Headline from 2014: San Francisco's public defecation map highlights a shitty situation

It appears that the word sh_thole is making major network news lately. Various media outlets like CNN, MSNBC and ABC can’t seem to get enough of the word “sh_thole.” WARNING GRAPHIC LANGUAGE:

Perhaps its time to take a look back at a stark reality in San Francisco, California. A sanctuary city that has literally turned into a sh_thole because of its public policies.

Steve Dent from Engadget.com posted a column dated December 21st, 2014 titled “San Francisco’s public defecation map highlights a shitty situation.” Dent wrote:

Wondering what that smell near the Civic Center is, San Francisco resident? As far as serious interactive maps go, Human Wasteland is one of the strangest we’ve seen. Created by civil-engineer-turned-web-developer Jennifer Wong, the project plots human excrement “incidents” reported by the public to SF311. Her project won an internal hacking contest for employees of a real estate website, an ironic honor considering the city’s contentious housing issues. The highest concentration of crap is at a downtown alley next to the financial district, right in a high-traffic area frequented by tourists.

While the odd drunk or other soul may have had an emergency, the map is more about folks who don’t have a toilet, period. According to the SF Weekly, the map (graphically) reflects the city’s problems with limited, filthy public restrooms and lack of services for the homeless. So while it’s amusing for non-residents and disgusting for city center dwellers or tourists, it did make me think: “Where would I go in public if I had no choice?”

According to its website, (Human) Wasteland is a mochimachine project. It uses human waste reports made to 311 in San Francisco from DataSF and maps them in several ways. Human Wasteland links to three 2014 articles that address the problem of homelessness and lack of resources for the homeless in San Francisco:

SF Weekly: Occupied: San Francisco: Understanding the City Through its Toilets.
The Bold Italic: San Francisco’s Poop Problem is Serious
The SF Chronicle: A Decade of Homelessness: Thousands in SF remain in Crisis

When you go to the Human Wasteland webpage you see the below map of San Francisco:

Click on the image to view an interactive map of where people are defecating on the streets of San Francisco.

It appears that San Francisco has a serious poop problem. But it gets worse. Heather Knight in a June 26th, 2017 San Francisco Chronicle column titled “Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever” wrote:

On the face of it, San Francisco’s homeless problem should have improved dramatically over the past year.

After all, last summer Mayor Ed Lee formed the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to focus on the city’s most perplexing problem.

The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before. Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.

Public Works cleanup crews were busier than ever, picking up more than 679 tons of trash from homeless tent camps since June 1, 2016, and collecting more than 100,000 used syringes from the camps in that time span.

Read more.

According the San Francisco Chronicle, on 311 complaints in San Francisco:

Complaints to the city’s 311 service about encampments, human waste and needles have steadily increased from about 6,300 in 2011 to more than 44,000 in 2016.

Here is a map of the ongoing and growing problem: