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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

#551

Post by Kalium »

rootusrootus wrote: post #542
Kalium wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I think the only way to make it work is to provide plenty of security, right along with the social workers. The NIMBYs in Portland primarily argue against siting a homeless shelter near them because of the associated violence. If the city actually staffed the shelters with enough security, that argument could be dismissed. Of course another argument would pop up to replace it. So the other thing we need to do i…

That only works if the people in need of assistance don't respond to the on-site security by moving out of the encampment. You wind up having to establish a sizable security-protected area around the blessed encampment, otherwise you wind up with a series of unsanctioned and unsecured encampments anchored by the serviced one. Neighbors tend to object to that kind of thing.

What SF actually needs to do is house people. Unfortunately, its main dysfunction is its flat refusal to actually do this.

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

#552

Post by hot_gril »

kaesar14 wrote: post #400
saiya-jin wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that. Is this seriously the reality of SF? Never been there. If yes, that's pretty bad and degrades the city in some aspects to 3rd world place. But then again I am in Europe, many things like crazy homeless people I saw often in LA are unheard of here. Wha…

You pay for something, then you’re allowed to use the bathrooms.

Many places don't have one for customers.

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

#553

Post by bombcar »

astockwell wrote: post #112
msoad wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SFO is the airport. I'm very confused by this comment. We're not all working at Google right now. MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all

SFO is commonly a shorthand for San Francisco, LA for Los Angeles, SD for San Diego.

Nobody refers to San Diego as SAN, even though LAX is used for LA, the airport, and the train station?

Just be glad you don't live in Cumaná I guess.

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

#554

Post by xenadu02 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #348
hot_gril wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I used to work there. Hated the experience, but I can see why it's like that. SF was always dense. At some point, all these tech companies moved in, and it became what I call a "commuter city" where a huge proportion of people there during the day don't actually live there or necessarily want to be there. It also shifted the culture, probably for the worse. Of course many living there beforehand might n…

> No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that. Is this seriously the reality of SF? Never been there. If yes, that's pretty bad and degrades the city in some aspects to 3rd world place. But then again I am in Europe, many things like crazy homeless people I saw often in LA are unheard of here. Wha…

Be careful about trusting what people in this thread are saying. If you only spent a few years here to work, live in a "trendy" spot for startup kids, and mostly spend time in SOMA/FiDi/Hayes then your understanding of the city will be skewed.

In Sunset, Parkside, Richmond, Sunnyside, Glen Park, etc the coffee shops and restaurants have chairs. Many with the space have outdoor seating. Lots of them have bathrooms too - the ones that don't are for building space reasons not because of abuse. The bathrooms are supposedly for paying customers only (like much of the US) but I happen to know if you have kids they waive that restriction (blowouts rightfully generate pity from anyone who's ever had kids). I've never been asked for ID to enter a store. My local CVS does have some products behind locked covers but only a few more than my parent's small town CVS. It doesn't have a security guard. Everything is just more normal and relaxed.

That said there are areas of the city where things are much more annoying due to theft, vandalism, and so on. Walking into a CVS in Mission/SOMA vs a CVS in Diamond Heights is like two completely different brand of store. Crime has definitely increased.

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

#555

Post by hot_gril »

tanseydavid wrote: post #390
dekhn wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I worked in Moutain View, AKA MTV. And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.

>> But nobody calls the city SFO. Yes they do. And some also call it Frisco and San Fran. After 35 years in the Bay Area I have settled on calling it "The City" but will bust out with "San Fran Frisco" on special occasions to just to be irritating to those who desperately want to "fit in."

I've never heard anyone from there call it San Fran. That's almost as weird as calling the state Cali.

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

#556

Post by dang »

dboreham wrote: post #223

The original Chronicle article (linked in TFA) is less onion-y. For readers not familiar with the city -- this proposed loo is in Noe Valley, an affluent residential area far from downtown, so comments about homeless people are not too relevant.

(this comment was probably posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274885 before we merged it hither)

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

#557

Post by adolph »

collegeburner wrote: post #268
hedora wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

similarly, NYC decided to pay McKinsey $4mm to answer the question of whether large, stinky festering piles of trashbags would be better in containers.

I'm not here to defend McKinsey, but sometimes the real world is complicated and requires some observation and orientation before deciding on an action [see quote and 0]. I'm not certain if McKinsey is better than trial and error, and McKinsey has likely/certainly faked solutions [1], but they are the IBM of consulting [2].

“Containerizing New York City’s 24 million daily pounds of trash and recycling is far, far more complicated than many people initially realize,” Goodman said. “How do the containers perform in winter weather, which they don’t really have in Barcelona? Who is responsible for removing snow from them on each side? How do they work on narrow streets vs. wide avenues? What about our incredible number of very dense mixed-use buildings, given that DSNY collects residential but not commercial trash?”

0. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/10/03/exclu-sanitation-depa...

1. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins...

2. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/personalc...

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

#558

Post by bombcar »

nostromo wrote: post #496
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.

I suspect it's also part and parcel with having a city that is vastly "commuter" in some way - SF has about 800k population and estimates are that 250k commute into it each day; meaning that the "voting residents" make up only about 80% of the "actual city users".

This means there's a steady supply of "tax income" that is not from residents, which I bet exacerbates the problem until such time as companies move to the suburbs.

Some areas have "solved" this by moving much of the actual government to the county level, or by creating intercity agencies to handle things.

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

#559

Post by aksss »

xienze wrote: post #441
aliqot wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is SFO right wing? I don't see much representation of that type as far as elected officials. Is this a term used in spirit or something I'm overlooking?

> In what ways is SFO right wing? I think the poster misspoke, SF is more like what those on the left imagine a right wing dystopia would look like (massive wealth inequality, homelessness and litter everywhere, crime, everyone is a NIMBY, etc.).

Are we going to talk about the cognitive dissonance in there? Nobody can argue that SF hasn’t had every advantage (for many decades) in implementing a left wing utopia - a pure monopoly in politics, high taxes on high earners to fund policies - and at this point we’re saying it turned out looking like a right-wing dystopia. Why isn’t it a left-wing dystopia? Probably because in some people’s minds, left==utopia, right==dystopia, and that’s where any analysis stops; but this is just someone incapable of acknowledging any error in their own policy prescriptions. “I don’t suck at tennis, it’s this shitty equipment.” From the outside, it’s almost comical. It couldn’t possibly be that the systemic criticisms had any merit to them.

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

#560

Post by bombcar »

stephencoyner wrote: post #340
hot_gril wrote: post #228

I've lived and worked in SF. Thankful that I'll probably never have another work-related reason to go back. SF is marked deprecated in my eyes.

It’s easy to pile onto articles that highlight some of the city’s mismanagement, but San Francisco is one of the most naturally beautiful places in the country. If you’re out on the west side by Golden Gate Park, Baker Beach or the Presidio it feels like you’re in a nature movie. Even with all of its problems, I will always love that city.

There are tons of naturally beautiful places up and down the Californian coast; San Francisco is just one of them.
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