191–200 of 257 posts
I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I'd stepped in it. She tried to warn me.
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.
The only place I’ve ever seen human feces on a public street is in SF and I’ve been to every major US city.
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It's not at all a SF problem, it's a metropolitan city problem. NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, Boise, both Portlands, etc all have the same housing crisis. The truth is well-paying (i.e. middle class) jobs are coalescing in a small number of cities which have failed to adapt to the growth. As a software engineer this means I can either make great money in one of the aforementioned cities or a fraction of it in an "off-…
There are some cities that seem to have better salary/cost of living ratios. I'm thinking of places like Boulder, CO or Provo, UT.
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These arguments remind me of The Onion's classic "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" . Which is to say SF's problems are definitely a result of SF policies! For housing specifically, only SF is responsible for making construction in SF near impossible. The problems of the nation and state are of course also present there, but that doesn't change that SF is unique.
That Onion headline rubs me the wrong way... Just because a problem is unique to a country doesn't make that problem easily preventable.
Compare with Australia's National Public Toilet Map: https://toiletmap.gov.au/Find/20547
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That Onion headline rubs me the wrong way... Just because a problem is unique to a country doesn't make that problem easily preventable.
Yes, actually it does. You simply have to act like other countries in which it isn't a problem.
I'm not saying SF is blameless, but what works in Japan or Norway isn't guaranteed to work in SF.
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Is it reasonable to ship them to someone else's "BY"?
if you "shipped" them somewhere, they'd be in an asylum/shelter/jail facility which is set up to handle them, not in a back yard, not downtown, not IN THE STREETS.
It's not cheap even if you manage to get all your jails built in Sunset or some other backwater. Jail is expensive, and the homeless have no official salaries to garnish so you can't use the Ferguson method. Besides which, there's no way the state is going to take any convicted public poopers off your hands to house in their expensive prisons, so you're going to have to keep these criminals jailed for their entire sentence.
Wouldn't it be easier to open some public restrooms?
I echo the point that this is merely a symptom of SF's inability to be a little bit more hardnosed and solve its problems. As an example: I called 311/911 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). The operator said that she would report this to the "neighborhood outreach / management team" or somet…
So let me take this opportunity to say: there are far too few Anericans in prison. The number should be much higher. Prison sentences should be mandatory, they should be long, and they should be severe.
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More than that, Prop 13 incentivizes cities to have commercial real estate instead of residential. Thereby forcing housing to be ever farther from workplaces.
But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.
Also, Prop 13 inexplicably applies to commercial real estate, and inherited property.