San Francisco, as I’m sure you’re aware, has a problem with people pooping on the sidewalks. This kind of thing doesn’t seem to happen much in Nancy Pelosi’s well-to-do Pacific Heights neighborhood. However, human sidewalk feces has become such a problem in poorer neighborhoods like the Tenderloin — along with related street hazards like used drug needles — that the city has for years been the butt of jokes.
I’ll show myself the door for that one but not until after I’ve shown you the latest craziness from what is arguably America’s worst-run major city.
There is a long-term solution to San Francisco’s poop menace, which is entirely due to the city’s large population of vagrants, who generally suffer from some kind of mental illness, drug addiction, or mental illness compounded by drug addiction. The solution is to get serious about committing these poor souls and, yes, mandating the treatment they require but won’t seek for themselves.
The temporary solution is to set up porta-potties in likely locations and get serious about punishing people who continue to poop on the sidewalks.
Then there’s the San Francisco solution.
The San Francisco solution is to not build a public toilet eight years ago when one was proposed for a then-new town square, wait seven years for Assemblyman Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) to secure public funds “from the Recreation and Parks Department, not questioning the $1.7 million price tag,” (!!!) to build a single toilet (!!!!), still not build the damn thing for months and months, have Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom threaten to withhold the $1.7 million over outrage that there’s only going to be one toilet, change the plan to include a second toilet (!!!!!), then continue not building it.
Hold it, because the story gets better. And by “better” I mean “worse.”
All of this is going on 15 months after local officials threw themselves a party celebrating that they were going to spend nearly $2 million of other people’s money on a single toilet in the charming Noe Valley neighborhood’s town square where sidewalk poop isn’t the problem that it is in the Tenderloin or the Mission District.
You don’t have to be a fancy scientist with a doctorate from Stanford in Human Poop Displacement to know that the whole thing is criminally stupid from top to, uh, bottom.
For cryin’ out loud, San Francisco is now too incompetently leftwing for even the New York Times, which called Haney’s affaire des toilettes, “yet another example of the city that can’t.” (I thought it might sound better in French. I was wrong.)
Here’s a little more perspective, again courtesy of the New York Times:
The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms.
$1.7 million won’t buy you a particularly nice home in San Francisco but that’s hardly the point. The point is that I’m still praising a New York Times story criticizing San Francisco.
If that ever happens again, I’m going to feel really down in the dumps.
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