2-3 days.
I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.
Any other rational city, and the police would be cuffing these guys and hauling them in for questioning about clearly stolen bikes. But here in SF, it's "too inequitable" to be targeting homeless people for actively and visibly engaging in criminal behavior. This is to the point that car break-ins are considered minor acceptable crime.
This city has lost its senses, in the name of thinking it's some post-modern utopia that has to treat everyone equally and naively, and ignore the obvious bullshit going on right in front of our noses.
It's a combination of it being too expensive to hire police officers with the cost of living here, part of the citizenry thinking that "equity" and disincentivizing police from doing their jobs properly = good, and the divide between rich and poor insulating some people from seeing what their decisions cause.
I was not surprised at all at the stabbing / murder on Bart last week. In my travels in Bay Area, I have not seen 1 officer on a Bart train in my entire 10 years here. Even on Caltrain, the conductors have no authority to do anything.
It's like we actively try not to enforce laws here.
First of all, I hope you called 311 and not 911 for this. It's obviously not a life-threatening emergency.
> I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.
As (hopefully) established above, this is not an emergency, so I don't understand why you'd expect a squad of detectives to race out there right away. From your description, it doesn't sound like anyone was in danger. Sorry, but the police are not bellhops that you can just summon when you feel irritated about something that's happening outside.
Anyway, reporting a crime that is in progress certainly warrants 911. There is no ambiguity there.
The local government can patch symptoms of the problem but some of them (housing, mental health, opioid epidemic) are state-level or national problems that the local government have very little power or ability to solve. Some of the law and order issues are issues the local govt can solve, but there isn't an incentive to solve them.
Which is to say SF's problems are definitely a result of SF policies! For housing specifically, only SF is responsible for making construction in SF near impossible.
The problems of the nation and state are of course also present there, but that doesn't change that SF is unique.
Sincere question: Why does San Francisco seem to be the only one with those news stories (not NYC, LA, Chicago, Miami, etc.)?
Some cities have been better at patching these issues than San Francisco has - e.g Austin, TX is forcibly removing homeless encampments from their streets. Seattle have revised zoning and is building new housing to offset housing shortages even though the local NIMBYs oppose muh gentrification.
San Francisco has the right combination of growth, politics and local sentiment that prevents these problems from being solved.
EDIT: RE downvotes, shame on me for not being familiar with SF politics, I guess. It is, after all, the center of the universe. (◔_◔)
The truth is well-paying (i.e. middle class) jobs are coalescing in a small number of cities which have failed to adapt to the growth. As a software engineer this means I can either make great money in one of the aforementioned cities or a fraction of it in an "off-brand" city. Lucky for me I can afford to pay out the nose for my apartment but this causes incredible pressure on the housing supply, especially for those less well-off.
The root cause is prop 13 disincentivizes moving around keeping the supply illiquid, and encourages ninbyism preventing new construction, as you’re basically locked in whenever you currently live.
Compassion for homeless sure, but what about people who are victimized by the homeless, who have done nothing wrong?
Honestly, I hope some homeless people shit in the mailbox of people suggesting such "solutions".
Sane policing, treatment programs, and massive development is the solution.
There's tons of empty space in the US, it seems reasonable to move people who are breaking the law, causing chaos and public health hazards out of highly populated areas.
"Outside city limits" would be because of the prohibitively high cost of real estate and regulations in San Francisco.
Allowing people to commit crimes with impunity is not a solution. It is effectively punishing law-abiding people.
My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don't know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It's an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..
[1]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503376/all-meat-pet-food..., https://www.treehugger.com/pets/cats-dogs-meat-environmental...
These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved. Eating our leftovers is, in fact, the traditional role that dogs have played in human societies.
Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice. We can (and do) also control pet populations with spaying and neutering programs.
1. http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Pet-Food.html#ixzz662tVEXrH
Seriously, just the fact of making their food, the food containers/packages (aluminium, plastics or whatever, not talking about the further recycling environmental costs), end-to-end delivery/transport, all of this has a massive impact, e.g. pets industry in US is $75b/year [1], those pet products and services are generating "a great deal of pollution"
Saying pets are environmental-friendly is dangerously wrong, above all in our current state
Pets are like a virtual human extra-population (1 billion in order of magnitude), given they are not wild animals participating in the ecosystem (when they are feral, they disrupt it [2]), nor farm animals. Their footprint is probably somewhere between 3% and 10% of the average person, that's still significant
You're definitely right about human having to reduce their meat consumption, their consumerism in general, pets included. That's the key to environment problems
[1]: https://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp
[2]: pets/'feral' pets impact on ecosystem https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-dog-is...
It's like saying "I just give my throwaway to my dogs", this means you'll more or less consciously get more food because you know you need enough throwaway
Or it's also somewhat like saying, "I bought this mango at the supermarket, which came in plane, from another continent. But what am I doing wrong? if I don't buy it, it'll be discarded/wasted". Similar reasoning, the idea is to cut down the downstream demand so we're able to cut down the upstream one
> that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved.
That's not necessarily true, there may some efficient ways to compost/bury/recycle organic material, I don't know how precisely for this case. But compared to the amount of energy for making and transporting dog food to each final consumer? The latter is certainly more polluting
> Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice
Yes, right, well the vast majority people have the choice to not have pets, for those who need a companion, they can try with a plant, it's less talkative but not less sensible
People don't eat liver where you're from?
remember last time we culled cats what happened?
(If you're alluding to the idea that the "black death" plagues were worsened by cat culls, that's an oft-repeated story but somewhat dubious with regard to verifiable facts. Cats themselves can carry the plague bacteria & transmit it to humans – eg https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/08/us/house-cats-spread-huma... – and even regions where cats are superstitiously cherished suffered repeated plague outbreaks.)
There should NOT be ANY human poop at all!!!
That it’s even trivialized goes to show the growing acceptance of this phenomenon. On a few occasions I’ve seen people (perhaps transients or whatever) going behind bushes in plain daylight. I’ve seen it on sidewalks and also on public steps. That should not be a thing in a country that emerged from outhouses and such a century ago and understand cholera etc...
Edit: E.g this one https://sf311.org/track-case?ref=11716075&email=
My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house.
He eventually had the tiny patch of land paved over.
beyond being a nuisance, dog poop is actually more of a threat to dogs than to people (cross-species pathogens/infections are relatively rare).
what i don't get are the folks who who go through the trouble of bagging the poop and then dropping the bag on the ground.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29... [2] https://portlandloo.com/
There's someone I know that worked as a caregiver for a man that had dementia, and instead of keeping him inside all day decided to take him to the park. Well his adult diaper needed changed, so he went to the bathroom to do that, and a park ranger started banging on the door accusing them of smoking weed wanting them to open the door now! Banging on it, then while finishing up changing the state park ranger started accusing them of being homosexuals.
This was somewhere in California, but I know he moved across the country after his patient passed away and decided to go on a different career path. So kinda interesting how people can see one little thing and then start assuming a bunch of stuff. But apparently the ranger realized he was in the wrong and apologize. Sounded like there could of even been a lawsuit out of it, but he didn't want to go that far and just wanted to move on. Probably embarrassing to deal with. This was back I guess before everyone carried cell phones with them though also.
Look, minor concerns like "efficacy" are no matter when the goal is shaming the homeless.
That is SF. Drug deals are done in broad daylight.
Meanwhile there was that video going around of BART police arresting a guy for eating a sandwich on the platform.
Like in most cities, in the US atleast.
I really don't get it.
SF already has massive taxes and too many overpaid workers, and the city is still a mess. There is no accountability. Throwing more money at it is not going to help.
> San Francisco’s budget totals an astounding $9.6 billion this year — more than the budgets of 13 states and scores of countries around the world [2]
> By far the biggest chunk goes to pay city employees. Almost half — $4.7 billion — is spent on the salaries and benefits of 30,626 city employees.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/how-one-bay-area-janitor-mad...
[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Billions-of-doll...
for that you really need to have the toilets to begin with. SF, and in general American cities, have no public toilets ( i mean the number they have is just a noise around 0).
No, it was definitely a problem then. I was working in mid-market around then and we definitely noticed when the mechanical sidewalk sweepers missed a shift. Impressively it's gotten worse.
Are you not looking then? SF isn't even the only place in the Bay Area I've seen shit on the sidewalk.
Anyway, the fact that this is even a question people wonder about should be proof enough there's a problem. I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too. All kinds of liter all over the place, rats running around in plain sight. Trash cans getting deliberately turned over and emptied onto the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Vomit and the piss of drunks are common in alleyways. There is no shortage of abject poverty and homelessness. But shit on the streets? Not in Philly; not in this century anyway. This is one respect in which Philly is definitely cleaner.
This discrepancy is something that I've never seen satisfactorily explained. I've heard all kinds of comments about poverty and access to public bathrooms and all those other explanations. But I've never been able to figure out why this impacts San Francisco so much more than a city like Philly. Poverty, homelessness, mental illness, income inequality, and businesses with no public restrooms are not uniquely SF problems.
Edit for clarification:
North and West Philly are filthy. North of Spring Garden or west of 40th or so. And Kensington is a festering wound. The alleys in downtown are filthy too, though the sidewalks of the major streets are generally cleaner. Maybe they've cleaned it up since I lived there; I moved away about 10 years ago. I last visited about 2 years ago and it didn't really seem like anything had changed.
I moved from SF to Philadelphia 2 years ago and have no idea what you're talking about.
None of the things you described are things I've seen more than maybe once in the 2 years I've lived here, and I walk everywhere just like I did in SF.
Granted, all of those things I saw repeatedly when living in SF for 4 years beforehand. The one time I smelled urine in a street in Philly, my brain went "whoa, am I back in SoMa?"
Compare with Australia's National Public Toilet Map: https://toiletmap.gov.au/Find/20547
Is the San Francisco Shtuation Out of Control? Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am
It continued:
We may be the "parking hell" of San Francisco, but at least we're predictable about it. Just like how we've been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can't be found. Well, we're not going to have a protected bike lane in 9 months because.. well.. UberHittingTaxis is totally derailing it and killing the entire project . That alone has me so pissy and pissed off
I tried GPT-2 again:
We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco shtuation. Very few people know that the birth of frederic Felspike on the last day of 1847, resulted in the birth of a San Franciscan most certainly from all over. He was a true founding member of San Francisco history, at least a half of the San Franciscans who were still
I tried GPT-2 a third time:
by Edmund Kemper Now you can: - Save and share news and news stories from around the Bay Area - Mention SF Asks Now for special news updates when you're posting comments - Choose from many popular templates to create one of your own The San Francisco Sh*tuation ® began in early 2002 as a group of passionate Bay Area residents, many of whom had the same frustration with local politics, media, and society. Our mission is to provide a space
I'm not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn't immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.
(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)
You need to the Open311 API and not just the DataSF 311 case dump to see this unfortunately. But SF311 closes a large number of tickets with "duplicate of SR #<....>"
So without this data it's unclear if the poop is increasing, or if it's just that SF311 usage is way up and duplicate reports are increasing.
I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I'd stepped in it. She tried to warn me.
With sequencing getting so cheap, this might be an cheap data source for Hooli and the likes.
In my experience the east side of town, especially the financial district, businesses start being cagey about letting you use the bathroom.
Going westward, when you get to the Lower Haight or so, I can start naming many coffee shops with decent bathrooms and no lock on the door. And decent park bathrooms too.
This will be a factor in my decision to take the job or not.
(there's gotta be a word for that effect)
It's a homeless crisis.
Remembers me of mid-nineties Germany (where I've grown up) – in Munich (yes, Oktoberfest), Kindergarten teachers did rounds in the morning to clean up the fenced-in Kindergarten playground, remove the syringes the junkies left. In one of the better neighborhoods, too. Whole squares right in the city where hundreds of homeless did drugs with helpless police standing by. I remember being chased away from a playground in a well-off part of Bremen by an approaching mob of violent homeless junkies. Lots of refugees from the Balkan war, often in an absolutely desolate psychological state. That, too, was an amalgamation of lots of crises – reunification, economy doing poorly, a society built by the rules of Cold War, falling apart, war in the Balkans, huge reluctance to change the tiniest thing.
But Germany really turned things around. A lot of targeted action, lots of reforms, lots of small changes to how the social security net functions, a big invest in robust police services, somehow mostly without the Police violence issues the US have. There are some corner cases where the social services still fail to help, other than that, it's become relatively hard to stay homeless for long. In Munich, you really have to know where to look to find any homeless at all (Hofgarten at dusk; one particular river bridge.) Being poor isn't fun, and it's comparatively harder to get out of poverty (though the US seem to be catching up there.) It's easy and cost-neutral (i.E. part of mandatory insurance or covered by social security) to get help with mental health issues – no doubt that contributed. No opiate crisis to speak of (got lucky there).
A lot of money has been (and is being) spent on it though. It'll be interesting to see whether the US will do likewise, or find a way to make it work on a smaller budget, or simply fail to get things to improve.
e.g. "Pete Buttigieg has a AA voter problem" vs. his actually having that problem (which is not conclusive)
The solution to this is usually some overwhelming action to not only mitigate but change the momentum of discussion.
If people want to lay around doing clean heroin, watching TV and hanging out with other addicts, give them a safe space to do so with minimal drain on the rest of society. Attach a minimum wage wavier so manufacturers could set up low skill jobs within, and addicts can save up for when they want to leave. Concentrate drug treatment, health, social and educational programs for economies of scale. Tie dose dispensation to biometric data to prevent people from receiving OD-levels of drugs, but allow them to slowly ratchet up if they wish to do so as tolerance builds. I'd imagine this could achieve a net-savings in cost of anti-drug programs and policing, and could be funded by cities which want to export their derelict addicts.
It would be an ugly business, but I think with proper considerations it could be more empathetic than current drug policy.
