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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

#491

Post by hot_gril »

bena wrote: post #451
aliqot wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.

It's what I call the difference between "northern racism" and "southern racism". The American South is probably more ethnically diverse than the North. If you're in the South, you are going to encounter black people. They're 13% of the nation but they're up to 30% of the population in some states. Whereas, there are some states further north where the population is mostly white. Like the joke that when Prince died, M…

This reminds me of one party in UC Berkeley hosted by my extremely Democrat-voting, racism-fighting friends. All their friends and acquaintances were there. 20 minutes in, I noticed something was different... every single person out of ~100 attending was white. This is statistically unlikely, given that >50% of the students are (or were?) Asian. And I'd been to plenty of other parties not like that.

Then I realized, that entire friend group is distinct from my other groups, with almost no overlap.

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

#492

Post by Kalium »

rootusrootus wrote: post #488
Kalium wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's such a good idea that SF already does it! They're called "navigation centers". As you might guess, where to site one is an intensely political process.

Oakland tried doing one temporarily. Three months turned into nine with major drug abuse and violence problems. Further, they couldn't actually manage the shrink-the-encampment goal, so eventually they had to clear it.

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

#493

Post by nosequel »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #297
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…

Is this the real SF experience? Or is it media hype? I’m completely unfamiliar with the city. My only experience of America is staying in Atlanta for 6 months during an exchange program, but that was years back. Some of the stories of bureaucratic meddling and political corruption sound like something I’d see back home in India. Always had this impression that America was above that.

I've lived in several cities around America, and nothing really compares to how poorly run SF is. There is corruption in every city on earth, so SF isn't special in that regard.

There are much better run cities in the US, but most of the really functioning cities are smaller. The sweet spot it seems in the US are the 100k-250k sized cities, which typically are run much better (I'm sure there are many outliers).

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

#494

Post by asow92 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #368
asow92 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience of living in both rural New York and Pennsylvania and NYC for decades, the ratio seems to skew more towards the city. But I can't say as much for the west. A $2k car is a lot less than higher average taxes and housing costs.

Try the rural south. Lots of rural NY is just a play place for richer people.

But, I'd also like to point out that much of the southern tier and western NY is a lot like Appalachia economically. We have much higher poverty rates compared to the rest of the state. The town in which I live is double the state average at around 30% poverty.

And despite the fact that we have double the poverty rate of NYC it's nowhere near as apparent.

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

#495

Post by thatguy0900 »

mattnewton wrote: post #335
mrits wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd take my chances with the sidewalk than risk a startups new self cleaning censor. Literally a shit storm

It's not some startups self cleaning sensor, this is old technology that is in several other cities without attendants, and is basically idiot proof. The attendant hopefully makes it american-idiot proof too.

I think the problem isn't making it idiot proof, but making it malicious user who really wants to do heroin in there proof

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

#496

Post by nostromo »

screye wrote: post #148

Is the SF Bay Area the worst managed "successful" economic urban area in the world ? It performs pretty badly on public transport, safety, affordability & sanitation. All its pros seem to exist despite the management, and not because of it. (Universities, Jobs, Weather, Nature) I thought Greater Seattle was badly managed, but it has been funding light rail, missing middle-housing and recently started reversing the cr…

Having a wildly successful city economy and becoming poorly managed is a causal relationship I think.

In regular cities you simply can’t afford to be wasteful. But San Francisco and Seattle have endless streams of easy money to burn.

It’s sort of like the oil curse. The governments of gulf states can afford to be uniquely terrible, in ways other governments cannot.

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

#497

Post by puffoflogic »

erulabs wrote: post #461
BitwiseFool wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely wonder if we have 'democratized' infrastructure and construction too much. >"First, an architect needs to draw plans for the toilet, which will then be presented to the public for feedback. The Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee will be responsible for conducting a “multi-phase review” of the project, like it does for all projects on public lands. According to the Arts Commission’s website, “…

> just need to delegate authority and let them act mostly autonomously Not to be glib, and I expect to be excoriated for such a comment, but I literally cannot think of a way to not be snarky: I believe what you're describing is called ownership . Particularly in discussions of SF, I find this amazingly long road back to where we started: "If only there was some system where people with the most interest in a particu…

No post body was provided.

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

#498

Post by hot_gril »

yardie wrote: post #166
lotsofpulp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sometimes use major airport codes as shorthand for a city or the metropolitan region the airport serves.

I would hope not, considering many major cities are serviced by multiple major airports. NYC - JFK LGA EGW PARIS - CDG ORY London - LGW LHR Tokyo - NRT HND SF - SFO SJC If someone starts refering to a city by the airport code I'd be completely lost because most airports and their codes don't reflect the name of the city they service.

SJC doesn't really serve SF. You can say OAK sorta does, but not really. It's pretty clearly SFO. Also, the BART line to SF is called SFO (used to be called whatever terminating city until they realized that's stupid).

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

#499

Post by hot_gril »

nsxwolf wrote: post #203
lotsofpulp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sometimes use major airport codes as shorthand for a city or the metropolitan region the airport serves.

We have the best pizza in ORD

Back to that same old place, sweet home ORD.

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

#500

Post by jakear »

The real solution to the public defecation crisis is either unlocking bathrooms at night or more “single” use plastic bags. Anyone knows dog parks have less shit around when there are bags readily available, but somehow they haven’t connected that to the city in general. It used to be you could pretty reliably find a good clean plastic bag in any trash can. Not so anymore.

Problem is anyone proposing this in government would be cancelled for disgracing the homeless or some shit (I’m homeless, I get a free pass). The absolute worst part of the homeless experience is being in a city during the hours when bathrooms are locked and desperately needing to use one. Not proud of the things I’ve done in times of such calamity.

At least SF has people freely shooting up on the streets, so perhaps they won’t feel as compelled to prevent them from using bathrooms for the same? Anyone know if SF bathrooms get locked?

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