Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

I echo the point that this is merely a symptom of SF&#x27;s inability to be a little bit more hardnosed and solve its problems.<p>As an example: I called 311&#x2F;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).<p>The operator said that she would report this to the &quot;neighborhood outreach &#x2F; management team&quot; or something similar I&#x27;ve forgotten the name of. And she said they would likely be dispatched to resolve it within 2-3 days.<p>I asked, incredulous, &quot;isn&#x27;t this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?&quot; She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course.<p>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&#x27;s &quot;too inequitable&quot; 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.<p>This city has lost its senses, in the name of thinking it&#x27;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.

More broadly, the San Francisco livability crisis is out of control. Poop is only a visible and easily disagreeable symptom of the broader problem.<p>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&#x27;t an incentive to solve them.

You could actually enforce the laws and put people in safe jails with better living conditions than they have now, outside the city limits. It seems like being more and more lenient is not a solution to a problem getting worse and worse.

The problem is not so much their poop, it&#x27;s the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it&#x27;s huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..)<p>My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don&#x27;t know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It&#x27;s an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;503376&#x2F;all-meat-pet-food-has-big-environmental-impact" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;503376&#x2F;all-meat-pet-food...</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treehugger.com&#x2F;pets&#x2F;cats-dogs-meat-environmental-impact-in-US.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treehugger.com&#x2F;pets&#x2F;cats-dogs-meat-environmental...</a>

Mods - can we update the title to “San Francisco dog poop crisis” ? Note that the category of tickets in 311 is “Human &#x2F; Animal waste”. I personally went through 100 random tickets on the sf data portal and found that 95% were either dog poop or miss classified (eg abandoned car or trash collection). People automatically read the headline and correlate to human waste.

SF needs the Portland Loo.[1][2] The homeless-resistant public toilet. Not enough privacy for a drug deal. Water faucet on the outside, not the inside. Prison-grade stainless.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29-portland-loo-20120829-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;portlandloo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;portlandloo.com&#x2F;</a>

OK, how about &quot;Uber for toilets&quot;? Clean a toilet, get paid. Cameras and machine learning to check what a clean and dirty toilet look like. Sign up, and you get access to cleaning supplies and can turn the hose on. Works like retrieving dockless scooters.

I wonder how much this has to do with an increase in people knowing that there exists a system to complain about poop, versus the actual increase of poop itself.

Something about this article pinwheeled Firefox on my mac for two minutes before I gave up and force killed firefox. Particularly strange since I have all javascript, including first party, blocked by default with uMatrix. I had to read it with emacs.<p>Anyway, the fact that this is even a question people wonder about should be proof enough there&#x27;s a problem. I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>This discrepancy is something that I&#x27;ve never seen satisfactorily explained. I&#x27;ve heard all kinds of comments about poverty and access to public bathrooms and all those other explanations. But I&#x27;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.<p><i>Edit for clarification:</i><p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t really seem like anything had changed.

San Francisco needs more public restrooms. I think any map of SF&#x27;s poop should also show how few city-provided restrooms there are, so I made one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf-restrooms-and-poop.glitch.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf-restrooms-and-poop.glitch.me&#x2F;</a><p>Compare with Australia&#x27;s National Public Toilet Map: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toiletmap.gov.au&#x2F;Find&#x2F;20547" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toiletmap.gov.au&#x2F;Find&#x2F;20547</a>

We call it &quot;culture&quot;. Public restrooms don&#x27;t help, people do it despite those, and often near them. We&#x27;ve had people come in during a change window late at night, and go right outside our office door. The custodian said he passed the person on their way out, and had to clean it up. Then there is that moment you realized someone tracked some into your office after walking to get lunch. It&#x27;s very offsetting.

I prompted GPT-2 with the headline and date:<p>Is the San Francisco Sh<i>tuation Out of Control? Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am<p>It continued:<p>We may be the &quot;parking hell&quot; of San Francisco, but at least we&#x27;re predictable about it. Just like how we&#x27;ve been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can&#x27;t be found. Well, we&#x27;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<p>I tried GPT-2 again:<p>We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco sh</i>tuation. 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<p>I tried GPT-2 a third time:<p>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&#x27;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<p>I&#x27;m not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn&#x27;t immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.<p>(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)

That&#x27;s a nice population density map.

Tracking the increase in number of SF311 &quot;Human&#x2F;Animal waste&quot; reports over time isn&#x27;t as meaningful as it seems...because a larger number of poop reports are duplicates!<p>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 &quot;duplicate of SR #&lt;....&gt;&quot;<p>So without this data it&#x27;s unclear if the poop is increasing, or if it&#x27;s just that SF311 usage is way up and duplicate reports are increasing.

I went to a big tech conference in San Francisco a couple of years back. Walking back to the hotel from Moscone Center, I found myself pacing evenly with what looked to be a bag lady. All of a sudden she loudly yelled &quot;Watch out for that sh*t!&quot;<p>I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I&#x27;d stepped in it. She tried to warn me.

Can human genome be sequenced from human poop?<p>With sequencing getting so cheap, this might be an cheap data source for Hooli and the likes.

A huge problem is the lack of public toilets. When I first lived there, I got locked out of my apartment and could not find anywhere to go to the bathroom. I had to wait until my roommate got back. If I did not have a place to go back to, what could have I done except poop on the street?

I am in the middle of an interview process with a company in SF right now. I like the company and the job but I&#x27;m not sure about SF. I had already been thinking about the well-known poop problems before I saw this post.<p>This will be a factor in my decision to take the job or not.

I&#x27;ve never seen so many people who feed their dogs corn.

SV should have some startup to create autonomous tool to clean up the poop on the street, which could solve this practical issue

Did anyone else smell poop while reading this?<p>(there&#x27;s gotta be a word for that effect)

It seems very wrong to describe it in those terms. I mean, what&#x27;s next, an article in January about how DC has a &quot;frozen bodies on the street&quot; problem?<p>It&#x27;s a homeless crisis.

There are simply too many puns are floating around in my brain-- and they&#x27;re all terrible. My wife has always said, &quot;everyone likes a good poop joke&quot;, but I think that may have been targeted at preschoolers and not adults.

I feel like if you can even ask that question then the answer is probably yes. This would make for a rare exception to Betteridge&#x27;s law though.

dilemma probably is, if you build restrooms, they will do drug in there.