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Comment by justin | Hacker News Reader

>> In fact, SF streets are some of the cleanest of any big city I've ever seen.

False. SF is a cesspit in any part of downtown, tenderloin, SOMA, the Mission, and pretty bad in many of the other parts. Every day for the past week I've watched a mountain sized pile of shit slowly grind down (by being kicked, stepped on, and rained on) into nothingness outside of our office. It's quite frankly repellent.

Now that I think of it, one time a (presumably) homeless man took a shit on the wall of our office building. It was there for weeks.

*Further SF horror stories: I've also witnessed a homeless man take a dump on the fence down the street from us in broad daylight. Also a coworker has seen a pile of dump propped up against a neighbor's door, and witnessed the shock of said neighbor as they came home to discover it.

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I can't help but wonder why you let a pile of shit sit outside your office for a week.

You know, Chicago has tons of homeless people too, but I've never seen this sort of disgusting behavior there. I can't understand the difference?

I lived/worked in the Tenderloin and in the "bad part" of SoMA for a while, and have personally observed: * Club kid (homeless? probably not) shitting on the street, sheltered behind my car. 300 lumen flashlight beam and "what the fuck are you doing, get the fuck away from my car" and he ran off. I had to step over a pile of warm shit to enter my vehicle and drive away. * Multiple incidents of presumably-compensated sexual acts in alleyway, near the door to my apartment. * A double-homicide approximately 100' from my front door, which I happened to observe because I was looking out of my window onto the street at the time -- one of the victims ran around the entire block, leaving a blood trail, before expiring. Blood trail was not cleaned until mid-day.

I am concerned about which cities you visit if you find SF streets to be some of the cleanest! Baghdad and Kabul are on par (more actual dirt, blood, and random limbs; less shit and used condoms)

Ever been to Napoli? It reset my idea of what a dirty city looks like.

I find it quite incredible that so many Americans, mostly from SF, report seeing such things, indeed talking about them as if they're a normal part of everyday life. I have lived in a few places, mostly in Australia and Asia, all of them big cities and all of them with significant homeless populations, and have never, ever seen that kind of thing.

What is it about American homeless that they lack even the basic human dignity to find a toilet to take a dump in? Or hell, at least a drain or somewhere their shit will wash away? Are they that disconnected from society? Or is it a calculated thing, like vandalism, revenge against a society they hate? It's nuts.

Sure, I've seen people shit in public. Once a friend had severe stomach cramps while walking through a park in central Sydney; she rushed into the bushes to relieve the pain. And while I was living around there I regularly saw women (it always seems to be women) crouching over drains in the street outside my apartment. Hey, I understand, when you gotta go, you gotta go, and severe diarrhoea makes people desperate. That's fine. But never with this total lack of dignity and respect that SF residents seem to experience.

Do you think it might have something to do with how easy it is to find a public toilet?

I guess that could be a contributing factor, but not being able to find a public toilet has never inspired me to take a shit on the street in broad daylight, and I presume most other people would say the same. So it must be more than that.

Well, if you are homeless, what else are you going to do? It's not like you can walk into a Starbucks and use their restroom (aside: one of the benefits of the huge number of Starbucks in NYC is that they have some of the cleanest restrooms)

It's not like you can walk into a Starbucks and use their restroom

Why not? And anyway, they could at least try to do it in semi-privacy - maybe behind a building, or in the bushes, or something. No, it seems almost deliberate to me, or alternatively so zonked out on drugs/malice that they just couldn't give a damn. Either way it's not just a lack of facilities. We've all been in a strange part of the city we don't know well, no toilets anywhere and busting to go. We all somehow found some kind of semi-acceptable solution that didn't involve shitting on someone's fence.

I have no idea why it's different in SF but these things just don't happen elsewhere, so there must be some reason for it.

SF attracts the most helpless, inept homeless, and there are not convenient public restrooms in the parts of the city where there are lots of homeless.

Frankly, I'd rather walk by the occasional fence than risk going into a public restroom after a homeless person has used it.

Evidently in the past there was a move to provide lots of public restroom facilities in the city, but they were soon condemned and removed. It would take significant resources to offer such facilities and keep them clean and safe.

It's not the American homeless; it's the San Francisco homeless. In most American cities you definitely won't see shit on the sidewalk as a part of an everyday occurrence.

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