My vote is for camouflaging defense shield. But I’m not sure if I understand what you mean by “of divers species”…
Yes. San Francisco installed 25 self-cleaning toilets in 1995 as test. Those are the same ones you have in LA and they were originally from Paris. JCDecaux services them once per day.
It is a test that went very, very badly which is why more weren’t installed. There are junkies that shoot up inside, prostitution and people who literally sleep in them and they regularly have wet floors and smell… well, not very clean. Hell, often half are broken because the mechanisms aren’t built to withstand the damage people put on them.
Which is San Francisco is now spending $1 million now to put attendants outside of 8 of the them just to make sure they are clean and people aren’t abusing them.
If SF is the sort of city (as has been explained to me upthread) which is much more sympathetic to and welcoming of the homeless than are the bigoted yahoos of my Midwestern city, and has just about double the per capita income to boot, then I would expect San Franciscans to provide all the public toilets necessary, and keep them clean, smiling all the while.
1 Like
@popobawa4u has referred to itself as preferring the pronoun “it”. That might explain the “diverse species” turn of phrase.
That bus, though. Damn.
1 Like
The homeless problem in San Francisco is far more complex than what people here have stated.
I would hardly call San Francisco welcoming or friendly towards the homeless. I understand that in some places, the homeless population is abused. Ours is largely ignored by most of the population. We do tolerate quite a bit more than many cities. You will rarely see a panhandler confronted by police and people regularly sleep in public spaces.
We have professional homeless advocates and spend far more than other cities in the US. At one point we were handing out $400/month to homeless people, but that program was phased out. San Francisco spends about $150 million/year on homeless services - about the same as Los Angeles and 15x that of Indianapolis, a city of similar size.
That said, most of the homeless in San Francisco are from the Bay Area. There is relatively cheap mass transit which makes it quite easy for people to come here from 50 miles away in multiple directions.
Weather is actually a strong draw. Unlike the rest of the Bay Area, the temperature in San Francisco rarely goes below 48 F and if you stay on the East side of the city, it will rarely go below 52 F. Temperatures outside of San Francisco can get quite a bit colder. Go 30 miles South to Palo Alto for instance, and you have an average low of 38 F for months on end.
There are plenty of other reasons though. A bit one is that San Francisco like all major California cities was severely impacted when Regan closed all the public mental health institutions in California in the 80s. About a third of our homeless population were previously institutionalized.
San Francisco was the first stop for many soldiers returning from Vietnam. Unfortunately, the Federal government didn’t have any sort of plan for these soldiers. A lot of these vets ended up on San Francisco streets as a result. They make up about a third of San Francisco’s homeless population.
There are certainly other factors as well from expensive housing to drug policies.
4 Likes
Interesting post, thanks. The only thing I would question would be one-third of the homeless being Vietnam era vets. Do you have a cite for that???
There are a lot of them out there and hard to find the original source I used before, but here is one about vets in general vs. Vietnam vets:
It is estimated that around 3,000 of the roughly 10,000 homeless people
on San Francisco streets are veterans — but that ratio could rise in the
coming years as veterans trickle back from Iraq and Afghanistan.While cities still struggle to find homes for downtrodden veterans of
the Vietnam War, they are now starting to see an influx of soldiers
returning from the Middle East who have become homeless due to the
barrage of illnesses, injuries and shortcomings that trail them home.
Mind you there is a lot of overlap between people with mental illness and vets. Unfortunately the Veterans Affairs never provided adequate mental health services to Vietnam vets.
Well, yeah, obviously. That doesn’t mean they’re not needed.
Most of America treats the homeless like subhuman vermin. “More sympathetic and welcoming” than that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re treated well.
1 Like
We got rid of them in London too. Now there are schemes encouraging cafés, bars, pubs etc. to allow free access to their toilets for public use.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
