San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
sfchronicle.com
San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#2Version I found without a paywall: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/flushing-money-san-franc...
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#3The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#4Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#5The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.
It's not inexplicable.
The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners).
It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#6I'm not sure how you would be able to codify it in a fair and just way, but this level of waste needs to be a crime. There needs to be accountability.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#7The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.
It's not inexplicable. The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners). It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.
If expensive permitting is the problem, since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees.
Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong.
A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#8The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.
It's pretty explicable. Our entire economic system is based on the premise that we should off shore the production of things to other places who are willing to deal with the nitty gritty and get it done at a price Americans can afford and then we regulate and enforce wages that ensure that those activities are prohibitively onerous and expensive to be done in the USA. This is literally by design.
It's great for multiplying the amount of physical things everyone gets to consume as long as the quality of those things isn't taken into account. It's a disaster in the event we actually need to build any physical things for ourselves.
We've been able to pretend this isn't true for the last 40 years as we wore our existing infrastructure down into the ground. It is becoming more apparent now as we fail to rebuild to the state we were in 70 years ago.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not inexplicable. The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners). It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.
If expensive permitting is the problem, since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees. Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong. A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the em…
Government has to get permits like the rest of us
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#10I think things in SF have gotten well past the point where people should believe that it's mere inefficiency, and start calling it what it is: corruption. This money is being embezzled, used as political favors, or otherwise misappropriated. There will be a story about a wasteful process, of course, some budget paperwork, and excuses. But unless a detective looks closely at the books, those excuses will probably be lies.
This particular price tag on this particular project isn't super important, but it looks to me like California government projects and public institutions have a pattern of doing this, adding up to a whole lot more than $1.7M.