Supervisor Matt Haney spent his 37th birthday walking through the Tenderloin talking about trash, needles and poop. And then he got a special gift: his shiny black shoe made contact with a smear of feces ground into the sidewalk.

He barely seemed to notice. But he did notice as another man stepped in a fresher pile as we rounded the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth streets.

“Look, he just stepped in it!” Haney said. “He’s now got poop all over his shoes.”

It turned out the two men had more in common than foul feet. They also shared a last name. Malcolm Haney, who said he lives in the Tenderloin’s Hamlin Hotel, took his misstep worse than the supervisor did.

“I’m kind of pissed,” he said, shaking his head and attempting to clean his tennis shoe by scraping it on the sidewalk. “Look how it just tracks. Suppose you walk in your house and don’t realize you stepped in it.”

Haney the supervisor wants to make the neighborhood less disgusting for people like Haney the resident. He has a new, 10-point plan full of commonsense solutions that innovative, creative, superrich San Francisco could implement quickly.

But slow-moving City Hall likes to overthink everything, like whether more trash cans would help with trash and more restrooms would help with poop.

Yes, City Hall, they would.

“Just because this is a low-income neighborhood doesn’t mean we should have to live in this filth and mess,” the supervisor said on our hour-long walk through the Tenderloin as we were treated to multiple piles of feces, broken glass, needle caps and food wrappers. Pretty much every street tree had trash scattered around it, and several trash cans were broken and spewing garbage. A light breeze carried the smell of urine.

And this gross scene was after the city’s morning cleanup. At dawn, apparently, it’s flat-out nauseating.

Haney says simple measures would make a big difference, and he’s rolling out his proposals in the coming days. Most of them wouldn’t require legislation and would just need the cooperation of city departments to get them done.

He wants 200 more Big Belly trash cans for his district. They’re the kind that are hard to break into and are self-compacting, so they hold more trash and keep it off the sidewalks. He wants 10 more Pit Stop public restrooms and, he wants five of them to stay open all night. He wants street cleaners assigned to 10 “micro-neighborhoods” in the Tenderloin and 10 more South of Market. They would clean the same few blocks all day, rather than relying on the big crews that sweep through only in the morning.

He wants regular deep-cleaning and pressure-washing of sidewalks. Incredibly, unless there’s a specific request, most sidewalks in the city are never deep-cleaned. He wants street cleaners to have access to equipment to quickly clean feces rather than having to call the city’s Poop Patrol with its special steam cleaners each time.

He also wants more dog poop receptacles. More beautification, including murals and painted sidewalks. Triple the number of syringe disposal boxes. He wants 311 to provide more clarity to people who report problems, rather than just responding that the case is closed.

He wants the controller’s office to resume its annual reports about street and sidewalk maintenance — it stopped them in 2015. That’s already in the works, and the controller’s office has told Haney and Public Works it has come up with a better way to evaluate maintenance.

He wants Recology to waive fees for indoor trash pickup, so fewer bins are left overnight on the sidewalks, where they’re easily rifled through. He wants strong locks for bins left outside.

A lot of what Haney wants is doable — if he can find the money to pay for it.

Paul Giusti, a spokesman for Recology, said inside service does help keep sidewalks clean, but costs more because it slows down trash collection, requiring more routes and workers. He said Recology isn’t as keen on locks on bins because people pry off hinges, cut the locks or slash the plastic containers to access the recyclables inside.

Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said many of Haney’s requests can be met if he finds the money in this year’s budgeting process. For example, paying for overnight restroom monitors, so the Pit Stops don’t turn into makeshift shelters and shooting galleries, would be pricey.

In the meantime, the department is taking its own steps to make the city cleaner, like expanding a pilot program of placing sensors on the city’s green trash cans to alert Public Works when they’re nearly full. Gordon said the trial run of a few dozen sensors on cans has worked and soon sensors will be placed on 1,000 cans around the city.

The department remains opposed to Big Belly cans, in part because they’re expensive to repair if they’re vandalized. The ones being used in some neighborhoods, like Union Square and North Beach, are paid for by community organizations.

Public Works is rolling out a new campaign about dog poop called, yes, “Doo the Right Thing” that will include free dog poop bags and little canisters to hold them that can be attached to a dog’s collar or leash.

Gordon said the Tenderloin receives more attention from Public Works than any other neighborhood.

“It’s where we certainly have the most challenges,” Gordon said. “It’s a densely populated area of the city where a lot of people are on the street, and there are a lot of people with issues that may prevent them from behaving properly in a civil way.”

That raises a good point. We wouldn’t have as many needles on the sidewalk if we didn’t look the other way as addicts inject drugs into their necks in broad daylight. We wouldn’t have as much poop and trash on the Tenderloin’s sidewalks if we had enough homeless shelters and mental health treatment beds.

Haney said he’s working to address those bigger societal issues too, but said he thinks people’s behavior would improve if their surroundings didn’t show a lack of care on the city’s part.

“Bad behavior can’t be an excuse for the city to not do our job to keep the streets and sidewalks clean,” he said. “I don’t want the city to scapegoat residents.”

Also, pretty much every neighborhood in San Francisco is dirtier than it should be — even those with few homeless people. San Franciscans, throw your litter in trash cans! Pick up after your dogs! If there’s trash outside your home, pick it up! Really, it’s not that hard.

Back at Eddy and Leavenworth streets, the site of Malcolm Haney’s unfortunate step into poop, his friends sat on the sidewalk in lawn chairs, lamenting the grime in their neighborhood. They call their daytime hangout “OG corner” because it’s for the older, longtime neighborhood residents.

“We keep it clean — no partying,” said Greg Shapazian, who lives in the Cadillac Hotel. He said the overnight tent encampments and resulting mess are hard to take. “In the last year, it’s just become horrible. But what do you do with them? They’re just people.”

Malcolm Haney walked on, wheeling his bike. But he got less than half a block before stepping in more poop.

“Damn!” he exclaimed, shaking his head and scraping his shoe on the sidewalk yet again.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf