San Francisco spends $3.1m/year on homeless toilets and $65m/year cleaning up poop

Senior back-end engineers indeed! Kids’ last minute Halloween costumes get easier every year. Well, especially since takeaway clamshells got designed to composite into any given clothing size for various services, and we all started conceptualizing guts as a custom ink blending process.

1 Like

I suppose that havin inspiration from Roman Emperors could be useful.
This is a statue of Vespasianus, who made pay toilets in Rome, that are called “vespasiani”.

1 Like

You could use the “bauhaus” concrete ones, built in the 1930s - You nee every day that some one will clean them with a hose, but they’re mad to be esily cleaned, if you prefer a low tech solution.

So the city is spending twenty times as much on something that does not work as it spends on something that does.

This is not a particularly good argument in favor of Prop C.

It’s inertia. There is already a budget and workers and equipment to do the cleaning - all that is necessary is to point it at the problem. Yes, it’s more expensive, yes it’s less effective, but what is most important is that it works RIGHT NOW! BECAUSE THERE IS SHIT IN FRONT OF MY BUSINESS AND YOU NEED TO FIX IT. NOW!

DID I MENTION THAT I NEED YOU TO DO IT NOW?!?!

The problem could be addressed in a hypothetical future if the financial and political capital were mustered in a way that would still fix the problem that is happening NOW, while making the future better. That can and will only happen in piecemeal fashion at best until a disaster (or colossal boondoggle like the Super Bowl or Olympics…) strikes (war, depression, earthquake, etc.) and you get to start from scratch.

Democracy means you will get incremental change until things get REALLY bad.

1 Like

I did a quick Google street view of the tenderloin area and found many for sale signs.

1 Like

Instead of paying a lot of money to run a few public toilets,
I suggest requiring every food establishment which has a toilet
for customers to post a sign saying

Our toilets are available for all orderly members of the public to
use at any time when we are open for business. City ordinance XYZ
requires we display this notice and make our toilets available in
that way.

If you find an eating establishment in San Francisco that claims
to restrict use of toilets in violation of ordinance XYZ,
please report that to PHO-NEN-UMBR.

and, of course, to do as sign says.

Restaurants profit greatly from being in places with a lot of foot
traffic, so it is fair that they contribute to public sanitation based
on the local foot traffic also.

2 Likes

This is fair, but I do think rules and consequences should be put in place in re: “orderly”. One of my clients in NYC had a chain of fast casual restaurants. I used the bathroom in one of them and came out to let the manager know that there was a smell of burning styrofoam or plastic in there and that there might be a wiring issue. “Don’t worry”, he said casually, “some of the local homeless people smoke crack in there.”

Within a week my client had put up a (for me, suprisingly) long list of disorderly restroom behaviour that would get one banned from the location. They also put in sharps disposal containers at a couple of the more problematic locations.

3 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.