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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

#781

Post by hcurtiss »

ROTMetro wrote: post #769
hcurtiss wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow those poor in rural areas find places to live other than tents, tarps, and heaps of garbage. That leads to me to believe your facts are wrong or somehow misconstrued.

No. I moved from the Bay Area to a rural area, we have an entire tent city out in the countryside too. It's just way less visible and people are more understanding of it as the average citizen lives pretty close to that level. Lots of people pay a couple hundred dollars a year to park a 40+ year old camper/trailer on someone's land and can only afford to eat meat that they hunted for. People are SUFFERING and our pol…

But for 10 years in downtown Portland, OR, I have lived in rural towns my entire forty-five years. I have also travelled extensively through rural PNW towns with my schooling and work. This does not at all match my experience.

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

#782

Post by la64710 »

dijonman2 wrote: post #735
nemo44x wrote: post #107

“the committee evaluates each project’s design, scale and massing for accessibility, safety and aesthetic merit.” The review process “ensures that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.” This is a perfect example of why you codify requirements and any review for permitting is as objective as possible.…

I worked on a public project in the South Bay and the corruption runs deep. Spend 15k on Airbnb in a week for one person? Expense approved. Seems everyone took a cut somehow.

Why is there no oversight?

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

#783

Post by Rebelgecko »

feoren wrote: post #636
1024core wrote: post #425

It's simple. It's not their money. When you ask any SF Department to give you a budget for something, they will just hallucinate a number and pull it out of their ass. Matt Haney (the State Senator) asked the Parks & Rec Department for an estimate of what would it cost to build the toilet (given that the hookups are already in place). They shrugged and pulled a figure of $1.7M out of their ass. And he just accepted t…

> maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big. Except this is SF, not the Federal Government, and part of the reason the costs are so high is because PG&E is holding the city hostage. Republicans want giant corporations like PG&E to have more power to hold the government hostage and loot it. Why do you pay attention to what they say, rather than what they do? They never actually shr…

How much of the $1.7m is going to PG&E? Especially since their profit margin is set by the state it seems weird that they'd be able to gouge the cost of running a few light bulbs by over a million dollars. If PG&E is such a problem why not just use some cheap solar lights?

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

#784

Post by lern_too_spel »

anon291 wrote: post #591
jorblumesea wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIMBY-ism and the accumulation of power through real estate and capture of local power structures isn't an inherent to SF or any specific political party. It happens in Texas, NYC and Idaho.

Texas and Idaho have much more housing and build much more, for better or worse. And are much cheaper.

Unlike California Republicans, Texas Republicans haven't gone off the deep end and passed a Proposition 13.

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

#785

Post by julianapostate »

missedthecue wrote: post #33
anm89 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty explicable. Our entire economic system is based on the premise that we should off shore the production of things to other places who are willing to deal with the nitty gritty and get it done at a price Americans can afford and then we regulate and enforce wages that ensure that those activities are prohibitively onerous and expensive to be done in the USA. This is literally by design. It's great for multi…

This can't be the explanation, because the US has never offshored construction. You can't offshore construction. It's a service business that requires being on-site.

its been inshored to latin americans

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

#786

Post by bruce343434 »

david_allison wrote: post #729
programmer_dude wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M is not ambiguous at all it stands for mega which is 1e6 (which happens to be a million). Meters is lowercase m. And nobody uses Roman numerals as a suffix. MM is just unnecessary.

> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M. Internet advertisers are familiar with CPM which is the cost per thousand impressions. > The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M. [0] k and MM are unambiguous. You don't want to stop & think, and you definitely don't want to be off by a factor of 1000. So it makes sense to avoid ty…

As a European, I have never seen suffix M = 1000. It’s always a million. Is this one of those things America does different?

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

#787

Post by iancmceachern »

dijonman2 wrote: post #735
nemo44x wrote: post #107

“the committee evaluates each project’s design, scale and massing for accessibility, safety and aesthetic merit.” The review process “ensures that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.” This is a perfect example of why you codify requirements and any review for permitting is as objective as possible.…

I worked on a public project in the South Bay and the corruption runs deep. Spend 15k on Airbnb in a week for one person? Expense approved. Seems everyone took a cut somehow.

Who approved it?

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

#788

Post by iancmceachern »

lr4444lr wrote: post #224
mattnewton wrote: post #206

One of the reasons this toilet is so expensive no doubt, is that the new SF public toilets are self cleaning and will have attendants on duty to try to prevent this. The one on golden gate park and Haight closes after each visitor to spray the inside down like a dishwasher, and has an attendant on duty to make sure no one is inside while it does that (and to generally discourage people from shady stuff). It's not per…

They have to pay an attendant hourly just to be sure no one is in there while the self clean runs? Why can't it operate based on a weight sensor?

Valid point, public bathrooms in France do this without an attendant

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

#789

Post by cycrutchfield »

cudgy wrote: post #485
cycrutchfield wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell me you don’t know anything about construction without telling me you don’t know anything about construction
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