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San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

sfchronicle.com

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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#481

Post by whimsicalism »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #468
whimsicalism wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes. I see a lot of discussion among urbanists of "induced demand" when adding extra lanes to highways. Are we sure there wouldn't be induced demand from providing free housing to the homeless? Already, the Bay Area & LA are major draws to homeless populations throughout the country. [0] [0]: Yes, there are some studies that s…

If food became twice as cheap, would you consume twice as many calories? Induced demand is easily applied to traffic because people shift consumption from X to X+Y% miles when trip times are reduced. Housing demand is finite. There is no +Y% additional housing that is being consumed when it is free, because it's only available to people who have none. Google's software engineers aren't going to be using free housing…

> it's only available to people who have none.

It's only available to people who have none across the entire country, plus it lowers the cost at the margin to becoming homeless (albeit only slightly).

> Housing demand is finite.

So is traffic demand. Demand being finite does not mean that induced demand no longer exists as phenomenon.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#482

Post by Ancapistani »

Kalium wrote: post #392
hcurtiss wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that should be weighed against no home at all.

How do you weigh incipient death-by-fire-with-major-public-hazards against other options? I have no idea how you'd do it or how you'd weight other options. Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?

> how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?

Up to, but not including, the number of avoidable deaths by exposure that are already occurring.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#483

Post by rootusrootus »

ActorNightly wrote: post #457
bongobingo1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not unreasonable to attack effects of homelessness as well as the cause. Some problems are really hard and some are just hard . In other places where it wont cost 1.7M to build one public toilet, this wouldn't be seen as such a failure or mis-step, just extending public services to people in crisis - as long as it's not seen as "fixed" by doing so.

The issue is nobody leaning left politically is going to run with the truth that homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse. California still sells the lie that homelessness is caused by lack of housing/affordability.

It can be both. I'd like to see numbers, though. Used to be mental health and drug abuse were by far the dominant cause of rough homelessness. Did the pandemic change that? The homeless population has exploded in many cities in the last couple years. All from crime and drugs?

I could believe that the non-rough sleeping homeless (couch surfers, as it were) are much more likely to be people who cannot afford a place to live.

Also, politically conservative areas still have homeless problems of their own, so it might be premature to declare it a left leaning policy problem.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#484

Post by dsfyu404ed »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #443
jollyllama wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we agree. I would consider the construction workers to be laborers. They're adding value. Profiteering would be collecting profit without adding value i.e. engineers and the licensing board in this case.

Why do you seem to believe that only manual laborers can add value?

Because in this specific case they are the only party who did anything helpful to the people who were trying to turn money into a road.

I don't think he meant that you have to do labor to add value.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#485

Post by cudgy »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #443
jollyllama wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we agree. I would consider the construction workers to be laborers. They're adding value. Profiteering would be collecting profit without adding value i.e. engineers and the licensing board in this case.

Why do you seem to believe that only manual laborers can add value?

Perhaps because they are the ones that actually convert the plans and raw resources into a useful building? Plans for bathrooms and buildings can be easily pulled from a shelf of existing plans, tweaked a bit, and sent out, but building the actual structure can never be avoided.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#486

Post by notch656a »

mjhay wrote: post #454
glacials wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Born and raised in SF. NIMBYism is indeed a huge problem. It’s the hidden underbelly of a city with otherwise modern and diverse thinking. I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.

> I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here. I've never heard Seattle described as a place where "shit can actually get done," but I suppose its not quite as bad as SF at this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process

I almost spat out my drink when they said: ... and then I went to Seattle. The light rail extension fiascos are the most publicly facing examples of this. Dear god SF must be bad when Seattle looks like a well oiled machine.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#487

Post by Kalium »

Ancapistani wrote: post #482
Kalium wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you weigh incipient death-by-fire-with-major-public-hazards against other options? I have no idea how you'd do it or how you'd weight other options. Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?

> how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification? Up to, but not including, the number of avoidable deaths by exposure that are already occurring.

Given the permanently mild weather in the SF Bay, this number is probably smaller than you think. Whereas fires in homeless encampments are a relatively frequent occurrence.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#488

Post by rootusrootus »

Kalium wrote: post #280
agumonkey wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is strange. Last year a Canadian woodworker made cabins for the homeless which was destroyed (probably because of some regulation) by the city.

SF and Oakland have both had problems with fires in encampments. I'm betting the... let's call them guerilla housing efforts generally don't measure up on fire safety.

The city should create encampments themselves rather than let them grow organically. Then provide security and sanitation service. Portland may actually try this, all because the city got sued for violating the ADA. Maybe someone should try that in SF.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#489

Post by leereeves »

ceejayoz wrote: post #246
leereeves wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious when the OSS, which was both founded and dissolved during WW2, had use for that advice. Were they sabotaging German bureaucracy, or American? Neither seems likely.

My understanding is it was for partisans embedded in occupied areas working in critical infrastructure and manufacturing.

The Germans held meetings where they allowed partisans to make speeches and question their decisions?

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#490

Post by borkt »

hedora wrote: post #135
michaelscott wrote: post #49

> San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets. The irony in this statement, given the reasons why this toilet costs so much, is absolutely unreal. I had to check the date on this article to make sure it wasn't an old April's Fools skit or something, but it seems red tape and NIMBYism have escalated to such a degree in SF that (a) securing bu…

We have an access road that was sized for utility trucks. We had to widen it slightly because of obscure California regulations. Widening it didn’t cost $1.7M. However, the cost per linear foot was within a factor of two of buying a line of Tesla Model 3s. This is in an unincorporated (rural) area, on a farm. The work lasted one rainstorm before needing extensive repairs. I’m completely unsurprised that building a hu…

Litigation is the enemy here. I’ve been in this from top to bottom and it’s always legal precedents that fuck everything up. Governing bodies, be they local or regulatory, are forced to broadly interpret legal precedent established in high profile situations, or small, specific legal settlements which have occurred at a local level. Lawyers then take this case law and work with bureaucrats to craft regulations and ordinances which have zero possibility of running afoul the case law, and these can become so odd and counterintuitive when broadly applied that they have wildly negative effects on the whole. A high dollar project can spend the money the develop legal justifications for getting a code variance and ignoring the precedent set by case law, but the 95% of the rest of us are forced to design, construct, and accept the baked in laws to gain the privledge from the city to operate under their purview (which ultimately puts them on the hook for any lawsuit in their jurisdiction - as they always come after cities before individuals, and the cost of fighting these always exceeds the cost of settling them). So contractors are left constructing shit they know won’t work, engineers are signing off on shit they know won’t work, and cities are authorizing construction on shit they know won’t work, all to avoid taking on the responsibility doing your job right, and to avoid the horrendous consequences that would result from the people willing to go along with this system being in the position of making actual design decisions themselves, with no legal safety nets when they fuck up. It is the very definition of a broken, unsustainable system, and there are even more levels of red tape around environmental reviews I didn’t come close to getting into. It’s a lawyers dream, the most profitable contractor in your local jurisdiction is so solely because they are the best at exploiting loopholes in the system to overbill clients, it drives away anyone who has the skill or desire to fix it, and its and civilizations worst enemy.

Edit: Pardon the typos, I’ve got gig to go do as I was stupid enough to try to address a small part of this on behalf of a city’s residents, and boy have I suffered.

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