San Francisco might be the one of the most expensive place to live in the world but it has recently acquired a new, slightly less esteemed honor - the feces capital of America.

A new study by the real estate listing website RealtyHop declares the California tech-hub to be the worst place in the US for 'poop sightings', with ten times as many as New York and 20 times more than Chicago in 2017.

According to the study compiled from publicly available 311 data, there were 21,000 incidents of feces complaints last year, which is an average of 456 per each of San Francisco's 47 square miles.

Some San Francisco streets are so covered in human feces that the city launched a 'Poop Patrol' to clean the mess

2017 was San Francisco's worst year so far for feces complaints, but it looks as though 2018 will be muckier still, with more than 16,000 calls so far.

In fact, the number of complaints received by the city has risen every year since 2011 - and has almost tripled annually since then - so the problem has been getting worse for some time.

The 311 now receive 65 complaints every single day about feces, both dog and human, on sidewalks.

RealtyHop reported than unlike in Chicago and New York, the neighborhoods further out see fewer complaints than those in the centre (except for Golden Gate Park).

The Poop Patrol will ride around the Tenderloin neighborhood in a vehicle equipped with a steam cleaner

There was also no correlation between median home value and feces, nor when comparing homeownership with complaints by neighborhood.

Like the others cities howeer, San Francisco residents mostly pick up the phone to complain on Mondays, closely followed by Tuesdays, and seem far more relaxed about it on the weekends.

Clearly feeling that the story lacked a visual element, they also created an interactive brown and yellow map to show the neighborhoods of San Francisco with the highest concentration of reported feces.

The SoMa (South of Market) area of the Californian city was the muckiest overall, while Presidio Heights was the cleanest

The map shows that the city center was the dirtiest - with the SoMa area being the most complained about overall, and The Mission, Tenderloin, Portrero Hill and Hayes Valley following closely behind.

The cleanest neighborhoods were Presidio Heights, Twin Peaks and Lakeshore.

Data from 311 shows that there were 4,436 feces complaints about SoMa in 2017 - around 2,493 for every 10,000 households; a quarter of households have complained on average.

As the report was compiled using only 311 complaint statistics, the real amount of feces on San Francisco's streets is likely to be much higher.

To tackle to problem, San Francisco in August launched 'Poop Patrol' — a team of full-time Public Works staffers, armed with a steam cleaner, who patrol alleyways in San Francisco's poop-hotspots.

It is already illegal for dog owners not to pick up after their pets, but the city wants to spot and clean away the waste before the complaint comes in.

'We're trying to be proactive,' Public Works director Mohammed Nuru told The Chronicle. 'We're actually out there looking for it.'

'So, what happens is we're going to take one of those crews out and try to get ahead of those calls and look for these locations so that hopefully we can get less numbers of calls coming in,' he added.

Mayor London Breed (L) of San Francisco, who was elected in June, has made unannounced inspections of neighborhoods, sometimes carrying a broom

A number of syringes are scattered in the remains of a tent city being cleared by city workers along Division Street in San Francisco

Nuru said the vast majority is from the city's 120,000 dogs, but the growing homeless population is the city is also a contributing factor.

The city's new mayor, London Breed, has earmarked $1.05 million for new public toilets and expanding the opening hours at five existing locations.

The city only operates 22 toilets at the moment and most of them close overnight, leaving few options for those who are sleeping rough.

In April, then-Mayor Mark Farrell vowed to spend $750,000 hiring more people to pick up needles and $13 million over the next two years for more heavy duty steam cleaners and pit stop toilets.

'The trash, our homeless, the needles, the drug abuse on our streets, I've seen it all in our city and it's gotten to the point where we need to really change course,' Farrell said at the time.

Just a 15 minute walk from the headquarters of wealthy tech-giants Twitter and Uber in the Tenderloin neighborhood is one of San Francisco's worst-kept streets.

Heroin needles and excrement cover Hyde Street, which hosts an open-air narcotics market in broad daylight.

This year, there already have been more than 8,300 requests to pick up waste and 3,700 for needles

The excrement problem is especially bad here.

'Some parts of the Tenderloin, you're walking, and you smell it and you have to hold your breath,' said Yolanda Warren, a receptionist who works around the corner from Hyde Street.

A New York Times report claims Hyde Street is the 'dirtiest block in the city.'

Adam Mesnick, who lives in the SoMa neighborhood and owns two deli shops there, said San Francisco is 'finally kind of melting down' and that leaders have routinely ignored dangerous street behavior for years.

The area, known as Tenderloin, is notorious in San Francisco, with an open-air narcotics market by day and the slumped bodies of drug users at night

'I cannot have my family down here, I can't have visitors. I can, but I don't choose to, have my nieces come here,' he said. 'It's horrifying for my family to walk down the street here.'

The city's logged more than 24,300 requests last year for human waste cleanup and 9,500 for needle pick-up.

This year, there already have been more than 8,300 requests to pick up waste and 3,700 for needles.

San Francisco has budgeted $65 million out of a $10 billion citywide budget for street cleaning this year.