“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. In this case, it's totally subjective and will be abused to get money and other favors from developers that want the project.
This is pure corruption out in the open and they don't even try and hide it. They even mention that they might not need the full $1.7M and they'll find other uses for the money if it doesn't cost as much. This is theft of tax payer money by unaccountable officials.
Any extra money should be returned to tax payers and every single part and labor cost must be documented and justified.
Politicians will happily spend $1 million on consultants and studies to figure out how they should spend $100k on actual infrastructure. It's like it's been decided that money isn't wasted until you spend it on something physical, and they are paralyzed by fear of building a "boondoggle". But paralysis costs money too, in some cases more money than building the wrong thing.
> Can you crap in it? Does it get crap on you? Anything that meets the description will do (doo) .
Not quite. You can spread portable toilets for pennies, or even a shipping container with toilets, but that will make any city look terrible.
If you care about making things nice then it becomes necessary to invest resources making things nice which you would otherwise not have to spend if you just drop a portable toilet off the back of a pickup truck.
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 that! Any normal person would have alarm bells go off in their head about such a large amount. Imagine you walk up to a street vendor and ask about a hot dog, and he responds with $1000. You'll laugh at his face and walk away. But the politicians in SF thought this was perfectly normal, and were getting ready to celebrate this event (until the Chronicle published the article that went viral). Kudos to Heather Knight... but it shouldn't have come this far!
Building a whole house costs $1.7M. A public toilet? Definitely not even close.
But hey, it's not their money, so who gives a shit, right?
When I read cases like these, I feel like maybe the Republicans _are_ on to something: the government has become too big.
> 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 shrink the government; the bigger the government is, the more there is to loot, after all.
> and part of the reason the costs are so high is because PG&E is holding the city hostage.
One thing you'll see when you live in SF long enough (20+ years here) is that they'll come up with all sorts of crazy excuses to justify bad behavior. Blaming PG&E for the $1.7M cost is bullshit.
The nationalization of politics is a huge problem in blue states and cities—it totally eviscerates accountability. Pointing to republicans in Texas becomes a get out of jail free card to explain why a toilet costs $1.7 million in San Francisco.
It’s particularly a problem with the bread and butter of state and local governance: education and policing. Why are cops in Minneapolis—a city that has two greens on the city council and no republicans—murdering black people? Must be Trump’s fault.
Trying to imply that Greens on the city council can stop police from murdering their own constituents is also silly. They don't hire the cops, and meaningful reform of PD department's ends up being the voters job since it's usually ballot measures.
Consider that in places like Portland where city government and local people are openly hostile to the cops, the cops are simply quiet quitting. Despite having the budget to hire hundreds of new cops, literally no one applies to work in Portland.
Thus, if your desire is to get cops to stop murdering, you really should vote for the Democrats or greens or whatever. The issue is that the cops just through a massive hissy fit to punish you, the voter, for trying to bring in a safer society.
I was just in South Korea. The cops there are not empowered. Their police stations are usually the most ghetto looking buildings in their community. I could get a cop to look for my lost bags if I needed it, because that's their role in society there. South Korea is one of the safest societies on earth.
Do we have the same structural factors as south Koreans? No, but demilitarized police can still be effective. Luckily hippy blue cities tend to have low violent crime...
The point is that a democrat signed Derek Chauvin’s checks. A democrat has authority over the department’s training and disciplinary policies. Insofar as police unions stand in the way of reform, democrats are responsible for that too.
Those democrats obviously want to shift focus to Trump voters in Kansas with “Blue Lives Matter” lawn signs. But those Trump voters are just heckling from the sidelines. They’re not the ones with actual authority over how Minneapolis runs its police department.
I fled too. I miss so many aspects of the area, but the politics got so toxic when the libertarian hippies (let's all just get along) were replaced by authoritarian progressives (our way is the only truly good opinion, therefor the only opinion allowed, agree or be evil) and you could no longer have any policy discussions about anything.
You know people are actually Republicans, right? You think what they want is for big companies to loot the government? That sounds like you view Republicans as the villains on Captain Planet.
The Republican position is probably more like "With less regulation more companies could flourish and compete in the same space and then market forces would drive costs down" and less about wanting to steal from people.
It's crazy to think ~half the country just wants to empower big business to rob them. Not least because big business tends to support Democrats.
I assumed by "Republicans" they meant Republican politicans and the wealthy entities that support them, rather than party members (the general populace).
You say that as though SF hasn't been run exclusively by democrats for 30+ years. Democrat politicians care as little for their constituents as republican.
Y’all are funny in there (US). Every time someone argues that “democratic politicians this” or “republican politicians that” the rest of the world looks at each other like “do they think that they actually have two different parties?”
Even based on public policy (and ignoring how their private actions), US democrats are closer to “global centre” but still in many cases to the right of centre.
On economic issues, the Democrat mainstream is center to center right compared to Europe. But overlook that social democracies in Europe went through a long conservative retrenchment after the 1960s and 1970s. Look at the corporate tax rates in Sweden.
On absolute terms. Among the salient issues, what would a center platform entail? The reason I bring this up is because we can then compare your idea of center to examples world wide. I'm specifically challenging you to enumerate your position so that we can escape the, "Well it just is center," circles we would otherwise run in, or the relative terms we seem to be talking about now.
I gave you concrete examples. In particular, on social issues American democrats are on the far left globally because of how they conceive of those issues. They view of abortion or same sex marriage as individual rights that trump society’s power to regulate. By contrast, in most countries where abortion or same sex marriage is permissible, it’s because society has chosen to allow it, subject to whatever circumstances and conditions society has chosen to impose. Abortions, for example, are widely available in Japan to 24 weeks. But that’s because of WWII-era rules put in place by the government to control population growth. The Japanese largely do not think of abortion in terms of society lacking the power to prohibit abortion, as American democrats do.
I don't agree. I'm asking for a response in the form of "Global center for issue X is..." Instead I've received a "Part A is left of center, Party B is right of center." So no, I don't think I've been given what I asked for.
That is what I gave you. The “global center” on social issues is that the public, through the government, has the prerogative to regulate personal and social morality. They have the power to regulate abortion, who can get married, what kind of birth control is available, etc., based on social consensus. Even countries that choose to allow certain things, typically do so as an exercise of that prerogative, not as a matter of “individual rights.”
I can't help but feel I'm getting XY Problem-ed here. Thanks for trying, but I'm apparently not capable of communicating clearly enough to get what I'm asking for.
You want a quantitative answer to something qualitative - it doesn’t make that much sense to ask for an answer in such a way.
If you want to decide the center yourself on every issue then you’d have to take true and accurate surveys of a global population and then stratify them for their various biases (religious or cultural or whatever) then further stratify each cohort by age, family, gender, sexual orientation, and many other variables. The idealogical center to your surveys will just be the mode for your various questions, if true
Not even the majority want same-sex marriage to be illegal, but only 55% of Republicans support same-sex marriage. That's a low number. 60% of republicans want abortion to be illegal.
Democrats have a super majority in SF, have a majority in the CA state government, and PG&E is essentially a state (as in CA) controlled corporation. The democrats have had majorities at both the municipal level and the state level for a long time.
PG&E is not the reason for this particular high cost, but if it was it would be the D's fault. And it's squarely a local level problem. And yet you manage to somehow blame republicans at a federal level...
Why don't you demand some responsibility from your local politicians instead of blaming a caricature of the other party? If PG&E was at fault here, D's are literally doing what you're mad at the Rs for supposedly doing... Incredible.
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?
This framing means absolutely nothing, which is why politicians love it. It just sounds bad, without actually saying anything and pretty much any negative news headline can be accommodated by it.
But it doesn’t actually shed any light on what the actual problems are. In this case, as you point out, there’s an agency issue. The people paying the money have no real representation in the effort to distribute that money. The problem has nothing to do with the size of the government.
I feel like that's a terrible false equivalency. One of the most liberal cities in the country making a bad decision over one toilet is not nearly enough to say "the whole concept of American government is too big, better reconsider my political party"
You can toss up a stick built or modular house for like 100k these days, and they can build these prefabs near instantly, at a better quality than a lot of stuff built during the 80's/90's.
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 there so long that it's seeped into appointed bureaucrats in every place in local government, so even if you vote for someone staunchly anti-obstruction, it would take years of intense work to get the rot out of the entire system, longer than a single election cycle for sure.
Plus, the people who would vote less obstructionist policies often are the ones who live out in Oakland or something and commute in to work, and thus can't vote on the SF policies, so those people get shoved out even more by the high costs. It's a vicious cycle and there's probably no answer to it besides state/federal intervention to force lack of obstruction (e.g. making certain zoning requirements like "single family home only" illegal). For now, the incentives of local voters are stacked in the "we'll take literal shit on the streets if it means higher housing prices" camp.
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.
> is in fact the breeding ground of a lot of major national politicians from that party.
Really? If Newsom runs for president, despite being somewhat moderate, he's going to have problems because Republican attack ads will frame him as the former mayor of the most liberal city in the country while showing pics of the TL in the background.
He’s obviously angling for a national platform, picking silly sound-bite fights with people like DeSantis. My guess is that he runs for president, fails somewhat spectacularly due to just this issue, and then steps back into the position of senator for as long as he likes. Quite possibly for life, just like Boxer and Feinstein. It’s what I would do in his shoes. It would also give him the platform to launch another presidential campaign whenever it feels right. How many times did Biden run for president?
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.
That's such a load of baloney, man. Yeah, you're right, SF is hemmed in by a bunch of natural barriers
BUT there's more than enough space and money to build some utopian high-density stuff if it weren't for the NIMBYism. You can work part time as a janitor in downtown Tokyo and afford live in a comfortable apartment within 20 minutes of your job (Comfortable by local standards, but Japanese people don't usually use couches or beds. You could afford a place comfortable by American standards with a 45 minute commute)
Man, this area makes me so angry every day. Every time I go to a store or restaurant the people working there are lazy rude slobs because they're stressed out, overworked, and underpaid. I can't even blame them for being a-holes, because a lot of them have been pushed out of their homes and have to endure hours of commute every day just to BARELY scrape by.
I'm getting blasted by political spam now, and it's all about "protecting home values". If I could somehow cause an earthquake to level this region without physically hurting anyone, I'd do it right now. I'm counting down the days until I can leave at this point.
Tokyo is huge. It's actually less dense than San Francisco. There's a lot of room to build out, and the train system makes that possible.
It's unlikely a janitor would be able to afford a comfortable apartment 20 minutes from work. The norm in Japan is for the husband to be the sole breadwinner, and a janitor's salary would almost certainly push them further away from the center. You certainly can live in the center parts of the city, with low prices, but the place you rent is not going to be comfortable. This is a better situation than SF or NYC, obviously.
Tokyo is actually quite expensive. You can't compare the specific prices against American cities, because the wages are considerably lower. Folks work insane hours to get overtime pay to afford their lifestyles. Similarly, the reason the prices don't increase is partially because they keep up with building enough units (and that's partially due to zoning), but also because there's effectively no inflation, and there hasn't been inflation for a long time. Prices don't change, but neither do wages. Home prices are also deflationary, unlike the US.
Tokyo is a great city to use as a good example of building a dense, immensely enjoyable city, but it's best not to exaggerate.
(I currently live in Tokyo and am in the process of buying a home)
Absolutely... There's no denying that SF is going to be more expensive based on natural barriers. However, this same sort of dynamic plays out in many more cities than SF
IMO the higher prices for shit on the streets camp make sure that the shit doesn't end up in their neighborhood. Go to various wealthier & busier places in the city and notice the curious lack of crap on the roads, or homeless people in general.
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 perfect but they have been clean every time I used it.
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.
All the toilets in Paris self-clean between users. You don't need the sensor to work not to get sprayed, just to exit the toilet when a voice says "EXIT THE TOILET NOW, THE SELF CLEANING PROCESS IS ABOUT TO BEGIN.
I used one of these and the self clean cycle started without warning while I was washing my hands. I couldn’t have been in there more than 4-5 minutes. Luckily the door didn’t lock so I was able to escape before getting “cleaned”.
Even self flushing toilets are often broken. A certain building I worked at I had to jump off quickly and out of the way so it didn't spray up with a trigger happy mega flush.
They’d be injecting hard drugs, especially fentanyl, constantly in this toilet, so signs and disclosures won’t mean much. SF is a rather “special” place, you can’t easily compare to other international cities.
These were the type of public toilets in France, it was actually very interesting to see and a bit confusing as I couldn't figure out why I couldn't go in right after another person...
Absolutely, but you're reducing the risk of communicating with people who may be using the roman suffix without writing in Roman numerals. In that situation, you'd see 2M rather than MM.
The British billion went out in 1974/5 (Wilson/Healy). One billion is 1,000,000,000 and you shouldn't expect ambiguity there.
In practical terms, it doesn't matter. It'd be extremely unusual to be at the scale of the old billion (1,000,000,000,000)
----
This is similar to a justification of using `i` as the variable for an iterator, or `x` and `xs` for head & tail. There are logical reasons, but it's mostly convention.
Well you're gonna be really disappointed to find out lots of people do use "mm" particularly in finance, and that Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed.
Just because you don't use them, or aren't aware they are used, does not make it unnecessary.
By unnecessary I meant the second M in MM is redundant (since M = Mega = 1e6 is enough). And yes I am disappointed, probably just as much as people's use of imperial units :)
Edit:...
>Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed
Indeed it has. But has its use as a suffix existed for just as long? BTW I am also disappointed that the people still use Roman numerals :) (also completely unnecessary, the Indo-Arabic number system is "better").
> 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 typing 'M' if you have any risk of being misinterpreted.
It's mostly about the reduction of risk, it's VERY rare to see M used in this way.
This is infeasible, and what does it mean to reject something in a written document?
I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: you're arguing against an established convention in a sector of the market which you don't have experience with.
The upside if you're successful is that I don't need to type an additional 'M'.
The downside is that it requires enforcing a blanket standard on an industry, rather than letting it converge over time to an unambiguous standard.
Help the convergence along by objecting to the use of M=1000 wherever you see it. We already have an unambiguous standard (it is the SI system of units and suffixes if you are unsure). People should be using it.
why not have a full time janitor who cleans after each visit? much cheaper than a self cleaning toilet. even if you pay $100k to the janitor in annual salary, it will take 10+yrs to reach 1.7M and who knows what kind of issues these self cleaning toilets will have in that 10yrs.
Because a human who can afford to live in San Francisco almost certainly costs more than this machine over 10 years (the 1.7 million is for the whole project, not just the self cleaning portion), and drugged out crazies can make a mess that would be a very hard and unpleasant job to give a human.
Sure, substitute live in San Francisco with live in commuting distance of San Francisco. It's not like Daly city or Oakland are cheap either.
Even when we focus on the fiscal aspect of it, I don't think a machine is a bad idea compared to a plan of "find some willing to clean up after addicts and the mentally ill at all hours" - how much would you need to be paid to take that job and show up to outcompete the toilet-dishwasher-machine every day? California has tons of other jobs and generous social programs.
And that's ignoring the angle that we're allocating a human life to this extremely unpleasant and automatable task.
How does it work? I mean in France I saw many self-cleaning toilets (you can find some in Paris) and they don't need an attendant to function; they just wait for people to leave before the cleaning start and if you get sprayed it's just on you.
Public bathrooms in cities get destroyed and are very difficult to maintain; a lot of cities give up on free restrooms entirely. One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours.
I priced out some relatively minor kitchen/bathroom renovation work in 2018 at around $100k. Put it off during covid times, and today the quote for the same work is well over $300k. Sure, some company with modular units is gonna sell you a stainless steel box public bathroom for that price, but it’s far from the same thing as a proper building.
I know this is a forum for tech bros who are generally well paid but responding to a story about a million dollar public toilet with "that's no big deal, I'm currently spending six figures on minor kitchen renovations" seems pretty out of touch to me. That is a ton of money to so many people.
Thank you. I laughed out loud when I read this part: <<I priced out some relatively minor kitchen/bathroom renovation work in 2018 at around $100k. Put it off during covid times, and today the quote for the same work is well over $300k.>>
In many parts of the United States, you can buy a whole house for $300k.
One of my dearest friends lives on government assistance in a section 8 listed house with a mold problem in rural Oklahoma that is worth well over $150k now. Things are getting expensive, out of touch or not.
They clearly were emphasizing how expensive things are; they didn’t make a value judgement as to why. “Minor” conveyed that the work to be done is small.
This is a shit take, there’s no evidence for this person being out of touch with respect to anything
The point is that construction/materials are incredibly expensive compared to just a few years ago. Further, home construction is generally cheaper than public facilities in a huge city that must withstand a ton of abuse and use.
Construction costs are construction costs, none of that would change if I was still struggling to pay for food and utilities for a rundown apartment, as I have in the past.
> One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours.
I'm in a big city in Canada and there was a downtown farmer's market here for a while. Literally smack in the middle of the city, went up and down a few streets on Saturday mornings. Loved going, was a short walk and had lots of good eats, local produce, etc.
But no bathrooms. None of the local places would let you in if you weren't paying, and the only way I could make a head call was at the local YMCA -- and the only reason they let me in was cuz I was a member of their gym.
It's crazy to me how you can be in the center a huge edifice of planning, piping, conduits, etc. and still not be able to find a toilet.
edit: they did normally have porta-johns but didn't this morning. On at least one occasion I'd seen people tip them over, hopefully with no one in them.
I'm in the process of building a new kitchen in the NYC area and I can't really find a way to make it cost more than $150,000. And that's including demo work to expand the size, new floors and windows, and entirely new appliances, countertops, and cabinetry.
Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty? It seems that there's a fine line between compassion and enablement when it comes to the deep blue municipalities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc. Sure the rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are areas with similar problems and mixed politics, but they also somehow feel different.
The destitute are merely more visible in "big dense blue cities" but statistically there are more of them in rural red places like Mississippi and Oklahoma.
After all, in OK or MS you need a car, which is a $2000+ asset, just to even access any public space or resource or make yourself visible at all.
There's much more poverty in those places, but it is hidden away. You can see a slight bit of it at gas stations that are walking distance to poor areas, but for the most part, those are the lucky ones, and the unlucky ones are walking distance to nothing.
I would much rather be destitute in a big city where I can access all kinds of formal and informal resources like temp agencies or subways to sleep on, than in a rural area where I am totally dependent on rides to anywhere.
The advantage of the rural poverty accrues solely to the wealthier, who don't have to look at the poor as much as the urban wealthy and middle classes do. And perhaps that is why we are kinder (well, ok, slightly less unkind) to the deeply poor here, because we actually see them regularly rather than having locked them away so securely we can actually trick ourselves into thinking we don't have them here.
It is deeply ironic that you came to the opposite conclusion by accepting superficial appearances. The trick of hiding the poor by means of car culture sure worked on you.
> I would much rather be destitute in a big city where I can access all kinds of formal and informal resources like temp agencies or subways to sleep on, than in a rural area
This is why so many commuters forego cities' public transit in favor of driving.
"Hiding the poor" versus "letting the poor suffer in plain sight" doesn't seem to matter, then. If it was true that oblivious poverty resulted in more action being taken to help those in need, we wouldn't have a homelessness problem in San Francisco. Clearly that is not the case, so I'd much rather live in a place where it is hidden.
> After all, in OK or MS you need a car, which is a $2000+ asset, just to even access any public space or resource or make yourself visible at all.
Nah, you may need a ride every once in a great while, but in most counties you can get by just walking or biking so long as you live in the county seat. Most services are still consolidated within a couple square miles.
The bigger difference is that you can be incredibly poor and still have a house. We didn't have utilities a decent portion of the time growing up because we were so poor, house was in condemn-worthy condition for most of the time we lived there (roof, basement), but my mom's mortgage was, and still is, around $200 a month.
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 cities based on their list.
$2000 is a lot for plenty of poor people. And it's not even that easy to get a reliable car at that price anymore, you know. I'm glad it's hard for you to imagine that, but having to constantly either deal with the lack of a car (which usually means being unable to get to work, and thus earn money to feed the car...) or struggle to keep a car (worrying about a surprise bill) is a huge, huge pain for the poor.
I’m from the poorest place in the country. Ok, well almost the poorest (right outside the Mississippi delta). You can get a car for less than 2000 and like someone else mentioned, you don’t even need one because you can just ride a bike.
Public transportation? Public transportation to where? Down the road to the grocery store? Someone is about to wait at a bus stop outside the projects to go 500 feet? Just ride a bike or walk.
Can’t get to work? Someone will pick you up and bring you. Overslept? Expect that same person dragging you out of your bed.
You can find shelter for less than $100/month.
Need food? Go out back and get it.
If I ever was destitute, I’d go back to the rural South in a heartbeat and it blows my mind how many people don’t do that very thing.
Bottom line, I’m 99% sure I’ve a better understanding and closer relationship to extreme poverty than you and you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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.
In the rural areas you have "poor people" who have their own land and may even live off it a bit - which means they have housing and so are not as noticeable as actual homeless.
If you own your hovel outright you can be incredibly far below the poverty line and be "okish" for some value of "ok". Especially if you have a number of people banding together on the same property (very common in rural areas) - some on SSI or SSD, some on welfare, some making some money on odd jobs.
You can't really have that in the city or near it; the land is too valuable.
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 politicians are fighting over if transgenders should be allowed to exist (yes, yes, human beings should be allowed to exist, now, about the crushing poverty leading people to hopelessness and escape into fentanyl in our district mister conservative family values politician, how about read address REAL social issues?).
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.
Rural PNW towns not impacted by insane levels of brown/white? Dude, come on. Mexi's (fentanyl pills) are killing so many people right now. Driving so many young girls prostituting themselves. It is horrible.
You lived in rural America and didn't experience families whose only source of meat was what they hunted? Dude, come on. Or families living in ancient trailer homes/campers?
As for the camps, these places aren't really visible or publicized, I bet plenty of locals don't know about our camp town (or choose not to know). It's way out of town and not near any roads.
Yes, there are lots of poor people in rural areas. No, they do not live in tents in giant mountains of garbage with needles littered all around. What you see in Portland is not a product of being poor. It's a product of enabling the worst of society with three free meals a day and no enforcement of drug laws.
There are boatloads of programs to support the urban poor. I donate to many of them. If you need a hand up in Portland, it's there outstretched and straining to reach you. What we have in the streets are not poor people who need help. They are sick, or mentally disabled people. And some are just truly bad people.
Growing up, my own family's primary (at times only) source of protein was fishing and hunting. We somehow struggled through without being degenerates.
I'd like to point out that blue states like NY are making it harder and harder for rural families to support themselves by hunting (legally) through firearm restriction laws that make sense downstate, but no sense upstate.
The rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are not some beautiful, middle class paradises. They're full of towns littered with heroin and meth addicts subsidized by welfare and petty crime. You just don't see it or read about it because it's across thousands of small towns and not concentrated in major cities, where media also tends to live.
These places have a lot of violence, social issues, drug overdoses, etc. They may not have homelessness at the same level because housing is cheaper and in many cases involves a trailer or an old house in disrepair.
I just spent a few days in Birmingham, Alabama. The downtown streets were so clean you could eat off of them.
It is really hard to come back to Seattle and see all of the trash everywhere. In the Seattle airport one of the bathroom stalls looked like someone had used the floor as a trash can. There were orange peels, discarded shoes, and various other trash sitting on the floor next to the toilet.
Social problems exist everywhere, but that's no reason to give up on having pleasant and usable public spaces.
Birmingham has all of its black people locked up with some of the highest incarceration rates in America. They'd just arrest your ass and throw the book at you if you camped in the streets.
Offer people food and shelter. Hopefully they will take it. If they decline because they like the streets better, there has to be some recourse. We can't cede the health and safety of public spaces because we are too afraid of having to ever tell a person "no." It's not compassionate to let people live in dangerous and unregulated encampments.
Prisons are just used for too much. I wonder if there’s a coincidence in incarceration rates increasing as we phased out mental asylums. Asylums had some issues but maybe there’s a middle ground between lobotomy and todays situation of treating so much as criminal.
Because cities tend to go blue and tend to have their problems crammed into a small area, where a single person can observe it. Taking a photo of 10 junkies strung out on a city street corner tells a more compelling story than taking a picture of a rural junkie on their porch, then driving 10 minutes and taking another picture of a rural junkie on their porch, and then driving another 15 minutes...
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.
> Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty?
Because urban areas tend to be blue, and urban areas attract more poverty (costs are higher, easier to get into poverty; but also there are plenty of public services around that make it "easier" to be poor). Poverty is also just much more visible in areas with denser populations.
I assure you that there's plenty of poverty in right-leaning areas in the US. They're just usually not as visible.
Safer for who? I’m sure enough of the disproportionate minority men in prison and jail or who get harassed by police would disagree with safer. Same with transgender people or people not fitting into traditional social norms.
Red areas are poorer and have more crime (and especially more violent crime) than blue areas, almost unconditionally. It's very easy to find stats on this.
Crime has been dropping for decades, and cities are safer than ever. Hell, San Francisco is one of the least violent cities in the country.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here. Crime levels are still at historic lows. There's been a large percentage increase in crime, but when actual numbers are at all-time lows, the percentage increase are always going to be high. There's a media onslaught about crime, which is a nation-wide push from Sinclair broadcasting. Sentiment isn't a usable statistic when sentiment is being purposely biased. It also ignores the fact that SF is still considerably safer than most US cities, especially republican controlled ones.
The sad thing is that Sinclair is not pushing this narrative in some of the most crime ridden cities, so the sentiment in those places is actually higher.
Maybe crime is at historic lows because it's not being reported because people there think it's hopeless to report it. Maybe they've lost faith in their system. Maybe crime rates are higher in right leaning areas because it's reported and criminals are prosecuted for their crimes.
All speculation, but worth considering nonetheless?
Speculation isn't generally worth considering. It's hard to hide murders in statistics, and those numbers follow the same general trend.
Crime is actually down, but crime reporting is considerably up. It drives local news viewership, which drives their advertising revenue. People don't watch news for good news. Because of this trend, people also think that crime is at all time highs.
Crime is higher in republican controlled areas because poverty, as a whole, is higher, and assistance programs are slashed. Crime (excluding white collar) is primarily driven by poverty. Republican controlled areas do also police more aggressively, and tend to heavily over police particular groups, but that hasn't lowered their crime rate, and has likely made it worse, by further pushing those groups into poverty.
Sources? Otherwise it’s just speculation, which I’ve heard isn't generally worth considering.
FWIW, I work on a national news media app and advertising CPMs are down considerably year over year thanks to Apple's ATT update, so advertising is not the driver for these business as much as it once was. Many are looking to subscription revenue to fill the void, but even that's not enough to cover the loss.
I know less about the linear (TV) and print distribution side of the business, but my guess is they're also struggling given that their target demo is getting older and older while younger cohorts aren't adopting these legacy distribution channels. https://mobiledevmemo.com/att-is-killing-advertising-perform...
You're correct in that "if it bleeds it leads"; people are fixated by bad news.
I can say anecdotally after living in both NYC and right-leaning rural NY and PA areas where the crime and poverty rates are statistically higher that it's cleaner and these issues aren't as apparent, so something isn't adding up.
Other comments mention that it's more visible in cities, but I'd like to add that "abject inequity and poverty" are national problems that cities cannot solve individually. Rural areas are given disproportionate political power in our national elections while cities go underrepresented. So national problems that affect cities go ignored.
If rural areas are given disproportionate political power, why can't political parties that feel this disadvantage do better in those areas? Why change the rules of the game instead of winning it?
If a political system disadvantages a group of people then their needs will always take less precedence.
“Why doesn’t the urban coalition simply win rural votes?” is a silly question. They would win rural votes by prioritizing different issues and then the issues important to urban citizens would be less likely to get addressed.
It's not a silly question. If they can't win on their merits then they deserve to loose. That's what democracy is.
Also, notice how I said political parties and not an urban coalition: these are not the same, and their needs are different. There are rural democratic voices, and they do engage in these issues, but the wider party does not seem as interested in this. And that's why they will continue to loose rural voters in the house this November. They don't care as much to spend the time and resources on these campaigns, and this whole fight against the electoral college and how seats are dived up among states is a ruse to further consolidate power while abdicating accountability on a national level.
Also, when democrats spend money on an extreme opponent campaign (which is diabolical) to make their own party look better, people see through that. It's just sick and could severely backfire on everyone. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/dem...
I agree that Democrats should focus on rural areas more. You have to win by the rules not complain about the game.
But you’re missing my point by ignoring coalitions to focus on parties.
Imagine a religion that is a mix of democrats and republicans. Imagine Saturday is a holy day for them where they try not to engage with the modern world as much.
If elections were only held on Saturday this would hurt their community.
This is why farm subsidies are plentiful for example, neither party wants to claw those back and face the consequences.
It’s also why social security is “the third rail of American politics”. Republican or democrat, no senior wants their checks messed with. And having elections on a Tuesday in November is a fine time for seniors and retirees to vote even if it sucks for other people.
Because the two-party system limits choice to voters and polarizes camps.
A democrat could have genuinely good policy that would make an enormous difference for a lot of republican voters. But stances on social issues like gay marriage, gun control, etc, will make them unviable as a candidate. If they switch and support these issues, then they'll lose their primary.
While I don't think Yang has a shot, I really appreciate his attempt to find a new, level-headed middle. Finding middle ground is our best hope. I think there are ideas from both sides that could help both city and rural constituents, and believe that the culture war has gotten out of control on both sides with irreconcilable differences that disqualify the other. However, I also believe that rural voters could be won by Dems if they were engaged on their level instead of flown-over.
While I don’t think UBI will work, I like some of the other things he’s advocating for in the forward party like open primaries and ranked choice voting. Those may disincentivize extremism on both ends of the spectrum.
Chicago and New York do not belong in the same category as Seattle and SF. Chicago is orders of magnitude better than seattle wrt inequality and poverty
City vs rural have different challenges for one. Cities as a whole seem to lean left but it’s unclear if the policies are to blame or if it’s just a problem of unrelated political factors (eg bussing homeless into cities from red areas to “clean up your streets”)
this is a very a different sort of "bussing", it is state wide allocation of section 8 housing. they're not bussing people if they don't have section 8 already.
Massachusetts does the same thing but from Boston to places like Fall River.
Homeless are being bussed to SF without any housing arrangements.
At the end of the day we have more people coming into our community of who don't feel inclined to contribute to it. The pedantic semantics of the difference is immaterial to my peers and neighbors.
If they're rent is subsidized by the state and they do not work is their contribution a net positive? Many of these people that I've met don't want a W2 or 1099 in fear of loosing their entitlements. The only folks who win there in the long run are landlords (rich getting richer).
Sure some do contribute in a qualitative way to culture and social functions, but not as much economically.
Yes, I'm often accused of being an un-empathic robot, but I can't help looking at this in a macroeconomic sense. Just trying to be intellectually honest with what I see around me in the world.
Do you have any studies you can point me to that shows that Section 8 housing is a net drag on the economy? I haven’t come across such but admittedly I don’t go looking for it either so I’m curious to better understand the themes of what makes it an unsuccessful program and ways to mitigate it. As far as I know, at least based on personal experience, poor people don’t stop being poor people if you take aid away vs give them opportunities to try to better themselves (or at least their child’s lives). And if you think Section 8 housing isn’t rough, all that I’ve seen is not in a state that I’d want to find myself in and I suspect that’s how people there feel too (based on stories I’ve heard told by people from that background).
Results indicate that voucher receipt causes a large increase in violent crime arrests for
male recipients. They do not, however, indicate that vouchers have an effect on women
or on other types of crime. Specifically, we find a statistically significant increase in
violent crime arrests for the overall population and male recipients alone. There are no
statistically significant effects for female recipients alone. This dichotomy in the effects
for male and female housing voucher recipients is consistent with previous research on
the effect of the MTO experiment on juvenile criminal outcomes (Kling et al., 2005,
Sciandra et al., 2013, Zuberi, 2012, and Clampet-Lundquist et al., 2011).
Yeah. God forbid poorer live next to me. You know who else has that mentality? People who are much better off than you and view you as the pots.
You know what’s demonstrably shown to improve moral and connectedness of a society? Being forced to live next to people who are worse off than you so that your self-interest is to vote and advocate on their behalf so that you’re not living in a shithole.
Do you disagree that stratifying people socio economically so that you minimize your interactions with people who are worse off than you sets up a socio economic caste system? Or do you think a caste system isn’t problematic for a society?
The latter; I think it’s folly to deny that social, political, economical, intellectual “caste” systems or hierarchies form naturally on their own, and that they can somehow be abolished through government policy. The beauty of America is that we can break through these barriers if we are truly exceptional and deserve it. And yes, if you are intelligent enough to leverage nepotism, you deserve it. I expect that we will fundamentally disagree on this, as is our right to as free thinking individuals.
I used to be a progressive and used to campaign for candidates. Then I stayed where I am and the rest of the bandwagon moved way way left. So, I will probably vote against any of the "progressive" policies, politicians and elections.
At this point, Florida and Texas have record net in-flux migration from California. Can't wait to see this competition completely kick California's butt. It is a shame, I am stuck here, I'd move otherwise. With all my heart, I want to improve California. I just don't see a way.
And the right-right of 20 years ago feels center today. The left is progressive intentionally by branding. The "conservative" right wing keeps gets more extremist, opposing things as fundamental as elections.
In contrast the tiny city of Zürich Switzerland has 106 public toilet facilities. [1] Some are staffed, some cost money to use and some are open 247. Does my tax money pay for this, yes, I have used them and I am glad they exist.
The maintenance of these 106 facilities cost around 6,895,000 CHF (~USD) per year. Around 40% of that is staffing costs and 23% is rent to 3rd parties.
Yearly investment in upgrades etc. is around CHF 1,796,000
Probably one of the best choices of my live was moving out of S.F to Switzerland five years ago, the culture here is a lot less focused on virtue signaling and
way more focused on working, being respectful about no making a lot of noise on your house and public transport, actually having good incentives and culture about recycling and the washing machine, ultra safe place in general.
It only took me about a year of about 2 hours per day learning german as my third language to feel confident enough to apply for a job that was similar enough to what I got in S.F, I was hired in about a week at a financial institution as an applied data scientist in the fraud deparment. Could probably have tried earlier but wanted to be able to integrated decently into the swiss society without feeling I was leeching too much.
I knew someone in S.F. who married a woman from Switzerland roughly 5 years ago and moved out there...did you work at a software consulting company in S.F.?
It depends base on the canton, but in the overall swiss german is more spoken than french.
I knew someone in S.F. who married a woman from Switzerland roughly 5 years ago and moved out there...did you work at a software consulting company in S.F.? >
SF has something like 67 public toilets, 49 of them staffed, according to an article written two years ago. And the population of the city is about 50% greater than Zürich.
I remember finding the Zurich public toilets strange - they use the toilet bowl as the sink as well (notice in the photo how the water to wash your hands falls into the same bowl). It was a strange surprise, but seemed pretty efficient: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3...
Building a public toilet that remains reasonably appealing over its lifecycle (Zürich plans for a 20 year lifetime) is a non-trivial problem and has a non-trivial cost.
I think things in SF have gotten well past the point where people should believe that it's mere inefficiency, and start calling it what it is: corruption. This money is being embezzled, used as political favors, or otherwise misappropriated. There will be a story about a wasteful process, of course, some budget paperwork, and excuses. But unless a detective looks closely at the books, those excuses will probably be lies.
This particular price tag on this particular project isn't super important, but it looks to me like California government projects and public institutions have a pattern of doing this, adding up to a whole lot more than $1.7M.
Where's the corruption here? If you set up a system of regulation where a building a toilet costs 1.7M and then building a toilet costs 1.7M, that seems like inefficiency not corruption.
I'm open to being proven wrong here but it seems like this statement needs to be justified.
People that think like you interest me. Exactly how much would someone have to move against you before you simply stopped them and said this is enough regardless of evidence? Like would you die instead of fight back if it came to it?
Were your parents extremely well off? I don't see how one can make it through life without being wary of the bad intent other people can have without some sort of caretaker that will bail you out.
If a proposal for a toilet needs to pass through several committees to be built, it sounds plausible that SF is just one bureaucratic monstrosity organized democratically. It doesn't need to be fraud, although frankly I wish it was. That would be easier to dismantle.
You said you don't believe there is some sort of corruption but were open to more info that would prove you wrong.
Yet when I am looking at a project that me and a couple of guys could do over a weekend then be told its going to cost enough for modest person to retire. I don't need extra evidence. I know immediately that corruption is at play. There is no honest answer that ends up at 1.7mil. Sure you will get a mile long list of "explanations" that are all part of the corruption. That pile of money is going into bank accounts at the end of the day and that's all there is too it.
$1.7M is approximately the construction cost for a ~2000 sq ft rebuild in the suburbs. So that does seem a bit high to construct a single 150 sq ft bathroom.
Probably the mistake is undertaking such a small project to begin with. It sounds like there are many fixed overhead costs (such as environmental review) that must be paid regardless of project size. Maybe you could have a 1,000 sq. ft. bathroom for $2 million, or an entire 10,000 sq. ft. park for $4 million.
> General Interference with Organizations and Production
> Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Be worried about the propriety of any decision -- raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
What’s crazy is many of the people doing this are doing it without a hint of irony or intentional malice. They truly believe they’re working towards a worthy goal and what you’ve described above is the only way to reach it.
What's funny is if you remove all the scare quotes this can be added to any organization guide for many big corporations. The crux of the thing is "follow the process, keep following the process".
When the Germans took France and all the other countries, they didn't replace all the management and workers at the various factories there. They didn't have that much manpower; their own managers and workers already had jobs. This left plenty of opportunity for obstruction and sabotage.
> Of course, he instructed workers to set a nice, leisurely pace when building trucks (likely Citroën T45 trucks) for the Wermacht, but that’s fairly obvious. What was brilliant was Boulanger’s idea to move the little notch on the trucks’ oil dipsticks that indicated the proper level of oil down just a bit lower.
> By moving the notch down, the trucks would not have enough oil, but German mechanics would have no idea, because, hey, the little notch on the dipstick says its just fine. Then, after the truck has been used for a while and is out deployed somewhere crucial, whammo, the engine seizes up, and you’ve got a lot of angry, stranded, vulnerable Nazis, balling up their little fists and redly barking curses in German.
The whole thing also includes lots of non-meeting options; making sprinkler systems go off, clogging toilets, dulling cutting tools, etc.
Anyone who has dealt with children can recognize it immediately, but it can be damn hard to "identify and punish" because they're following the letter of the law.
Correct — everybody knows that Mohammed Nuru [1] was not the only corrupted one. He was just the only one caught. The problem is that these kind of corruptions is so hard to catch and prove.
All the waste of money was done above the table and according to official government process. On one hand it's just a bunch of people who DGAF about the big picture doing their jobs and nothing more. On the other hand it walks, floats and quacks like the graft duck.
This looks a lot like the "I'm gonna pay you $100 to F-off" scene from Trailer Park Boys where the money is being given to parties who would usually whine if there wasn't something "in it for them" (the unions, the NIMBYs, the politicians, etc.)
Surely the fact pattern doesn't meat the legal definition of graft but if the entity doing the paying out wasn't the government a negligence tort would probably fly so it kind of begs the question why this fact pattern is acceptable.
> I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift
A lot of the money is presumably going into the extremely long public comment process mentioned in the article that building any sort of public works take in the US and which usually ends up resulting in paying to have projects redesigned multiple times when anyone complains. That seems more like incompetence or a failure in the political process than corruption/grift to me. Really the only people that benefit are the planners who end up redesigning stuff multiple times (but who probably don't necessarily really want to have to do that) and the NIMBYs who are able to effectively destroy any project if they're persistent and vocal enough. The politicians or local government officials don't really benefit because their projects end up getting effectively killed. While it's tempting to assume everything is due to intentional corruption, it's actually hard to point to anyone who's really successfully pulling off a "grift" here.
Actually building anything also costs more in the US than pretty much anywhere else, which could be attributed to "grift" but it's so diffuse and systemic that it also seems to fall under "incompetence" as a result of the complete lack of any process that successfully keeps the prices in check or looks at how other countries are doing things better.
Also, it seems like even other countries that have more outright bribery are more successful at actually getting stuff like this built than the US, so even if corruption is a factor it might not even be the biggest problem.
This seems like the usual case of public servants doing everything possible to avoid someone being unhappy with them later. Consultations, union workers, tons and tons of approvals, etc. Remember, you can't really win as a government worker. The priority is not to lose.
You want every little concern addressed? You want layers and layers of accountability? You want the top concern of every person in gov to be avoiding any possible desire to be responsible for something?
You get this.
I've seen this play out many times. No corruption. No grift. Just ass covering.
Yeah the local state had some efforts to reclassify some state construction rules for work on state facilities. Through years of rando events it came to pass that installing a door required a "metal worker" (I forget the exact term) ... because it involved some metal ... in some way. But generally they were just prefab doors with frames that you drop in. This only seemed to apply to doors and a couple other also "this is actually a cheap job" type situations.
It jacked up the price considerably. Lots of interests end up with some strange outcomes.
I'm increasingly convinced that a good deal of our societies problem is pathological conflict avoidance.
The people we have elected(directly or indirectly) are terrified they might be confronted with the consequences of doing their job, and making a choice. I see the same thing at work, and in my church community.
I've found it's often better to have a direct conflict early, than an prolonged indirect conflict. Having the courage to deliberately engage in it is a whole different ball game though.
But people also need to have an actual interest in engaging in the conflict. I refuse to engage at work. You could be shipping passwords in plaintext and I will let you do it, as they are not my users.
In the case of elected officials, it is even worse. Smaller waste can easily go unnoticed, unless you bring it up, fight a lot of people, and get blamed for not finding it earlier. Another thing work has taught me. Cover ups nearly always make sense.
Aside from the cost, the broken thing here is that the process requires so many layers of review and approval, but _everyone_ disapproves of the status quo of feces on the sidewalks. The bathroom needs an environmental review, but sidewalk feces don't, even though they get mixed into storm drains.
You're saying this process arises by trying to not make people unhappy, not leave concerns unaddressed, having layers of accountability. But people are not happy, concerns (ongoing feces) are not addressed, and given that there isn't a person to blame for the ongoing situation there is clearly insufficient accountability.
1. Actual rewards in gov for success. In the public sector, the smartest people try nothing new and do not innovate because that would be a dumb thing to do, as you are punished for failure and not rewarded for success.
Someone who delivers a big win should get a big bonus. The problem is that when that has happened, some article will get written and managers will get in trouble over it.
2. Tolerance for missteps, delays, and schedule changes.
I spend 2 weeks fixing a hard to solve bug for my private sector unicorn? No big deal. Maybe talk about it a bit in retro and move on.
In my public sector job? At least three meetings on why we missed the sprint goal. Why? As someone above wants to cover their ass on missing the sprint goal. And we will write up a several page doc on why we missed the sprint goal.
Someone takes a chance on a much cheaper contractor and it doesn't work out? They can't be dragged to meeting after meeting having to defend it. That is how you get people hiring IBM for failed project after failed project, because at least they can say "IBM is the standard practice."
Back to the idea that public servants are indeed servants to the public, and their entire purpose is to spend the public's money in a way that benefits the public.
I've heard horror stories on HN which would justify your cynicism, and agree that corruption is a problem. See also issues with police and accountability.
You might be surprised, however, at what percentage of federal bureaocracy does see themselves as civil servants.
The culture shift can be done. And it is well worth it, for everyone's sake. Corruption represents a Nash equilibrium, once rooted it is very hard to remove.
That's why I'm defending government workers here. We want good, effective government. This requires good, effective people to carry out the work. Making this respectable and letting those people do their job is pretty key to getting that good government.
The principles aren't so different from managing a team of software engineers. Would you enjoy working (in software) in a company where sales and marketing was always blaming the engineers, and HR was always calling the engineers lazy, and management was constantly shifting priorities while blaming engineers for not hitting targets, etc...
So why create the same environment for government workers? Why not treat them with the same professional respect you'd expect/hope for in your job?
And why not call out the politician as the a*hat when he insults the people trying to get the job done?
I don't personally care about anything as a public servant beyond covering my ass. Joe Taxpayer does get screwed, but he gets screwed by the collective decision making satisfying everyone else, so I can't get in trouble for it.
Joe Taxpayer doesn't show up to the planning meetings. Joe Taxpayer doesn't submit anything to the feedback forms. Joe Taxpayer doesn't care enough about any particular project to really win.
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.
At some point I think we went off the rails and decided that democracy has to occur at every level of a public project. E.g. First the governor announces a vision, then the legislature allocates funds, then it goes to a design committee, etc, on down the line. At each level we try to get public participation, and at each level just a few loud voices can derail the whole thing for an indefinite amount of time.
Perhaps we could reign that in. Democracy is how we elect leaders. If enough of our leaders decide to do something, then we do it. Maybe we have one public comment period for really big projects. But it gets done. Don't like what they did? Vote them out.
The US was setup as republic for reasons that are becoming more and more apparent. We used to select representatives for a town or locality that would then group together and select representatives for the next level, etc. Much of this was due to communication limitations at the time, but there's something to be said to saying "I trust Bob here to make good decisions on my behalf" instead of everyone injecting themselves into every aspect of everything.
All I can to personally is not vote for or against these various things.
It's certainly going to be tougher (not just in San Francisco, but elsewhere) because it was previously standard practice to choose cheaper areas for these projects to keep taxpayer costs low. Of course, in reality this disproportionately affects marginalized communities, so it'd be a political dumpster fire nowadays to propose that.
If you can't build things in the cheaper areas, all that's left are the expensive ones.
This is exactly the problem. As someone who has been observing 'the process' closely in my own city, as we struggle to build enough homes, this piece really hit home:
> The eastern span replacement of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was a construction project to replace a seismically unsound portion of the Bay Bridge with a new self-anchored suspension bridge (SAS) and a pair of viaducts. The bridge is in the U.S. state of California and crosses the San Francisco Bay between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland. The span replacement took place between 2002 and 2013, and is the most expensive public works project in California history,[5] with a final price tag of $6.5 billion, a 2,500% cost overrun from the original estimate of $250 million.
> 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?
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.
Californians who move out, remember back test your beliefs before you force them (usually via money) where you move to. There's a reason why you're moving out and part of that reason is your flawed thinking. Doubling down on that will only lead to more 0 trust societies like SF.
The biggest problem in America: Things are inexplicably extremely expensive, especially if government is involved and nobody can give a straight answer as to why.
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 multiplying the amount of physical things everyone gets to consume as long as the quality of those things isn't taken into account. It's a disaster in the event we actually need to build any physical things for ourselves.
We've been able to pretend this isn't true for the last 40 years as we wore our existing infrastructure down into the ground. It is becoming more apparent now as we fail to rebuild to the state we were in 70 years ago.
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.
The political system froze up to protect entrenched interests (NIMBY land owners).
It's making conscious efforts to make new construction onerous to get through permitting process. That restricts supply and enriches existing land owners.
If expensive permitting is the problem, since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees.
Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong.
A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.
It couldn't cost more than say 200k (and that is pretty crazy the article says the plumbing hookups are there it's not like they have to dig up a city block to run a sewer line or something) to actually build the thing so we are talking what? A million and a half in illustration, planning and review for a single toilet?
I don't have any special insight here but, in other cases, environmental reviews and environmental lawsuits are tools used to stifle new developments.
> a rejected San Francisco apartment complex...required a more than 1,110-page environmental assessment [1]
It is not socially acceptable to charge a million dollar permit for constructing a toilet. It is socially acceptable to make the process so onerous that it costs more than a million dollars to complete. Think of the environment.
This isn't a universal problem across America and even from a contradictory perspective it's certainly not an equally impactful problem across America. The inability to build and excessive costs of regulatory compliance when allowed to do so are very much blue team problems.
Couldn't you do it yourself? It's typically a relatively simple job, no need to get a contractor in. The tools to replace it, if you don't have them already, would have come in at a fraction of $900.
I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with contractors. I had to do the exact same thing, while it wasn’t $900 it was $200-300 to have someone come out and replace a faucet. I ended up buying the tools and did it in ~20 minutes for like $20 in parts. I’ve done a lot of other projects and constantly get outrageous quotes from landscapers, plumbers, HVAC, etc.
My theory is that they prey on people that don’t know any better. Less and less people know how to DIY so they have no frame of reference for the real value of labor and get scammed.
I'd love to see a breakdown of wages paid to plumbers, tilesetters and carpenters as well as all material and equipment costs vs everything else. I'd gamble it isn't even 20% of the total.
Paris has automatically self-cleaning public toilets all around and they cost around $200k each to build and install. There’s no way this is a remotely reasonable cost and is clearly a grift.
Whats the incentive to get it done fast or cheap when you don't have to answer for what you spend and the general public is threatened with incarceration if they don't pay you.
SF tried those toilets and they were a failure in nearly all categories. They charged $250k in 2019, the wouldn’t be surprised if the full cost to set up is double now.
"Clearly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence unless you've delved deeply into the approval process of this specific toilet. It's absolutely believable that this is just produced by sclerotic bureaucracy.
Honestly it's a big difference. One is payroll and legal, the other is laundered and illegal and the feds regularly prosecute SF gov officials for this.
In my definition, bureaucracy is unintentional, whereas grift is intentional. I subscribe to the view that in general these things are more likely to be due to cock-up than conspiracy. Not everyone is Robert Moses.
The cost isn't in the toilet itself, it's in all of the politics that will go into it. People will fight against it, there will be scrutiny in its design, etc.
Honestly, I might fight a public toilet near my house too if I knew the end state was that it would mostly attract homeless people who want to shoot up heroin.
The Paris sanisettes were controversial when they went up. Using the same damn arguments against them. Everyone cares so much about what the homeless and drug users might do and care very little about the millions of others who also use them.
And they were unfounded. The self-cleaning and maintenance schedule does not attract homeless. I've literally watched a drug user argue with one because the door forcefully opened automatically after 15 minutes and he marched off to finish his business elsewhere.
I don't know, I'd rather them use a toilet that is self cleaning than do it on the trash bins outside my condo. I've lived in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) for a long time now, and the un-housed people that hang out up the block or sleep in the HSBC aren't happy about having to go to the bathroom in between parked cars on the street. Whenever I've walked by them while they're doing that (which is fairly often), they've always apologized. At least give them a clean, private place to do it.
If you read the article, the main reason why it cost so much is not because of the cost of the toilet and the installation per-se, but because there is many, many red tape around doing anything in SF.
So it is not necessarily a "grift" ( although many are profiting from it and are probably more than happy about the situation being the way it is ) but the result of decades of laws to regulate public work and spending ( ironically ).
I’d love to see an itemized break down of “red tape” that actually adds up to $1.7M. We too often accept officials obfuscating costs on these projects into opaque buckets like “studies” and “reviews”. “We’ll of course it’s expensive! It all goes to uh… RED TAPE! Yea that’s where it goes obviously!”
Yes, I am aware, but the fact is those laws are put in place (and could be removed) by elected officials. If the resident of SF where so angry about the situation, they could vote against it.
> but because there is many, many red tape around doing anything in SF.
Right, the red tape still exists to this day to allow for grifters to come in who help "expedite" the process for a fee. So it's really the same thing.
I like how there is currently a porto-john in the exact spot right now. Like, there is currently a working toilet in the exact location that is, to my limited knowledge, doing the bare minimum well enough right now. For likely much less in my entire life than the 1.7M that just building the new toilet will cost.
I think this is only a little bit of incompetence and poor city leadership, and a lot of Baumol's Cost Disease[0], which the bay area suffers from the worst case I have ever seen.
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?
I don't think it's even possible to solve the public toilet problem without first solving the drug abuse problem. Everyone agrees it would be ideal to have toilet access to everyone, but no one has an answer for how you design a toilet that's impossible to abuse.
Folks abuse drugs right on the street in SF. I don’t see why they’d prefer to take up a stall, where you’re much more likely to get noticed, complained about, and “handled”.
If not a doggy bag supply outside locked bathrooms, a roomful of toilets with no doors/walls/etc would be better than what we have now. Down with the idea that defecation is a naughtily private affair, bring back public bathhouses!
You're saying people who are pooping on public sidewalks will willingly choose to poop into plastic bags on public sidewalks, if only they had them available?
I can’t speak for everyone, but some of them yes! If you were homeless and needed to shit in the middle of the night (usually avoidable, but stomach bugs can screw you - and they’re more common when you can only afford bottom of the barrel food), would you prefer to do it directly on the street in the vicinity of your bed where you’ll have to smell it and look at it for weeks, or into a bag where you can properly dispose of it immediately?
Now imagine you live in a community with a dozen other hobos, what sorts of policies would you legislate?
Reminds me of their $2.4B bus terminal, which opened in 2018, closed a month later when they noticed structural cracks, reopened in 2019, then closed in 2020 for covid19. Had to walk under its unfinished skeleton every day going to work.
And is presently open and pretty cool actually, most notably the way the transbay buses have a direct link to the bridge. And I believe the full price tag included the park on top of it, which remained open (though vendors did not) during COVID. I don't have a strong opinion about whether it was all worth $2.4B, but at least it wasn't quite as much of a disaster as you are portraying.
You are making light of things for your own delight and political leanings which is exactly the kind of thing that leads to all this nastiness. The station you are talking about is multimodal and is going to get Caltrain even though it takes a long time. It has a unique structure that makes it essentially a big floating barge and the problems that came with that have since been fixed. Lots of stuff got closed for COVID that could probably have been kept open with precautions. Your pointed criticism needs to be balanced against alternatives and you provide none.
About that Caltrain connection...the terminal was built before the connecting tunnel was planned. It is still unclear how the terminal will accommodate the required number of trains without the tunnel backing up. The latest workaround being studied is to make it a Through-station -- which would be great except these same city officials allowed a bunch of skyscrapers to be built east of the terminal (i.e. where the through-tracks would go).
As for the bus-station-in-the-sky...talk to any AC Transit planner and they will say (privately) the agency would have much preferred for transbay buses to continue down Market St (i.e. similar to how BART works). But AC Transit is not allowed to compete with SF Muni, so instead a giant bus parking lot was built above some of the most pricey real estate in the world.
So yes, the station is yet another example of Bay Area dysfunction.
There's the obvious alternative of just building a regular terminal instead of an overdone mall-like thing with an artificial park on top. What they did was excessively costly and time-consuming, and during its long construction (effectively 9 years) the area was much less ped and bus friendly. It's like they wanted an iconic transportation structure like GG Bridge, except GG Bridge's form actually serves its function.
Since $2.6B can be too big to think about, Salesforce Tower (tallest building in SF) cost $1.1B to build around the same time and in the same location. It took 5 years to build.
Why did I mention Covid, to illustrate the point that things are more valuable now rather than later, cause you don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to hear that it's going to be useful eventually when they could've KISS'd and made something useful years ago.
This is laughable. So poking fun at a projects cost overruns and failures is actually the reason for the failure in the first place? I guess then Jon Stewart is responsible for the failures of the Bush administration then?
Why did your project take 2x as long and cost 5x as much?
Because somebody on the internet made snarky comments...
No, this is grift, red tape and incompetence. Go look at other cities in the US, they don't have these costs that are anywhere near SF for the same amount of work.
Considering all the parties mentioned, from city leaders to committees etc., the massive figure makes more sense when you realize it's actually a welfare program in disguise to support a bunch of people with bullshit jobs.
Homelessness and drug-abuse employs a lot of people in SF. Many people would no longer have fundraisers, gala events, and other things if those issues were solved.
Rule #1 on the comments section of the Guidelines page: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
Your comment goes against several of these requirements. Be better than this.
I agree I stepped in some snark here, but this city has a human feces tracker app, which I failed to include which may have softened the blow: http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/#
Why didn’t they open up the bids? My firm would’ve been willing to do that toilet for only $1.45 million and get it done within 18 months. Because we are go-getters
They are opening up the bids soon. Feel free to bid 1.45 MM, but that will probably be too high as the 1.7MM cost includes the architect, running the bid process, etc.
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 crime problem bit-by-bit. Bangalore might get a shoutout, but they did see unprecedented population explosion in a decade and are at least (badly) trying to build their way out of it now.
I'll take a moment to mention one of my favorite comments on HN
"I call them PINO NOIRs: Progressive In Name Only, NIMBY-Only In Reality"
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.
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.
That's because conservative areas are rural. When they become dense enough to have urban problems, they inevitably become liberal. So then we get to paint the urban problem as a liberal one, when in reality it is orthogonal.
Certainly not in England. The shire Tories will block wind turbines and new housing to keep the value of their Surrey pile going up, while the progressives live in major cities and have everything built in their backyards.
> Lucy Powell has said that she “would not have signed off” a “NIMBY” Labour Party graphic distributed on social media earlier this year that criticised the government’s plans to build on “your green spaces without your say”.
They could certainly make arguments about "urban beautification", "community involvement", and other "progressive" causes. Unless of course those arent true progressives.
I don't think that either of these are examples of progressive politics in San Francisco. The city is not being beautified, it is being kept the same and not allowed to be beautified. All comparisons with the rest of the US would place San Francisco as more conservative on beautification than progressive.
Similarly, it's not the community that's involved in these decisions, it's a veto system where only those with abundant time and resources can be heard and have influence in the system, further cementing economic privilege rather than making it more equitable or democratic. For recent academic investigations of this, check out the book Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Einstein et al:
I don't understand what definition of "progressive" you're using here, if you think that putting pretty names on oppressive policies constitutes "progressivism".
It just me or why can't the City just put a bunch of porta potty throughout the city and have a crew with trucks that replaces/clean them on a periodic basis. This is what construction sites and community events do all the time! It's a simple model.
I live in the city and come across human feces daily.
I've been thinking a lot about this, and after going through a year long process of trying to get the city (actually the port authority) to simply lock a dumpster at night as they say they do but don't actually.
SF in particular seems to look for fancy big expensive flashy solutions to problems rather than look to other cities who have solved the issue in a simple "KISS" approach.
In the example of the unlocked dumpsters which were and are a serious public health hazard (people and raccoons go though it every night and drag the trash all over the waterfront and immediate area) I kept calling the port just asking them to lock them at night. They said thos was already happening, but clearly wasn't. We went back and forth for months but I got nowhere. The port kept telling me they they got new big Belly Trash Cans and have asked to build a new dumpster enclosure. All that was 2 years ago and the dumpsters still sit open today. All I was asking for was for them to lock the dumpsters they said they were already locking, with the lock that's already on the dumpster. It's not a "build a new building" or buy expensive things problem. It's a simple people doing their job as promised problem.
A non profit that distributed these throughout the city, then picked them up every few days would do far more good than any of these other efforts I've seen proposed by the city. The problem is its not sexy, interesting or newsworthy, it's just work. Working with a startup or design team to yet again invent another solution is, so that's why the people in power do that. Not because its better.
I'd really like to read an anonymous report from someone working in the government and who understands why the city is such a mess. Like, I read so many theories, but they mostly seem to be written by people with an agenda or who have no clue.
If this is anything like the $20,000 trash cans[0], the price is inflated because there's only one and so all the one time costs around design and manufacturing are put on a single item. When you amortize the costs across the entire production run, it falls to a tenth the price, but "$2,000 trash can" doesn't generate headlines and outrage because that's how much a sturdy municipal trashcan costs.[1]
But to talk about the nationwide problem that building anything anywhere takes orders of magnitude too long and too much, there's no smoking gun. It seems to be a combination of factors from understaffed government agencies, to invested interests, to out of date regulations, to just bad engineering and planning.[2][3]
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.
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.
Before the project is put out for bid, it will be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act, according to the Chronicle.
The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” according to a joint statement from Rec and Parks Department and the Department of Public Works, which added that, “While this isn’t the cheapest way to build, it reflects San Francisco’s values.”
> 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.
this part stands out to me, they have no incentive to say "yes" to anything (apart from a bribe) and every incentive to say "no". if they say "yes" that means projects can actually go ahead and the arts council has nothing left to do[1]. and they can say "no" for any reason they like since the standards are subjective.
There's a lot of issues with it. It's de facto bribery to buy votes from labor unions. If a union can win the job in a free and open auction then so be it. But it shouldn't be awarded to them just because.
There's a reason we have transparency in the bidding process for government work. This is cronyism.
Not to downplay your observations but thats mostly anecdotal.
Also, I think professionals working in STEM fields should be careful not to encourage this race-to-the-bottom wage-wise for workers, for it may also happen to us sooner than we may hope.
For the past few months I've been listening to Robert Caro's The Power Broker on audiobook (which has far and away the best narration I've ever heard - props to Robertson Dean!) and am about 40 hours in out of 65. The book is about a NYC administrator named Robert Moses who operated from roughly 1930-1970, and is quite eye-opening in its depiction of how the sausage is made in public works projects. I greatly recommend it if you have any interest at all in the nature of power within these areas. Robert Moses was famous in his time for "getting things done", which he was certainly successful at - but to think this required him to sweep away all the corruption and graft is absolutely untrue. He turned it to his own ends and operated successfully within an amazingly corrupt system, paying off everybody he could. All of this was non-transparently funded with money from public authorities, like bridge operators collecting tolls whose capitalization and disbursement were purely controlled by him. So we know this public toilet costs $1.7 million, which honestly isn't too astonishing a sum, but another era it also probably would have cost that - you just wouldn't know it unless you dug through the records decades after everyone involved was dead. Also the toilet would have, like, displaced an entire block of ethnic minority families or something. And had an elevated highway built over it.
Is there a cost breakdown of what goes into an estimate like this? The 1.7 million number comes from somewhere, so how was it calculated, what parts of the process result in it being so high? Cost of labor for doing the actual job, materials, administrative salaries for the planning and regulatory hurdles? Surely that exists somewhere, and so if this is corruption seeing such a document should make it more obvious who is benefiting from it
This highlights one of my personal favourite ways to attack this problem, itemised cost breakdowns.
If they were required by law to keep sufficiently detailed account of the government money they are using, and while making these public by default might be hard to convince people of (due to obvious questions about commercial in confidence information)… just requiring them to exist as government records of the project opens a pathway for the existing FOI processes to grant access to these for public inspection when it’s in the public interest.
I really struggle to image how a FOI request to produce the itemised cost documentation of the 1.7 million dollar public toilet, might possibly not be in the public interest.
The funny thing is a huge number public-facing businesses in SF are already legally required to have toilets and make them available to the public, but every single one of them is supposedly in a perpetual state of "the pipe just broke an hour ago" or other such excuses 24/7.
I've seen multiple articles on this, but none really explain why the public toilets that are used at other locations in SF cannot be used in this instance. Another comment in this thread mentions Paris's sanisettes, and SF already has a similar product (though far fewer of them). Given the city has already put them several places, I would have thought the marginal bureaucratic effort for one more shouldn't be so large.
Just pay for a top of the line port-a-potty cleaned and purged daily. Will be cheaper and won’t look that bad. I used to hang out at the park daily with my dog. It would work out just fine.
You could have a village of port-a-pottys for a long time for 1.7mill. On second thought, the person cleaning it daily would need a 200k annual city salary, so maybe not.
Vienna changed their freestanding restroom design a decade ago. It is all stainless steel now, they can clean it with a pressure hose, you can’t pee all over the seat. They are all the same and it is the first public toilet I don’t loathe to use. Obviously in my closest park the architect designed something of aesthetic merit and it is always broken. Operational concerns, basically cleanliness, trump everything with public toilets.
Could it be that the majority of the 1.7M is for getting the design "approved" and the clones they install elsewhere will be at a fraction of the cost.
It is a bipartisan pass-time (not past-time, you must have been auto-corrected) to accuse the government of wasting money.
And then forcing them to waste money by shifting their tasks and priorities followed by blaming them again for the waste.
The military overspending was on hammers. And the politician forgot to mention that these were hammers for use in a munitions factory, where it was rather important that the hammer not generate even micro-sparks.
The politician also didn't mention anything about government overspend on desks for senators. I'm sure his desk didn't come from Ikea, but somehow that wasn't a problem.
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.
I can see why you were downvoted. You are correct about the submitted article, and these types of posts attract a different audience - newer, lower karma accounts that tend to focus on non-technical subjects.
Yahoo doesn't produce much content, they distribute it. This is from the National Review, which is a partisan editorial magazine. It is not bias or incorrect to say it is not journalism. It is a subsidiary of the NRI, which is a dedicated to advancing conservative ideas and politicians (that is in their words - https://www.flipsnack.com/nrinst/2022-my-newsletter.html)
This type of content is fairly well crafted to appeal to certain worst impulses, and manipulate people. There is a US political movement based on creating a long standing state of aggrievement and thrive on this sort of cortisol raising material. It's is a shame to see it getting a foothold here.
What's the "truth" behind the headline then? Genuine question, I totally agree that it sounds a bit "too bad to be true" especially without more context. But what's the other side of this story?
I sorry, I didn't make my point very clearly: I think this article is raises non-issue, intended to create conflict and bad feelings. They say that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy; I am ambivalent about this article and am not invested enough to knowledgeably discuss it. I'm not an SF resident, and I don't know how much it would reasonably cost to put up a durable and safe public toilet in a high cost, seismically active urban area. I don't have time to figure that out, so I'll assume the people involved are doing their best and I will go on with my life. There are a lot of people here focused on unproductive negativity, and that is not good for them or Hacker News as a community.
The truth is there is always something to get outraged about somewhere, and rather than focusing on them everyone should do their best to live with dignity, integrity, and empathy.
This is already codified. It’s a political ideology that centers around throwing money into a bottomless pit of problems that never seem to be solved.
“Accountability” would mean a massive reduction in headcount, budget, and taxation. The likelihood of this happening in SF is….. you know the answer to that.
3 years of litigation until all the stakeholders agree on all the aspects of this public toilet are not cheap.
And what if the environmental reviews find a bunny family living at the proposed location? Relocating the bunny family will probably cost another million and 2 years of delay.
You're not even exaggerating. I worked as a contractor some time back for a major Canadian telecom company that no longer exists. I remember spending hours of meetings on calls with no less than 10 stakeholders (and in some meetings senior management) "circling back" to get a decision on button position. Not a single one of these people were a designer/UX person. I'd imagine it's even worse in the public sector.
There is probably some fallacy to explain this. My intuition tells me that if you have meaningless job (or you feel as if) you tend to make big deal out of small decisions, assert your territory of control/reign etc.
This leads to what you described. I guess it also offers an easy cop out for them if the button will be placed in the worst possible way. "Since Jerry was also on the call and I always thought he has final say."
I think we as a society have collectively forgotten that to be a stakeholder in something means you have something at stake. You make people ante up to keep a discussion open (doesn't have to be money, just something that requires non-trivial effort on their part) and you'll very quickly separate out those who have legitimate concerns from those who are just bikeshedding. Require people who want to attend a public comment meeting to do 4 hours of community service, make the default vote an abstention and require anyone who wants to vote yea or nay to write a 500 word essay explaining why, have someone who wants to add new requirements late in the process to put a percentage of their income in escrow until the project is complete, etc. It should be something anyone can do, but only those who really care would be willing to do.
I left a large employer (Irvine based, I think) that would occasionally run into this.
The final straw was a feature that should have taken 15 minutes. It instead took three weeks, because customer support, product owners and the design team couldn't agree on whether the change was necessary or if it would be harmful. Of course, none of this conversation happened until my change was already mostly done and I had to ask a question to clarify something in the ticket's acceptance criteria.
I got dinged because my work took too long... and I immediately started interviewing elsewhere. When good workers leave because they cannot tolerate bad inertia, all you're left with is people who don't mind or find a way to game it, and the problem gets worse.
It's a maximum amount allocated, and takes into account the possible costs of needing to start over because of building code changes and slowdowns due to power issues. As well as the cost for all the administration to decide on what kind of bathroom to build, a custom design, etc. It sounds high, but not insanely so.
I'm thinking of a bar in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, back in the day, where the owner got tired of repairing destruction and lined the whole bathroom with stainless steel plate, to which he welded stainless steel sinks, urinals, and toilets (as used in prisons).
At the end of the evening, he'd take the firehose in there to clean up.
> “They told me $1.7 million, and I got $1.7 million,” Haney explained. “I didn’t have the option of bringing home less of the bacon when it comes to building a toilet. A half a toilet or a toilet-maybe-someday is not much use to anyone.”
Did he not know how to bargain?
He just paid whatever amount people asked him to pay?
> 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 budget for a single toilet that will take 3 years to build is considered a political victory worthy of patting themselves on the back in the press, and (b) a toilet to "ease" rampant homelessness is considered a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes.
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 hut around existing plumbing and adding a toilet costs so much in the city. I wonder if the price includes a sink.
Litigation is the enemy here. I’ve been in this from top to bottom and it’s always legal precedents that fuck everything up. Governing bodies, be they local or regulatory, are forced to broadly interpret legal precedent established in high profile situations, or small, specific legal settlements which have occurred at a local level. Lawyers then take this case law and work with bureaucrats to craft regulations and ordinances which have zero possibility of running afoul the case law, and these can become so odd and counterintuitive when broadly applied that they have wildly negative effects on the whole. A high dollar project can spend the money the develop legal justifications for getting a code variance and ignoring the precedent set by case law, but the 95% of the rest of us are forced to design, construct, and accept the baked in laws to gain the privledge from the city to operate under their purview (which ultimately puts them on the hook for any lawsuit in their jurisdiction - as they always come after cities before individuals, and the cost of fighting these always exceeds the cost of settling them). So contractors are left constructing shit they know won’t work, engineers are signing off on shit they know won’t work, and cities are authorizing construction on shit they know won’t work, all to avoid taking on the responsibility doing your job right, and to avoid the horrendous consequences that would result from the people willing to go along with this system being in the position of making actual design decisions themselves, with no legal safety nets when they fuck up. It is the very definition of a broken, unsustainable system, and there are even more levels of red tape around environmental reviews I didn’t come close to getting into. It’s a lawyers dream, the most profitable contractor in your local jurisdiction is so solely because they are the best at exploiting loopholes in the system to overbill clients, it drives away anyone who has the skill or desire to fix it, and its and civilizations worst enemy.
Edit: Pardon the typos, I’ve got gig to go do as I was stupid enough to try to address a small part of this on behalf of a city’s residents, and boy have I suffered.
Actually, the construction workers found multiple issues with the plans, and were on the hook for some of the repairs.
The profiteers were the engineers that designed the system. Each time they screwed up, they got to bill us more hours. Also, the contract with them stipulates zero liability for their incompetence.
The state licensing board should be fired for allowing that.
Also, we wanted to put in a more environmentally friendly, cheaper, and more reliable road technology (specifically, a permeable road), but the county blocked us, then made us pay to put in drainage to mitigate the effects of the obsolete thing they stipulated. Both the mandated obsolete road technology and the drain design immediately failed. The state regularly uses the disallowed permeable technology in this area.
Since then, the county has approved similarly flawed designs at other sites, and the construction firm flat-out refuses to install them.
I think we agree. I would consider the construction workers to be laborers. They're adding value. Profiteering would be collecting profit without adding value i.e. engineers and the licensing board in this case.
> collecting profit without adding value i.e. engineers
Civil Engineers DO NOT have the upper hand in any of their designs. They propose, and upper management comments, and they propose again, and upper management comments again, and back and forth it goes. At the end of the day, all they have done is manage a series of comments, and tried to please the client rep with something like a quick and dirty fix to whatever comments they are getting.
Who has the creativity? The client rep, but he is so incompetent/overloaded/unelated that all he does is either manage from high above, or just look for ways to protect himself and the City, or ask the consultant to propose solutions and makes the smallest comments possible on these solutions, while leaving majority of the comments for other offices.
This leads to designs that hardly get a fight history. And more of a sychophant-driven approach just to get nitpickers out of the way.
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.
Mission accomplished. I never stated anything about my knowledge of construction. However, for whatever little it’s worth, I do know more about it than most people I encounter, especially in a forum like HN.
And now I see the political money cycle that sustains this and prevents the state legislature from passing laws to clean up all the accumulated case law cruft.
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, “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.”"
I recognize that the verbiage of this quote is probably standard for construction projects in the city, and it sounds absurdly out of place for a project of this scale. That being said, at some point our elected officials just need to delegate authority and let them act mostly autonomously.
> 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 particular building could make their own choices!" - "If only people who owned land could build buildings on it!". That system exists - it's called private property.
Bureaucracy exists because no individuals have any ownership over any of this. The pipes and the surface of the sidewalk belong to different authorities - and dozens of oversight committees (the dreaded planning commission) have vague authority layered on top. If no one can own it, and we don't want authoritarian political power, then we have to accept that bureaucracy is simply the only way forward. There are no choices that are not somewhere on the line between "one person owns", "everyone owns" or "the king owns". We must make a choice - and if the choice is "libertarianism is stupid but ALSO authoritarianism is stupid" then hey, achingly slow bureaucracy is on the menu folks. We can't have our cake and eat it too.
Fascism is the idea that the nation (and the race) of a people is more important than any individual member of the people. A fascist would say bureaucracy only implies a lack of power. Private property is the opposite of the textbook definition of fascism - private ownership is literally the idea that EVERY SINGLE individual is more important than the nation.
The fascist answer is to consolidate more power in a single political body. This would, indeed, make toilets cheaper to build. I would suggest that the polar opposite of that would also make toilets cheaper to build. The real question should be: how cheap should toilets be to build, and what is it about "fairness" that makes things so expensive?
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar and other unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and it's not what this site is for. We've already had to ask you this once. We eventually have to ban accounts that won't stop, so please stop.
Or, how about spend the money ONCE and create a set or two of architectural design standards for use in city projects? These would include aesthetic design, massing, scale, accessibility, safety, etc.
This is really what the whole review is doing, attempting to make the design consistent with the surroundings, which is a worthy consideration. But literally re-inventing this wheel for every project id both wasteful and guaranteed to fail, as every committee will be different. Simply pick one or two, and maybe have a standing process to update it every decade.
Then, it's just specify function, dimensions, etc., and maybe "in SF-City Style A", and put it out to bid, and passe it through maybe one or two approval processes to verify compliance before digging, or even include that in the bidding process - submit your design & costs, meeting these standards. IFF the process is good and fair, they should get many good bidders (ya, big IFF).
There's a non-market, political outcome that's the dominant factor in the labor market -- the degree to which the federal and state governments enforce or incentivize undocumented workers.
> 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 labor for everything. Nobody likes talking about the elephant in the room but that doesn't make it any less true.
Most of the red tape and bureaucracy come from having too much local rights and democracy.
If you can't build housing cheaply, then no amount of union rights and progressive policies would reduce the amount of homeless people.
i mean, the city has already hired police officers, who are armed. we know they're not solving murders or catching thieves, so i'm sure there's plenty of time to round up a work crew from the local population that will benefit from the toilet
The actual labor costs for the workers are not the issue, they already don't make a lot and wages have stagnated for decades while costs have soared. Also, there's plenty of non-union areas that STILL have incredible costs.
Profiteering from subcontractors and suppliers is the issue. All of these bids are public, this isn't exactly forbidden knowledge.
"The actual labor costs for the workers are not the issue" How do you know? The article explicitly calls out union labor costs. By "profiteering" are you complaining that someone made a profit because there is nothing in the article to indicate excessive profit.
Union labor is really expensive. It cost my neighbor who is part owner of the SF ferry building wine shop, over $8K to install a TV set because it had to be done with union labor. And get this, he was not allowed to install it himself because of union rules.
I have another neighbor that works as a location scout for movies and commercials. He says all filming in SF has to be done by union workers and its much more expensive than filming outside SF.
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?”
I mean the answer to this is not as simple as "yes trash belongs in trash bins".
How do you organize trash pickup? Where do these receptacles get placed? How large should they be? Is this for business and residential? Do trash routes need to change as well? NYC is massive and what will probably work in a neighborhood in Manhattan may not work for one in Staten Island. It's not at all a simple exercise.
California can move mountains when they really need to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUROM87vTA covers the Oroville dam disaster and recovery (the disaster was averted, and the recovery was fast).
In things that are NOT obviously life and death is where it gets bogged down by people "trying to help".
> a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes.
I see a lot of discussion among urbanists of "induced demand" when adding extra lanes to highways. Are we sure there wouldn't be induced demand from providing free housing to the homeless?
Already, the Bay Area & LA are major draws to homeless populations throughout the country. [0]
[0]: Yes, there are some studies that show "70% of homeless people in the Bay Area list most recently becoming homeless in the Bay Area" but many of those people came to the Bay in the first place to access homeless services and that study also relies on a very expansive definition of homeless). These studies are also incentivized to show this as a local issue from an ideological perspective. If you actually ask visible homeless people on the street where they are born, most will not say the Bay Area.
Another problem with "just providing housing" is that there are a good number of these people who need a lot of support and have a hard time functioning in society. Here, they tried giving homeless residents housing vouchers to apartments, and it lead in a significant drop in quality of life for the people who lived there, with a rise in violence and crime in the buildings (this is based both on newspaper articles about the program and talking with residents). I've known people in buildings like that who are looking to move after living there for decades.
Of course it would induce demand, especially when the benefits are an order of magnitude better than in other jurisdictions. It might even attract people to be "homeless" for free housing in one of the most desirable cities in the country.
> I see a lot of discussion among urbanists of "induced demand" when adding extra lanes to highways. Are we sure there wouldn't be induced demand from providing free housing to the homeless?
This is an interesting point, but would it not apply more generally to creating more housing for everyone, rather than just when creating housing for homeless? The population of homeless people is just a tiny fraction of the total number of people in the housing market.
If food became twice as cheap, would you consume twice as many calories?
Induced demand is easily applied to traffic because people shift consumption from X to X+Y% miles when trip times are reduced. Housing demand is finite. There is no +Y% additional housing that is being consumed when it is free, because it's only available to people who have none. Google's software engineers aren't going to be using free housing if it becomes available.
It's only available to people who have none across the entire country, plus it lowers the cost at the margin to becoming homeless (albeit only slightly).
> Housing demand is finite.
So is traffic demand. Demand being finite does not mean that induced demand no longer exists as phenomenon.
Induced demand is just another way of saying the supply is too low - and increasing the supply doesn't "increase the demand" it just reveals demand that was already there (and being unfulfilled).
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 not like that. Yeah some people own property, but generally big business stands to gain the most from the influx, not the residents. I wouldn't be happy in their shoes either, and the only reason I wouldn't be NIMBY about it is I'd just leave. The NIMBYs basically lost; the city grew anyway.
And it comes from every side, not just a "left or right" thing. People with nice houses don't want their neighborhoods to deteriorate. Renters don't want rent to go up. Even the stereotypical SJW people against gentrification... that's NIMBY.
Also, being a dense, very wealthy area with relatively fair weather, SF is naturally a place for homeless people to congregate. Besides the obvious squalor that brings, businesses don't trust just anyone off the street. 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.
> 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.
What do you do if you do multi-hour walk around the city? Or hop from one restaurant/cafe/bar to another one?
I worked there in 2016-2018 and returned several times 2020-21, and yes it's been this way.
It's not very difficult to deal with, just annoying enough that at some point you might get tired of it. I walked everywhere, only avoiding a few streets. You can find the cafés or even public seating areas that are hospitable, but it may require a little trial and error.
The one actually hard thing is finding a bathroom. Many businesses don't have one even for paying customers, unless it's a sit-down restaurant.
The Philippines has pay toilets ("comfort rooms") everywhere. I've always wondered why the US has capitalism for everything but toilets. It really makes things more convenient as people have an actual incentive to offer toilets to the public, and the prices are low by local standards.
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.
Yep, sounds about right. If you're a tourist, though, I would say that restrooms are accessible to a similar extent as any European city I've traveled to. They're perhaps more likely to be disgusting if you're in the worst parts of the city. Decent venues stay on top of it, though, and any place with a counter to order from will have a code you need to ask for to gain access.
If you're a local, there's of course social engineering tricks you can use, like going into a branch of your bank to make a withdrawal, then asking to use their bathroom.
And the quiet part that isn't spoken of is that all these businesses HAVE to have restrooms for their employees; and if you are nice and (basically not visibly homeless) and nobody is looking, you can often get access to them "as a favor".
Restrooms are the first victim of the tragedy of the commons.
“The NIMBYs basically lost” feels like it’s true in a lot of Northern California. Out in Tracy, a local lawyer (who had an office but not a residence within city limits) got a residential growth restriction on the ballot and passed circa 2000. The city took it to court, it was upheld after a few years, essentially zero residential development went on in the lead up to the ‘08 recession because the city had allowed “too many” houses to be built per the terms of the RGA restriction…
Fast forward 20 years later, the town grew substantially anyway, within the terms of the restriction. And all the problems that the lawyer and his supporters said their restriction would prevent happened. Traffic, densification (loss of “small town” feel), escalating housing prices, a majority commuter population… and much less of an escape valve to fix it all. The NIMBYs basically lost. And it has a knock-on effect, because families pushed into commuting to support themselves have to look even further out from their Bay Area jobs to find an affordable places. But the same lawyer still shows up to city council and planning commission meetings to remind everybody about how close they are to the limits on how many houses can be built this year.
Yeah, there's a sour spot where they're not planning for growth but not conserving the neighborhood either. I don't like the idea of neighborhoods becoming urban. It just doesn't work well. The urban area should be planned for density from the beginning, and they go all-out there without fighting the neighborhood for zoning permits. Make it ped/transit-friendly, and put parking on the perimeter instead of wasting valuable space on the inside. Meanwhile there's no reason a quaint neighborhood needs a huge apartment complex.
Thank you for this frank breakdown of what's going on. This seems like a good possible explanation for the testimonials I'm reading in this thread. I'm still struggling with what is espoused by those from SFO area and tech culture compared to the reality of what's going on.
If anybody is dedicated to 'social justice', to remove/resist facilities to relieve oneself just seems so far off the mark. I'm sure a lot of this is due to me not being in a city as dense as SFO, that undoubtedly has to change the dynamic. How much is this a "this is just a great place to live" issue, and how much is this a "this is a great place for easy resources if you're disadvantaged" issue?
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but in a chicken and egg way, I'm curious if a city with this much "not-here" going on, do people give money to initiatives and charities and people who ask for money/food on the street, or is it typically a city where people avert their gaze? I ask this because if resources were hard to be secured without effort, and if the city is generally expensive to reside in, the amount of those without resources should decline, right?
Where my hypothesis / thought-experiment falls apart is from what I can tell, most of California has amazing weather, so even sleeping on a sidewalk it's got to be quite hospitable and paradise-like (as odd as it feels to say)
I’m not sure I’m getting the full gist of your questions, but to one point: Yes I think people generally avert their gaze to the people and the issues, perhaps because of shame or sheer disinterest. I personally want to financially contribute to make things better, but it’s unclear how to get accountability with my spending. Giving cash on the street seems inefficient and likely to be used for the ‘wrong’ things. Organizations in the city and the city itself don’t appear to be doing much at all due to incompetence or bureaucracy.
To another: The folks living in the street are generally not the same as those in the laboring class. So indeed, those without resources working especially in the service industry are declining, and this is becoming quite an issue with cost and availability of these businesses. The people on the street mostly seem to thrive off the excess wealth the city casts off. But to be clear, although it doesn’t freeze, SF is no balmy paradise.
This is the method for any change. SF thinks it peaked in the 80s or 90s and any change requires community consensus lest the 50 people that use a bus stop a day are inconveniencing the single car owner that parks in front of the bus stop.
If I were in a wheelchair, I'd be terrified of cities like SF who only grow vertically and are opposed to any types of accommodations requiring construction.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm a simple kind of person in a small town, so to us here this is all kind of crazy. Is a city as big as SFO still governed by politicians who live in it, or at that size does local government take people from other areas? I always read a lot about SFO as being on the cutting edge of progressive initiatives usually toward humane goals. Is this common?
This gives everything I've been told or heard about SFO somewhat of a 'superficial' veneer (forgive me for lack of better words, I do not mean offense) based on the assumption that a city governed by its constituents ought to resemble them, but I'm seeing stuff like this where the words and intentions are right, but the actions and results are incongruent. Is this a mismatch between the politicians and residents or is this a "yes, but do it over there" thing?
p.s. congrats on the move! in your opinion, what makes Seattle different? I've been there before, it was a beautiful and welcoming experience. People are friendly like here in the sticks, but there's just a lot more folks.
SF is governed mostly by the people who live there.
The core of the problem is that SF has spent decades investing in giving every person, block, and neighborhood ways to participate in planning and changes. Generally this means giving out some kind of veto. So when the time comes to do something "Yes, but do it somewhere else" is the predominant response.
To put it another way - everybody wants more shelters for the indigent, nobody wants one near where they live. The planning system is structured around enabling this.
Thank you for your perspective on this. In my locale, this type of thing is hard to imagine, we'll feed anybody who can hold a fork here. We have almost zero resources for indigents here, so homeless and others without are a bit rare.
What are the resources (aside from this restroom) afforded to those without, near SFO? I'm tempted to think about this time when a local made a habit of feeding the deer, eventually they went from not being seen to no longer fearing people and would walk right up to the porch expecting sandwiches and RC Cola. Is it possible the abundance of resources exacerbates the situation where those seeking them arrive?
I think we need to also keep things into perspective, there are an estimated 8k homeless in San Francisco, about 1% of its population.
It seems most of those are caused by just poverty, not able to afford living expenses pushed people to the streets.
Some amount of them are coming from other cities who get rid of their homeless by sending them to cities like San Francisco, but Sam Francisco also sometimes send homeless away similarly, this happens all over the US, as a kind of way to spread it out more evenly so it's not as visible in any given place.
The fundamental issues of poverty are hard to solve, obviously, every country, city, nation, has always struggled with this. It's also a little more complicated due to some of the homeless also suffering from mental illness or drug addiction, that doesn't always make them qualified to even work, so it's like poverty mixed with what to do with the people that can't contribute to the work force as effectively.
There's also the case of temperate climate, that's pretty attractive to people who live in the streets, but it's also convenient for a city, if homeless are dying of frost bites or heat, you might feel more compelled to give them shelter, but when outdoor tents suffice you might instead choose to shelter them outside like that and just keep moving them around so they don't stay to the same place too long for the neighbors to complain.
I've heard San Francisco has a policy that when they give shelter, it has to be a full apartment with social service support, whereas New York and other cities go for more warehouse shelters, beds in a big room. The former is nicer to people that get to have access to them, but it hasn't scaled, whereas as the latter isn't as nice but has had more success actually sheltering them and hiding them from view I guess.
Some of the data seem to possibly indicate that poverty could in fact be the primary ingredient though. Also, rich families with kids that have mental issues or drug addictions are much less likely to end up in the streets, so it's definitely part of the formula.
> Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income
> According to responses from a 2019 survey of homeless people identified through the PIT count, a quarter said losing a job was the primary reason they became homeless
> When unhoused adults 61 and older were surveyed during the 2019 PIT count and asked why they had become homeless, 22 percent said it resulted from a job loss and 20 percent cited an eviction.
“The fastest-growing segment (of the homeless) is 51 and older who are homeless for the first time,”
>it's both difficult to study and politically sensitive.
Unfortunately I think you're right. A lot of delicate conversations fall into this category, and not just in SFO. As time passes my perspective shifts and I begin to realize our actions being at odds with our beliefs is not an ideologically linked trait, it is an innate quality of humanity.
It is as if having the correct belief-system is sufficient and on par with actually living those values- the emotional reward is the same.
I've only visited San Francisco, but I think one thing to consider is actually that it's a really small city with just too much going for its size.
It's only 46 square mile and has over 800k inhabitants. It's the second densest city after New York.
The surrounding Bay area adds 6.7 million more people, a large amount of who regularly go into the city for entertainment or work. I think it's an estimated 160k additional people that come in to the city per day from the outer areas. And there is an average of 131k tourist in the city each day as well.
So you have almost 1.1 million people in a 46 square mile area.
The city is fully built as well, there's no lots left, everything has a building on it with no room to grow, nowhere to expand out.
You could only expand up, but that would require destroying and rebuilding. The landscape is also all hills and valleys, huge slopes, it's not the easiest to work around.
The mayor is born and raised and still lives in San Francisco.
All in all, I just think running a city like that, of that size and yet so populous, that also has so much wealth at the top, a relatively strong middle, but also large lows, it's got a lot of all classes of things, it's just a harder problem because of the sheer scale and density of it all.
Seattle is twice the size at 84 square mile, and has a smaller population at 740k. The city has developed more recently as well, and a lot of the newer development are big tall skyscraper, there's still a little bit of building too small in some places, but it still hasn't reached anywhere the sheer density of San Francisco.
Be careful as the city square mileage can be misleading.
The other problem facing cities such as San Francisco is that despite its density it does a piss poor job at public transit and is still focused on car-first infrastructure. To your point, the surrounding area is ~7 million. It’s physically impossible for all of them or even most of them to drive everywhere without gigantic infrastructure problems. It will simply not work. Ever. It is physically impossible.
For example, if you look at lists of "largest cities in the US" [1] you'll find Columbus in the top 15 or so. But if you actually visit, it's no larger than Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, or other similarly sized metro areas.
This occurs because the city occupies ~225 square miles [1] and so when you look at density it turns out Columbus isn't much of a big city at all.
If you look at this link from Wikipedia, Columbus is even larger than San Francisco or Boston! Wow so big. But the relevant metric is density, not square milage.
I could have been more clear here but I just wanted other readers to note that you can't just look at square milage or even population, you have to look at those together to get density to help derive insight.
Fair enough, that was my point though, San Francisco is really dense, and has no room to expand. So you're looking at a city too big for its own good in some ways, as in, everything is a lot harder to manage when not only is it one of the largest in population, but also smallest in area resulting in really dense population and also no available land for growth.
> The city is fully built as well, there's no lots left
While that may be true, a huge fraction of the city is single family homes. Increasing housing capacity would be trivial were the political will to exist.
Trivial sounds inappropriate. It doesn't get any more complicated then that scenario in this case.
You'd have to re-appropriate people's family homes, or buy it from them. You have to destroy, possibly decontaminate, and then rebuild, there's the neighborhood to think about as well, with neighbors having to deal with the construction and the newly obstructed view, etc. Does the infrastructure support feeding water, gaz, electricity, internet as needed for a large apartment complex, and so on.
It is feasible, but can you think of a more complicated situation then this one? As it comes to cities and paths to increase housing, San Francisco seems to be one of the hardest one to accomplish.
I almost spat out my drink when they said: ... and then I went to Seattle. The light rail extension fiascos are the most publicly facing examples of this. Dear god SF must be bad when Seattle looks like a well oiled machine.
How would the NIMBYism contribute to that cost? I can see construction costs being somewhat higher with COL and regulations, but you could solve this problem with one of those toilet trailers or a porta-john (or cinder block and other materials are relatively cheap). Seems like they want a certain "look".
My understanding is that NIMBYism also takes the form of adding multiple barriers to changing the neighborhood. Environmental permit, safety permit, approving architectural proposals prior to implementation, limitations on who does the construction, how the materials are sourced, approvals on construction times and schedules, etc. The people building it might need to hire lawyers to draft proposals formally to local committees to do multiple rounds of approval at multiple stages. These all have the intention of liberal policies (better materials for the environment for example) but the effect is that the community is conservative with development.
[eta: I'm not making an opinion about what is good/bad/should be done. Just expressing what I understand is happening.]
While SFO isn't in the city limits, it is owned by the City and is in an unincorporated section of San Mateo; the SF police have a significant presence (probably the largest force) on site.
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."
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, Minnesota's black population died.
So the areas developed different styles of racism. The South has more of a "know your place" kind of racism. You can live here, you can shop here, you can blah blah blah. But "know your place". Defer to your "betters". Etc. The North has developed NIMBY. "Yes, you are equal to me, but just not here." A "roll up the windows and lock the doors" kind of vibe if you will. Redlining was as much, if not more, a Northern thing.
And while San Francisco is geographically South, it's got a lot of the North mentality about race relations. They want to deal with it by not dealing with it. They should be able to buy houses and shit with dignity, just not here.
And it's a kind of attitude that can pervade while claiming to be fighting for racial equality. And those people may truly believe they are fighting for racial equality. Which is why we should always be a bit introspective and concerned whether our own actions are prejudiced in some manner. Because it can develop despite our best intentions.
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.
I've lived here off and on since 1993. I work for startups but haven't hit the lottery.
There's a lot of San Francisco (and Bay Area) out there that has nothing to do with the startup scene, and many, many people who have no connection to and couldn't care less about it.
I agree, SF area has a lot of non-tech-related people and activities that should be enough to at least enjoy your non-work hours, but same with other areas. Moved to San Diego, and now I'm happier all around.
Running joke between me and the rest of the startup team in SF was that every time we go to an event, people lead conversations by asking what stack I use, which version of Python, and why the heck I'm messing with XMPP. I understood the importance of seeking out non-techies.
I don't know about you, but people don't charge me money to talk to them. All I have to do to meet people outside of my work peer group is go somewhere different.
> 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.
It sounds like your books are giving you an inaccurate view of San Francisco, because almost nothing is more on-brand for the city than red tape and NIMBYism.
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).
From my experience doing so is a good way of coming across as a douche tech-bro (“yeah, I’m so cool I use code names”). Particularly when the comprehensible way would be to write SF rather than SFO.
We have a datacenter there, so I'd totally know exactly what city you meant by that. I wouldn't say we always call Chicago ORD, but it definitely happens.
This is largely editorial bias and sensationalism. The original article was clickbait, $1.7m is merely the going rate for a public restroom (think of the big installations with women, men, and family rooms plus a janitor room). It is not what SF spent on a single commode.
Keep a skeptical eye whenever you see an article trashing SF. We are the boogeyman city for right wing demagogues in the USA.
Edit: Responding to a sibling comment:
> 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.
Lest people think the whole city is like this, this kind of thing is limited to a few square blocks inside the downtown area. As a gone-native SFer, I would have no problem finding public restrooms anywhere in the city, or a coffee shop with comfy couches soft enough to nap in.
I wasn't born here but my parents came here just after I was born, and they had lived here before that, I did grow up here, I've lived in other (N. Am.) cities, and I've studied a bit about San Francisco's history (Viva Emperor Norton III!) and I've seen more-or-less first hand SF city politics.
This city is nuts.
It's always been nuts. (Since the arrival of the Europeans, I don't know what it was like with the Ohlone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohlone )
First it was sort of concentration camps for the Native Americans run by Spanish Catholics.
There has always been a dark side to the city, from the tortured and murdered Indians, to the Jonestown Massacre. Sick shit has gone down here. It's not all sunshine and roses.
Last but not least, this city has been the catch-all for all the folks who are too weird or crazy to fir in in the rest of the country. There's even an old joke about it here.
It's only in the last twenty years, since all the tech companies and hype have come, literally since the Dot Com Boom (and bust). Remember that?
Before 2000 nobody but the crazies came here to live. I can't emphasize this enough.
All this "What's up with San Francisco?" is a young person's perspective. It's only by totally ignoring the entire history of the city up to ~2000 A.D. that the current situation seems puzzling or strange.
So anyway, to answer the immediate question: Yes, red tape and bureaucracy are wielded here with a perfection of hypocrisy. If you don't know a "fixer" you can waste hundred of thousands or even millions of dollars and years trying to get projects approved.
We do build things: the new Bay Bridge, and a tunnel under Chinatown, but some of the things we build are crap: The Millennium Tower is sinking, the sidewalks are pulling away from the buildings in Mission Bay (Mission Rock?) The new transbay terminal cracked, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center#Extend...
So yeah we have things like empty "luxury" condos next to folks living in tents in little shanty towns.
(The condos aren't actually lux, they look nice but the construction is crap, the folks in the office are sales not managers or maintenance, to get maintenance you call a call center in another state or country, the owners are a faceless LLC or other corp, etc. These things are all over the place!)
The city does house and feed some homeless people, credit where credit is due. Some folks have been put up in hotel since COVID and some other things have been done.
But we spend $250,000,000 (a quarter of a billion dollars) on less than 10,000 homeless people. As you can imagine most of that money is not just given to the homeless people themselves. Most of it goes to people who are not themselves homeless. Those people don't actually take any homeless people into their own homes and care for them. I'm not sure exactly what they do with all that money, but I'm sure the folks who get paid to "deal with" homelessness in SF are able to pay their rent or mortgage regularly and on time. (I feel a rant coming on, so I'ma stop myself there.)
So yeah, this is a case where the sensationalism is actually warranted in the sense that the situation here is "sensational" (but not in a good way, unless you have lots and lots of money, then you can avoid the worst of the bad stuff by isolating yourself in the nice neighborhoods and taking uber, etc.)
The educational system here is also wildly mismanaged. I could go on but this is already a long post. We recently recalled three school board members for being too nuts and radical for SF! Also the DA got recalled!
(A friend of my sister works for a school, the new principal of which turned out to be so fucking crazy the kids themselves went on strike! They literally walked out! I don't think this made the paper even locally, and I forget the name of the school, if anyone asks me I'll ask my sister about it, okay?)
To sum up: it's nuts here, it's always been nuts, but at least it used to be mostly fun nuts, and now it's more like a 90's cyberpunk dystopia nuts.
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?
>Replace "right" with "those who doesn't want to do the right thing" and most political speech kinda makes more sense.
>The Left/Right split of viewing politics is a false dichotomy that made sense only about a century after the French Revolution, in France.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. I don't think people affiliate with a certain party seeking to "not do the right thing". Saying it is a false dichotomy while still saying one side doesn't do the right thing is a bit two sided. I am, however, getting the idea that there is some subtle derision being conveyed when the term 'right wing' is used, which is unfortunate because at least to me I'm being pre-loaded with bias about people I don't really know yet.
It is not meant (I'd guess) as a characterization for people, but as a way to explain/read the words left and right, especially when one is criticizing the right
(i.e.: right is used mostly as a synonym for bad, for some people)
This comment makes more sense in that context, thanks for breaking it down for me. I don't know how we can have a meeting of the minds while people use the term for others as a pejorative. I hope it gets worked out some day when we mature as a species and global community.
People who are left wing w.r.t. the organization of the economy view democrats as right wing i.e. upholding the entrenched power structure. SF dems will happily support spending money on the homeless in principle, but they are still deeply conservative when it comes to how policies will affect them or their capital. They are pretty much the poster child of NIMBYism:
"I know X is something the community needs and I'm all for building it, just Not In My Back Yard"
This is some hilarious gymnastics. S.F. is basically a poster child for how left wing urban policy is easily turned into abusive graft and inherently prone to abuse and corruption and it’s just like, “no, more cowbell!” Just keep turning the dial up and I’m sure it will get better.
Of course, classic left wing policies such as single family zoning that somehow hasn't been removed after decades of the socialist iron grip on the bay.
In all seriousness, how do you differentiate between left wing policy that is "inherently prone to abuse and corruption" and policy with a progressive facade that is designed by and for those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo? Where are the left wing professors that are saying "actually we need more public hearings, stricter building codes, more environmental review, and by god we can't let anyone touch the zoning!"? Presumably they would exist if SF policy is what the left wing actually wants.
If something has problems, it's due to the right wing, naturally. The far right, because there's no such thing as being just a little right. Alt-right if it's citizen-led and not overly Christian.
Overall, it's just a manifestation of "if we were only just a little more left, things would work out!" you'll see.
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.
"a right-wing dystopia?" Seems like you'd prefer to redefine what it means to be left or right wing rather than admit that this is the outcome of left-wing governance.
The specific issues here are: tight control over building standards leading to red tape; high levels of process to ensure community review and involvement; paying more than market price for labor in order to support unions as a political value; supporting restrictive zoning to keep renters and homeowners in stable homes.
"Right-wing" imperatives did not create these issues.
Put another way, if a city elects left-wing politicians exclusively for 50 years, and those left-wing politicians enact policies and values consistent with their platforms -- it's probably not the case that negative results are because they're actually secret Republicans.
I assumed it was an attempt at ideologically shirking accountability for the outcomes involved in elected officials doing what they were elected to do.
what is 'fact' and what is anecdote are unclear here, I've observed none of this personally, until then it is me suspending disbelief and relying on the words given to me for the interpretations and observations of those that I assume have more familiarity than me. I have no idea if it 'could be' that they meant X. I'm asking to know, not because I have an agenda.
No, I think the comment was meant to mean "this is not left-wing, this is late-stage capitalism, the problem is that we have too many right wingers in SF that are cosplaying progressivism"
I don't think there are many ways in which SF is similar to a "very right wing" city. First of all, "right wing" politicians do not control any city governments in any real way, but if you were to compare SF with say, Houston -- which has radically different policies along these lines -- you wouldn't find that the results are the same.
In the American context, an extreme right-wing city government would theoretically provide very few public services, allow all property to transact in open marketplaces with very little red tape, allow for any use of property to meet market demand. In other words, you could build a gigantic high rise in Noe Valley but the city wouldn't pay for public toilets in any case (but someone could feel free to make pay toilets if they own or lease the land). Left wingers imagine that this sort of arrangement would lead to worse or similar outcomes for the poor than SF currently, but... I don't know, honestly.
> In the American context, an extreme right-wing city government
My businesses is in Carmel, Indiana. It is the definition of far right wing republican. There are often races where the only candidates are Libertarian or Republican. Here’s what it looks like:
* Constant growth driven by tax incentives.
* More roundabouts per capita and a corresponding low injury accident rate
* Fantastic public parks and commons (that drive up real estate values)
* best or near best public school system
* consistently in the top 10 places to live in the US
It’s been this way for 20 years. The city is expensive to live in and safe, and public transportation is minimal.
I think it's not unreasonable to attack effects of homelessness as well as the cause. Some problems are really hard and some are just hard.
In other places where it wont cost 1.7M to build one public toilet, this wouldn't be seen as such a failure or mis-step, just extending public services to people in crisis - as long as it's not seen as "fixed" by doing so.
I think the OP wanted you to consider the benefit that 1.7 million could have had in providing direct aid to preventing homelessness, e.g. rental assistance or job training.
No way in hell you could buy even a small building in the city for the stated purpose of homeless services for anywhere near that amount of money. Anything homeless “attracting” will have you swarmed with NIMBYs and red tape for years. It will be called a crime magnet. People will say that it will reduce property values. They will sue you to stop the project. The one thing everybody agrees on in the public review meeting is that the place to put the homeless is “not near me”. You will spend way more than $1.7m on lawyers alone for a project like this.
I'd think increasing demand would hurt everyone's bottom line, since non-assisted renters have competition with assisted renters for the same set of properties.
Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?
Funneling free money into rent, any way you structure it, will indeed raise prices unless you also build more housing.
Ironically the people fighting the hardest to funnel free money into rent are the same ones fighting the hardest to prevent new housing at all costs, under the delusional theory that "induced demand" means that the law of supply and demand is wrong and the inverse applies.
The issue is nobody leaning left politically is going to run with the truth that homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse. California still sells the lie that homelessness is caused by lack of housing/affordability.
It can be both. I'd like to see numbers, though. Used to be mental health and drug abuse were by far the dominant cause of rough homelessness. Did the pandemic change that? The homeless population has exploded in many cities in the last couple years. All from crime and drugs?
I could believe that the non-rough sleeping homeless (couch surfers, as it were) are much more likely to be people who cannot afford a place to live.
Also, politically conservative areas still have homeless problems of their own, so it might be premature to declare it a left leaning policy problem.
> homelessness is caused by lax policies in regards to crime and drug abuse
You don't even have correlation let alone causation. California is slightly below average with its incarceration rate so not really lax at all compared to the 20+ states with lower incarceration rates. Alaska has an above average incarceration rate and ranks high on homelessness rate. Nevada has a high incarceration rate and ranks high on homelessness rate.
> and drug abuse
California doesn't even make the top 20 list for states with drug abuse problems. Not surprisingly some conservative states are on that list - thanks most likely to widely available and cheap meth.
You want a reductive answer to a complex problem in order to make an ideological point.
I don't feel it was intentended attack on OP's part. It seems he was pointing out that even a workaround for this seems crazy. Despite not really addressing the original problem, but only providing some relief - which still is pretty welcome.
The $1.7M toilet is symptomatic of the root cause of homelessness in the Bay Area: you can't build anything within a reasonable time and budget there, even something as simple and small-footprint as a toilet.
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.
America is really big. You’ll find a high level of variance across the country just like you will in most g20 countries.
Big cities have lots of problems and lots of desirable features. It’s a toss up.
Having recently returned from Japan to San Francisco, I find myself longing for a city which has less crime and more functioning infrastructure, but having grown up here it’s hard to leave my friends.
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).
> I have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work.
I feel similarly, when it comes to pork. We tried to eliminate that from congress, calling it wasteful and corrupting. And perhaps at some level that is accurate. But when we took it away, now all we have is naked ideology. It's not clear to me that this is an improvement, in fact I think it is the opposite.
Transparency and politics can't mix. Zero sum deals where some group wins while another group loses are nearly impossible. Yet those are exactly the deals that need to be done. Example: America cannot agree where to store its nuclear waste.
SF has problems. The recent FBI investigation that nabbed Mohammed Nuru and the city's own investigation that nabbed Hui have helped a lot because it has reminded the rats that consequences exist. It's all just rumor but that seems to have damped down on corruption quite a bit.
That said... for the life of the average person there is not as much impact. I don't need to bribe anyone to get something done. I recently installed solar and batteries and we got permits, inspection, and approval including variances for some placement issues. It was all wrapped up within two months.
Another example: I've reported problems via the 311 app and the tickets were fixed. One was a burned out and broken light in a playground bathroom (replaced the next week). Another was a water leak on O'Shaughnessy Blvd that took about 3 months to resolve because no department could figure out what line was leaking or who owned it with lots of finger-pointing... but ultimately the 311 people stayed on the ticket, figured it out, and the city fixed the leak.
Corruption tends to happen on large projects or city contracts. Part of it has to do with public project bidding laws that don't allow for reputation to be considered. There's a gaggle of CA contractors who are experts at submitting low bids, then jacking the cost with change orders and delays. They keep winning contracts because they often submit the lowest bid. Sometimes things that seem way overpriced are that way for good reason... like buying rights to the land, digging up the street to run new plumbing which may require relocating other massive utilities, and so on. Other times you have things like the new outdoor trash can design where DPW employees treated it like a fun vanity project instead of buying an off-the-shelf design... resulting in vastly inflated costs. It's possible someone in DPW took a bribe but it's also possible they just didn't care about cost.
The tl;dr: No. Corruption and political meddling in SF doesn't come within an order of magnitude of India... especially not for the average citizen who can usually access relevant government services within reasonable times at the scheduled rates. That said there's more of it than average involving large projects, but recent arrests have helped.
Absolutely media hype. Read the article. Nowhere will you find $1.7m spent on a single commode. It’s just a budgetary set-aside for a future public restroom at the going rate. Leftover funds will go back to the general fund or can be put towards long term maintenance of the public restroom.
I don’t know why people are so willing to spread right wing FUD about Sf, maybe it brings in the clicks I guess.
Society is strange. Last year a Canadian woodworker made cabins for the homeless which was destroyed (probably because of some regulation) by the city.
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.
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 is quit trying to do direct democracy at every last level of the process. We elect representatives, so we should let them do their thing. And if we don't like it, elect someone else next time.
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.
Is housing really an option? I mean that seriously. I suppose we could build "projects," like in Baltimore, but I definitely wouldn't call those a success. Right now, most of the Section 8 projects are skimming the better candidates off the top. The hard cases, the truly drug addicted and mentally disturbed (and there are a whole lot of them), will take whatever housing you give them and either ruin it, or move back onto the street, or both. I always hear this appeal to just "house people," but it seems to me there's more to it than that. I think in many, many circumstances, you would have to involuntarily commit them. And then it starts looking like a jail or mental hospital. In my mind, those are probably the best answers, but that ship sailed a long time ago.
Honestly, all SF has to do is stop obstructing projects that are a mere 20% subsidized units. It's become common political practice to pretend that a parking lot housing zero people is preferable to a lot housing a bunch of people, of which up to 20% are impoverished and formerly unsheltered vulnerable community members. Couple it with a fantasy that 100% subsidized is within reach in all cases and you have a recipe for a parking lot staying that way forever and the unsheltered staying that way too.
Getting people in housing is often the first step to being able to help them with everything else making their lives difficult. It's remarkably hard to deliver psychiatric care to people who cannot be reliably contacted.
How do you weigh incipient death-by-fire-with-major-public-hazards against other options? I have no idea how you'd do it or how you'd weight other options.
Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?
Given the permanently mild weather in the SF Bay, this number is probably smaller than you think. Whereas fires in homeless encampments are a relatively frequent occurrence.
Being exposed without, say maybe wooden structure to block the wind around you while you sleep, may be a reason homeless build fires.
The last story I was able to find was of someone that died exactly that way, a fire in near freezing weather in SF [0]. If that person had a lockable wooden shed to put blankets and sleep in, she wouldn't have needed a fire.
When I lived in Oakland, my apartment building had several close calls with wildfires caused by poorly contained campfires in a nearby encampment of vulnerable community members housed in tents to keep the wind off as they slept. Given that lockable wooden sheds / "tiny homes" can and do catch fire from things like poorly managed propane stoves in particle board construction, perhaps a better solution is in order. As stopgaps go, this one has a bunch of known drawbacks that lead policy to shy away from it.
The Canadian woodworker built these structures for people who had no actual housing. Not people who had the immediate option of an actual house and just picked living in the shack for funzies.
Your suggestion that these homeless people should have just went in 'actual' housing instead is absurd, it almost certainly wasn't an option for many if not most of them in the face of the immediate expedient options.
Thank you for clarifying that I correctly understood the earlier comment.
What would you like me to say at this juncture? I firmly believe that the root of the issue at hand is California's, and the Bay's, collective aversion to housing. It's an aversion written into policy. Policy can be changed.
Similarly, people in need can be housed by municipalities sufficiently devoted to doing so in a cost and time-effecitve manner. It just requires the political will to do so and a political system that does not cater to NIMBY impulses.
Please accept my apologies for my lack of clarity earlier. I do not think that people lacking housing should "just go into housing". You are completely correct. That would be utter nonsense. I think the proper policy response is actual housing for people, as opposed to an entrenched policy apparatus devoted to doing literally anything but that. I hope this clears things up for you.
If that was the problem, I think it would have been solved long ago without as many fires as we see today. Warmth is available in a variety of ways, including and not limited to warming centers and chemical warmers. Propane stoves are a poor way to warm people.
To be honest, I'm being very generous when I ascribe those wildfires to a need for warmth and poor fire management. None of them happened in particularly cold weather.
SROs in SF have a long and storied history and generally one of the good lessons to draw from this history is wood structures are a bad idea for housing homeless people.
Attacking the root causes would mean admitting that they have no idea what they’re doing, that they’ve been running full speed backwards and that their political opponents were 100% correct. Or they can spend more public money and keep running backwards while claiming victory.
This is the even more wild statement to me. Just for the "look"?
Last year, the city spent nearly a half-million dollars to develop new trash can prototypes because city leaders “weren’t happy with the look” of off-the-shelf cans.
At least the public defacation issue is a true public health concern.
Replying to the top comment for visibility… the entire article is clickbait
Buried in the article is this:
> In an email to National Review Wednesday, the Recreation and Parks Department said it will consider various options for constructing the toilet, including installing a pre-fabricated restroom. The department said it budgets for the worst-case scenario, so it estimates high. “In the end, the project may well be delivered for far less [than $1.7 million], with leftover funding put toward further improvements or maintenance,” the email stated.
$1.7m is the going rate for an entire public restroom. $1.7m is not what was spent on a single commode. It is merely what is set-aside for the project while in the planning stages.
This is what decades of single-party dominance turns a city into. It has reached a fevered pitch in the last few years.
I'm voting Republican across the board, no matter what, until the Democrats regain some semblance of sanity. The Democrats have taken our vote for granted and are not only sucking the state dry with their corruption (a la Nancy Pelosi) but layering on ridiculous social justice programs that are destroying this state.
ALL of my friends are doing the same, and many people I've met are also doing the exact same thing.
So the basic lie here is the cost for the full process vs the cost for the actual construction.
This is just a small part of the ongoing and very popular conspiracy theory that all progressive government is actually an insane plot to destroy American society, if not human civilization.
If you're NOT super rich and work in tech (aka can leave), I do not know how you sleep at night paying those ridiculous taxes knowing they are getting pissed away on projects like this.
There's a lot of comments in this thread blaming this on the boogeyman of "conservatives", but you're talking about a city that has been hard blue for more than 50 years and has not elected a single red in that time. Granted, blue isn't really "progressive", it's more globalist center-right in the global sense, but nonetheless, in the American sense, it's certainly not "conservative".
I would suggest a re-examining of your political compass if this is the conclusion you came to after reading an article saying this boondoggle was based on regulations, committees, and unions.
Any actual SF residents in this thread? I’m seeing a lot of very authoritative posts coming from places of ignorance. One person even called it a “right wing dystopia”.
Here’s the bottom line. The problems we are trying to solve in SF are hard. This place is fully developed. No way around that. Is SF perfect? No, not at all. But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of. We could easily sweep away the problems tourists complain about, do a little fascism, and make all these “problems” go away… by ignoring the humanity behind them. But we don’t. Instead we keep looking the problem in the eye and trying to solve it at a systemic level, as best a super dense 7x7km “island” possibly can.
I would love to hear actual solutions from people who say they could do it better, but I am not holding my breath. They’re usually like people claiming P != NP because “well, obviously”…
The breakdown for the $1.7M toilet was published: $300K for the architect, $125K for construction management, $175K for the City project manager, etc. All this for one toilet in this cute town square. This has nothing to do with humanity, fascism, or the city being full. It's simply gross public $ mismanagement. SF should use this $ for something more useful, like better schools.
>But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of.
This is the problem.
The problem is you're trying too damn hard. Just build the fucking toilet. Less trying hard to do things the perfect way and be better than "almost any other city." At this point you should be looking at Camden or Gary IN for inspiration.
Did you think we are doing anything else? The article makes it pretty clear that’s all that is happening, but it’s making a big fuss over the fact some planning needs to take place, and that the planning website has some corporate-speak about doing our best or whatever.
$1.7m is what it costs to hook up a full service public restroom in SF from idea to completion. It’s not cheap to build on top of fully developed area, you can’t just “dig and hope for the best”. No, you can’t cheat by sticking a commode on top of a storm drain and calling it a day.
I grew up here, and live here now. I'm left-leaning by USA standards.
> One person even called it a “right wing dystopia”.
As an aside, I think they meant something like "what a right-winger would call a dystopia", not that it was the result of right-wing policies (which makes no sense.)
> The problems we are trying to solve in SF are hard.
Not this one. Pooping and peeing in cities has been a solved problem since Roman times.
A toilet could be a simple as a hole over the sewer: squat and go. That would be better than the current status quo and cost approximately nothing. But we're trying to act like a grown up not-insane town these days due to the influx of techies since the Dot Com Boom.
> This place is fully developed.
What do you mean?
> But damn if this city doesn’t try its hardest, moreso than almost any other city I know of.
I can't agree. We make loud noises, sure, but when it comes to actually getting things done downtown it's just like any other city. I mean, check out the career of Willie Brown, eh?
It's an open secret (if you've lived here long enough) that city hall has a lot of "soft" corruption. Some of it even makes the papers, e.g. Nuru et. al.
> we keep looking the problem in the eye and trying to solve it at a systemic level
Superficially maybe.
In reality we sweep homeless camps and keep or discard people's stuff. I've heard we recently started requiring homeless to carry special ID cards to access city services. "Papers please?" We have special police on the buses to check people's fares. That is a new thing here. I remember when we didn't waste taxpayer money on fascist policies like uniformed police sweeping public transport checking papers and ticketing or arresting people who didn't pay their fare.
I've heard that now-Governor Newsom wrote a book about his experiences as Mayor here. In it he relates that he found out that the fares we collect on our public transportation system only cover the cost of collecting the fares themselves. It's a break-even process: the fares pay for collecting the fares, everything else in the Muni system is paid for by taxes.
So he asked, why not make Muni free?
The answer, he wrote, is that it's believed that all the homeless people would ride it, and trash it. They buses would become "rolling dumpsters" was the quote, IIRC.
Look that in the eye, eh?
If I seem somewhat aggressive I apologize. I don't mean to pick on you.
> I would love to hear actual solutions from people who say they could do it better
Okay, I was homeless for about 4.5 years, and spent a little bit of that time here in SF.
Here's how you solve it.
First, everyone eats.
Say it with me, shout it loud as you can: EVERYONE EATS!
There are thousands of commercial kitchens in the city. This state produces more food each year than most nations.
"Even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."
Step one: Everyone eats.
Step two: Build houses and give them to people. This city is empty. More than half of it is one story tall. We could easily house a million more people here without sacrificing QoL or open space.
Step three: human recycling center, that's a crass way to put it but whatever. Heal people. Love each other, etc.
That's really step zero: get out of the way of love. All these problems are easy to solve if we just loved each other better, eh?
Your post didn’t offend me, if anything it reminded me how hard the problems are to truly solve. I appreciate your ideas, but we are in a democracy and you need buy-in.
> the city is empty
Maybe so, but you have to convince the residents that doubling the density won’t affect them. I’d be happy to double the height of my residence and house another family or two here, but right now I’m already near the max zoned height.
> A toilet could be a simple as a hole over the sewer: squat and go.
We have storm drains. The problem is any time we offer privacy, they get used for shooting up drugs and people pass out inside the bathrooms. This greatly raises the cost. We could solve this by being super tough on crime but for better or worse we’ve decided not to mass incarcerate.
I agree that SF does homeless sweeps now and then, but it’s generally a last resort, not a first one. And notice is required… other cities will give you much rougher treatment than SF. Or they have severe weather which acts as a more effective deterrent to homelessness than any level of policing.
I’m also seeing a lot more old RVs where I used to see tents, I think that’s an improvement even if I’d still consider them homeless. RVs are also illegal but are much less of an eyesore than tents and probably safer too. There’s probably even roaming services going around and “emptying” the RVs because I’m seeing a lot less urination on the street lately.
Remind me of the $60k/tent in San Francisco for the homeless... San Francisco is not corrupt at all: "S.F. spends more than $60K per tent at homeless sites. Now it’s being asked for another $15 million for the program"
The city should just spend $1.7M on composting toilet buckets ($22 at REI) and leave them by the dozens in areas with public defecation problems. What a goddamn boondoggle.
I would never step foot into a public SF toliet. Last time I went in there the homeless shit all over the floor and toliet and walls. I went in and nearly threw up. A homeless person pointed and laughed at me. Fuck that.
For years I felt this way. But with a 3 year old child you go into lots of public toilets all over the city. Nearly all toilets near playgrounds for children have been fine. Basic but fine.
Thinking through this more. SF Parks and Recs managed toilets have all been fine from a sample size of about 20 uniques and maybe 80 visits. About 75% of those visits are weekend days in the mornings.
I feel like there are two SF's - the one that other people write about on 6th Street and the tenderloin, and then the one I visit west of that which is one of the most beautiful and vibrant American cities I have ever spent time in.
I think you need to be a bit desensitized to problems that are visible all over the city (e.g. trash under and along freeways etc) for that to not be the memory that sticks rather than the beauty.
It is like SF needs a “clean up the city volunteer day” once a month that is broadly attended.
Hmm, having just visited SF and then spent a week in New Haven and Hartford in CT, I can't agree. What American city doesn't have trash? I can't think of a city I have visited in the world that meets that standard. I haven't been, but maybe Singapore?
The homeless problem is very bad in California and SF in particular, and it is very concentrated in a small area to the east that looks positively dystopian. But that doesn't represent the whole city. If there is a next time you visit, I recommend spending some time in the panhandle, the Haight, the sunset, basically anywhere bordering golden gate park.
FWIW, I visit golden gate twice a week in average.
I guess I’m saying something a bit different. When people visit SF from SFO they get on the 101 and within 2 hours they have a feeling of things are broken and that memory sticks. I’m desensitized to those problems so I mostly see the beauty.
If people land at SFO and took 380 onto 280 thn straight to golden gate perhaps their impressions would be different.
I lived in New Haven for 4 years. The difference in the amount of trash between American cities is vast, compare NYC with Chicago. Or really any city on the east coast with Chicago for that matter.
I'm not sure if you mean that Chicago is clean or dirty? I saw a lot of both last time I visited, it's hard to say. It certainly seemed a lot cleaner than, say, Rochester NY or Philadelphia when I visited, but not sure if that was just the areas I was in.
Of course the difference is vast, I think you could compare one part of NYC with NYC even and end up with vastly different ideas of trash. And that's kinda what I am going on about; the trash under highways in some part of the city is a meaningless metric.
Chicago is a much cleaner city. No comparison with New Haven, NYC (where I used to live), Philly (where I live now) or really anywhere else on the east coast. The culture of throwing trash on the ground is endemic on the east coast.
I was flying from NYC to Denver a few months ago and a Denverite and I struck up a conversation on this very topic after observing multiple people throwing trash on the floor in LGA. Speaking of which, Denver, another city that is much cleaner than anywhere on the east coast.
Chicago also uses cans instead of throwing trash onto the streets. In conjunction with using alleyways I think we have planned structural differences between the two populations. Surely the beginning of an argument for the "cleaner" and "cleaner habits" between the two.
I used to live in the South Bay and go up to San Francisco and Oakland every other weekend. It was bad, but it seems to have completely gone to hell in the last decade.
I would not set foot there unless all of human existence depended on it.
I’ve wanted to leave SF for a few years as I don’t connect as well after having kids. It has slid but it is very easy to avoid the big problem areas and you get desensitized. But there is still lots to love about the city. It soul isn’t crushed yet.
I had Paris syndrome for SF real bad because of how it was described by people and portrayed in movies and when I finally went there it was uhh.. not somewhere I would live forever. I'm sure it's amazing if you live in the rich areas but I got an apartment in the mission which was sold to me by some of my native friends as one of the good semi-affordable areas for young professionals and it was culture shock.
All the novels and biographies I've read that make SF out as a cool bohemian wonderland were all written in the 60s/70s and even then they were lamenting about the good old days being gone. It's remarkable to see a city living so long off a reputation it earned generations ago.
At the last office I worked at, there was someone who did that to our bathroom. Not a homeless person, either, but one of the employees. They never figured out who.
In a public bathroom, I wonder how much of that happens because of mental issues, and how much is a byproduct of the bathroom not getting cleaned often enough.
That doesn't make any sense. Public toilets are for the public. Anyone who finds themselves in a situation where they need a toilet. A tourist, for example. Or maybe just someone who finds nature calling at an inopportune time. I'm sure we've all been there.
Also, even if it WAS for people who have nowhere else, that doesn't mean that it should be covered with shit.
No one is saying it should be covered in shit. I'm just explaining that projects like this in SF are targeting a very specific issue - a large homeless population.
Yes, but San Francisco also has a large tourist population.
Speaking of targeted,
this public project almost feels like it was designed to piss off conservatives. Which is a shame, because older tourists are a big segment of the market there. And foreign toursts. And just like climate change and summer homes on the coast, I hate that there will be ironic endings to this for conservatives.
Obviously, the homeless population and climate challenged have it worse. But we didn't need to make others suffer.
Such a shitty situation. Pin sanitation worker pay to software engineering rates or higher and build some fucking toilets.
Have you ever taken a shit in a public toilet? It is a disgusting, degrading experience. I’m still traumatized from the one time I had no choice, and I said never again.
All the more reason to not dismiss them as for "people with nowhere else to go" and simply make sure that they are well maintained and people aren't using them as their personal poop graffiti space.
All of the public toilets I used as a tourist in Europe cost a euro, bathroom operators have an incentive to keep their bathrooms clean. San Francisco (lived there for 4 years) does not adequately maintain their toilets, echoing other comments in this thread, they're literally the worst I've seen. Even the NYC MTA (i.e. subway) bathrooms were better, bathrooms which tend to be portrayed as being especially dirty
What's different between a traditional public toilet that anyone can use and a homeless toilet? You seem to imply there's a difference that affords extra explanation and justification.
You are arguing an ideal and they are making a point about practice and fact. The practice on the ground and public policy is that certain "public toilets" are for the homeless. This informs government decisions about how they are designed, who has to maintain them, where they are placed, and who uses them.
A public toilet in the tenderloin is a homeless toilet in all but name. A public toilet in Golden Gate Park is actually a public toilet in the sense that you are talking about.
I'm not implying any difference at all. I'm not saying the public can't use the toilet, I'm saying that the main problem that the government is trying to address is one with the homeless population.
I responded to the blanket assertion. I wouldn't want people in civilized places to think that public toilets should only be "for the people who have nowhere else".
It's shocking that this is a normal opinion. Taipei is a much bigger city than SF. There are public restrooms everywhere. Every single metro station has clean, indoor restrooms. Not just "available" restrooms, I mean clean, like cleaner than most gas station restrooms in the US. Parks also have restrooms. Failing that, you can probably find a private one at 7/11.
I really can't believe how shitty major US cities are, nor can I fathom how they got there and how we think it's normal. It can't be just "public funding" because Taiwan isn't exactly a socialist welfare state either, yet the cities are downright urbane.
I'm not saying "every public bathroom is for homeless people". I'm saying in San Francisco that is the problem being addressed. I have traveled to many countries with public toilets that do not have these issues, I am aware of what is possible.
A tiny minority of people ruin things like this for everyone, and the US doesn’t have the political will to deal with them (they likely need involuntary commitment to mental institutions).
When I lived in SF, I couldn’t believe the amount of trash on the street. How can so many people litter so much? Then one day, I happened to witness a homeless guy taking all the trash out of every trash can on the street and just dumping them.
That one guy was undoing a week of effort by thousands of people to keep things clean of litter. That kind of behavior should be considered a serious offense, but no one cares, about either the guy or the trash. Have a paper straw! That will fix it.
> Public toilets aren't really for you, they're for the people who have nowhere else.
This is an incredibly stockholm-syndrome take. If you live in a place that isn't a total failed state, normal people actually can use the public toilets!
honestly though, public toilets are usually so dirty in my area (unless there are entry fees) that I rather use a shop's toilet instead. This is not about failed states, but a large portion of the populace not giving a shit about others... or giving too much shit perhaps =)
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.
Say what you will but the fact that cities in the US have that kind of money to throw around says a lot about the country - compare that to having to heat ourselves using duvets in Europe :D
> ... US Governments have the worst value-delivered-per-dollar-collected ...
Can you give me your reference for this?
Looking at [0] the lowest & highest marginal tax rates, cross referenced with citizen happiness [1], USA does not seem to be the worst, but you might have better reference data.
For this, let private companies install public pay toilets. Let activists fund free pay toilet passes for the homeless/poor.
Eventually there should be a couple brands of private public toilets where some are essentially free (lets say you own a business in an area with no public washrooms, it may be a financial benefit to you to sponsor a public toilet) and others are more luxury with higher prices to keep the riff raff out and fund more public ones.
There is a market solution if the government gets out of the way.
Counterpoint: California residents would've blocked the Condo development using CEQA and it'd be a hybrid parking lot/homeless encampment. Checkmate indeed.
It's a good thing the Millennium Tower is still standing.
It’s not really a counterpoint when every place is fucked. I’m saying this from region that did the last mega engineering project in the US (the big dig) and that was even 20 years ago. We are one of the best areas for approving infrastructure projects and we still don’t approve enough to support the areas needs.
Honestly, as a Californian; I see this positively. We need our butts kicked a bit to make progress. I want California to be the best place in the world. It’s trying hard to not be.
