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San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

sfchronicle.com

301–310 of 832 posts

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

#301
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.

The rural places you lived in probably genuinely didn't have as much extreme poverty. I'm familiar with some of the types of places you probably mean. I was thinking of the rural South, where maintaining some degree of radical poverty even in the face of all kinds of modern development has been a strange national sport of sorts for hundreds of years. The OP seemed to be pitting southern red state rural vs northern ci…

You don't need a car to live in these cities, but that doesn't mean it costs less to live there overall.

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

#302
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” San Francisco doesn't owe anything to the tradespeople. When you share a border with Mexico, there is absolutely no reason not to outsource. Almost every city that can rapidly scale up infrastructure have access to some type of cheap labour. The rapid construction in the middle east and asia didn't happen by using union lab…

No post body was provided.

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

#303
post #227
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…

I moved from Canada to what I thought was progressive SF bay area, not so much, very conservative on many issues.

The bay area is 'conservative' on issues that actual American conservatives are not very conservative on. For example, bay area people seem to hate building housing, whereas most red states are building like crazy.

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

#305

If you think about some of the really interesting architecture of San Francisco, do you think they could be built now? Imagine trying to get the golden gate bridge built today. At some point you have to accept that not everyone is going to like every aspect of your plan and tell them to go pound sound or nothing will ever get done.

It was quite a challenge to get it approved in the 1930s:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/place/article/Golden-Gate-Bri...

The detractors did have a point though:

> Any bridge with a clearance of less than 250 feet could blockade the harbor as the size and height of international vessels increased.

How much has the 220 foot air draft restriction affected the Port of Oakland (and SF, if Pier 80 ever got running again)? Does this factor into imports (that aren't bound for NorCal) seeming to goto the much busier container ports in Seattle/Tacoma and LA/Long Beach instead?

https://container-news.com/top-10-the-busiest-container-port...

Meanwhile, there's been a flurry of new construction across the street from my local container port in Old Portland (Maine), which sees 2 orders of magnitude fewer containers than Oakland, but does have a stranglehold on the nation's supply of imported fish sticks. It seems like a key in getting approval to build right on Commercial St has been proposing buildings that look pretty good and fit the area, e.g.

https://hobsonslanding.com

https://goo.gl/maps/uAgZepV25qzRxrtG6

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

#306
post #82

> 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…

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.

Most people that own a $2 million home don't want a toilet for homeless people in front of their house.

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

#307
post #125

The central issue in SF really is just that all the stakeholders with any power whatsoever are highly incentivized to minimize change, because most of the voting and bribery base (I mean, political donation base) is manically obsessed with keeping housing prices as high as possible, so every department in every place in government is designed to slow and reject permits as much as possible. The incentives have been th…

If the SF local government were to substantially change, particular political party officials would be out of a job, because the city is run by one party, and is in fact the breeding ground of a lot of major national politicians from that party.

People should think about this when they go to vote, because several SF politicians are attempting to potentially run for president and other national positions. One of them is already in the executive branch.

The 'both sides' nonsense I see in this thread needs to stop. It is a lie. There is only one side in San Francisco; we all know what side that is; and for someone reason, we're actually totally okay with those very same politicians becoming top dog nationally. Despite all the hand-wringing here by people saying they can't vote for SF politicians because they don't live in SF, everyone sure seems really happy to do it when it comes to the national elections.

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

#308

The thing is, you can look at this headline and know immediately that it's hiding information. You can read the opening paragraph and tell that it isn't an article that's actually seeking to inform anyone about anything. It's not news. It's not really hard to figure out why public discourse is so broken when this sort of shit-shovelling churnalism is treated seriously.

[deleted]

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

#309
post #227
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…

I moved from Canada to what I thought was progressive SF bay area, not so much, very conservative on many issues.

Can you give an example?

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

#310
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.

Maybe you call it that if the entire point of the city to you is just the office, haha. I do hesitate to call my home city "LAX."

I call it BUR.
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