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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.”
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 =)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
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?
>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 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,”
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.
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.]
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
similarly, NYC decided to pay McKinsey $4mm to answer the question of whether large, stinky festering piles of trashbags would be better in containers.
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".
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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/#
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 ).
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.
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!”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
831 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 367 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
This assumes that the cost is due to fees imposed by the government.
From the article:
>> [The costs] include planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach.
>> we expect to be able to complete [the toilet] in 2025
> 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.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-04-20/the-landm...
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.
Americans can't afford to buy things made by Americans.
Again we papered over this issue with decades of supressed interest rates but the ruse can't last forever.
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.
“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.
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.
I'm open to being proven wrong here but it seems like this statement needs to be justified.
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.
Can you point to where I say any of this is good or show any sign of support for any of it?
Were your parent's uneducated? I don't see how you could make it through life with this level of reading comprehension.
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.
How can a person not see this?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Ex-S-F-Public-Wo...
https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/gradonacelnik-zivinica-sveca...
https://twitter.com/MyFDOT/status/1582832749681201152
California is a failed experiment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interactive-see-after-p...
You can find failed/failing/failing to implement infrastructure in every state in the US, it’s a national issue
It's a good thing the Millennium Tower is still standing.
It is a national problem
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.
Installation - 2k
Rest - …
/s
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.
https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/467529962c184258d08f16daec...
> 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.
Were they sabotaging German bureaucracy, or American? Neither seems likely.
For example: https://jalopnik.com/citroen-sabotaged-wartime-nazi-truck-pr...
> 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.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-san-francisco-pu...
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.
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.”
Lots of palms greased all the way around.
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.
There's a reason we have transparency in the bidding process for government work. This is cronyism.
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.
liquidate the whole thing.
[1] https://youtu.be/gmOvEwtDycs?t=93
It seems like it’s a bipartisan past time to waste taxpayers money on foolishly over expensive pet projects.
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.
To gain power and direct the spending to your team.
Rinse and repeat.
I would not set foot there unless all of human existence depended on it.
It is like SF needs a “clean up the city volunteer day” once a month that is broadly attended.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
It is not true in places with functioning government.
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.
Also, even if it WAS for people who have nowhere else, that doesn't mean that it should be covered with shit.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like someone made it their home
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.
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.
A culture shift.
You are right more regulations/another layer isn't going to help.
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.
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?
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."
It jacked up the price considerably. Lots of interests end up with some strange outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wild.
Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all
The airport is actually a couple of cities away (there are a lot of cities in the Bay Area).
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.
Just be glad you don't live in Cumaná I guess.
100% believe this.
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.
You should have gotten out more.
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.
And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.
Yes they do. And some also call it Frisco and San Fran.
After 35 years in the Bay Area I have settled on calling it "The City" but will bust out with "San Fran Frisco" on special occasions to just to be irritating to those who desperately want to "fit in."
I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.
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.
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.
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?
As to that question... it's a difficult one to answer. My understanding is that 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.
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.
> Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income
-- https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
> 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
-- https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
> 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,”
-- https://sfseniorbeat.com/2021/06/22/people-over-age-51-remai...
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.
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.
As in exaggerating it's livable land size? Or the other way around?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
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.
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.
[eta: I'm not making an opinion about what is good/bad/should be done. Just expressing what I understand is happening.]
I've never heard Seattle described as a place where "shit can actually get done," but I suppose its not quite as bad as SF at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_process
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.
> We can't just paint 1,200 curbs, it's going to be a longer process.
https://twitter.com/aarieff/status/1582408966163660802?s=46&...
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.
The Left/Right split of viewing politics is a false dichotomy that made sense only about a century after the French Revolution, in France.
>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.
(i.e.: right is used mostly as a synonym for bad, for some people)
"I know X is something the community needs and I'm all for building it, just Not In My Back Yard"
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.
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.).
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.
As in "I'm right-wing; this is my idea of what a dystopia would be; SF seems like that."
Rather than "this dystopia is the result of right-wing policies." which clearly doesn't fit the facts, eh?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I don't know but would wager that it's not those people. All sorts of people live in SF, like anywhere else.
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?
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.
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.
Restrooms are the first victim of the tragedy of the commons.
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.
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.
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.
Then "Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay in 1846 and began the U.S. military invasion of California," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#U.S._Conquest_and_t...
Minutes later gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush was on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
That was a pretty nutty (to put it mildly, very very mildly) time...
Eliding all the craziness between then and the "Bohemia by the Bay" period brings us to the 1950's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Renaissance) which then leads directly to the Summer of Love a decade or so later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love)
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...
Then there's the recent and ongoing FBI probe into corruption, with the arrest of the director of Public Works among other things ( E.g. https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi... )
So yeah we have things like empty "luxury" condos next to folks living in tents in little shanty towns.
(The condos aren't actually l...
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.
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.
Then I realized, that entire friend group is distinct from my other groups, with almost no overlap.
Black people have been leaving SF steadily for 50 years. That's the experience.
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.
Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?
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.
SF's NIMBY progressives are a weird lot.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate...
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/care-coordination/20-s...
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.
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.
San Francisco, the city and community, as a society, owes what anyone in the world owes everyone else: an ethical existence.
Not enough wages. If the free market is good enough for everything else, why not for labor?
Profiteering from subcontractors and suppliers is the issue. All of these bids are public, this isn't exactly forbidden knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think he meant that you have to do labor to add value.
>"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.
Sounds a lot like the representative democracy that created this mess in the first place.
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).
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.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-v...
Separately, they completed the spillway upgrades about 10 years after that video was produced, so 1 for 2?:
https://ascecapitalbranch.org/geotechnical-aspects-of-the-fo...
In things that are NOT obviously life and death is where it gets bogged down by people "trying to help".
“Containerizing New York City’s 24 million daily pounds of trash and recycling is far, far more complicated than many people initially realize,” Goodman said. “How do the containers perform in winter weather, which they don’t really have in Barcelona? Who is responsible for removing snow from them on each side? How do they work on narrow streets vs. wide avenues? What about our incredible number of very dense mixed-use buildings, given that DSNY collects residential but not commercial trash?”
0. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/10/03/exclu-sanitation-depa...
1. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins...
2. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/personalc...
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.
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.
Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?
Up to, but not including, the number of avoidable deaths by exposure that are already occurring.
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.
[0] https://www.kqed.org/news/11906661/woman-who-died-in-homeles...
Personally, I favor actual housing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What SF actually needs to do is house people. Unfortunately, its main dysfunction is its flat refusal to actually do this.
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.
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.
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 have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work.
Trying to go through all of the legal rigamarole of the Indian regulatory process would mean nothing ever gets done.
Better to let the system freeze up entirely and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy than monkey-patch the bad system with bribery.
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.
Bring back the pork.
https://ag.nv.gov/Hot_Topics/Issue/Yucca/
I don’t know why people are so willing to spread right wing FUD about Sf, maybe it brings in the clicks I guess.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Not the same for artificial supply of zero cost housing.
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.
This is true of anything with supply and demand and a >0$ price.
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.
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.
I can sort of correlate this, well, expression, with a political view. State it more crisply.
Your comment goes against several of these requirements. Be better than this.
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.
It's inefficient, ineffective and definitely not cheap.
When many hands, many meetings, and definitely many layers of middleman are involved, it'll cost millions to build a single toilet.
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."
http://bikeshed.com
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.
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.
Yeah, because it's a huge problem when you have a homeless junkie causing problems where you live.
> And [the concerns] were unfounded. ... I've literally watched a drug user argue with one
You're not helping your argument here.
> Matt Haney, who secured the $1.7 million funding from the state to install the toilet ...
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 ).
This is the "grift" part of it; those "many [...] profiting from it" are often times friends or acquaintances of the officials regulating them
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.
https://missionlocal.org/2019/02/how-san-francisco-flushed-a...
If it's not corruption, then I am more worried.
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.
To some extent I agree.
> ... 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/the-initial-cost-of-arrivecan-...