S.F. has new data-driven solution to old S.F. problem: human excrement

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San Francisco is taking a new data-driven approach to a longtime city problem: human excrement.

For decades, feces on streets and sidewalks has been one of the biggest quality-of-life issues for San Francisco residents and visitors, particularly in the hard-edged Tenderloin, home base for many of the city's homeless and the nonprofits that provide them clothes, addiction help and meals.

Now, after a chorus of complaints and a month spent mapping the highest concentrations of human excrement in the Tenderloin, the Department of Public Works on Tuesday will roll out the city's latest approach: mobile bathroom stations at the three most well-used areas.

Each station will include two specially outfitted portable toilets, a sink, a needle disposal bin and a dog waste station, all mounted on a flatbed trailer.

"We're championing our residents' right to clean streets and a safe place to do their business with dignity," said Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the area and has been pursuing a public toilet program since fall of 2012.

Addressing prior mistakes

The city is calling the effort the Tenderloin Pit Stop, and officials are trying to learn from the past.

After San Francisco installed self-cleaning public toilets in places like Civic Center Plaza in the mid-1990s, some quickly became favorites for drug dealers and junkies, both for business and pleasure. The toilets were common backdrops in Berkeley filmmaker Steven Okazaki's 1999 television documentary on heroin addiction, "Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street."

The city's new approach is to assign an attendant to each portable bathroom station during hours of operation, planned to be from 2 to 9 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays. The idea is to have the stations available when social benefit checks are typically paid out and a few hours after meals are served at nearby soup kitchens.

The stations are designed to be well lit, and those using the toilets will have five minutes before getting a courtesy knock on the door from the attendant. The doors will lock from the inside, but the attendant will have a key to open them from the outside if needed, officials said.

Cleaned every night

The stations will be trucked away and cleaned each night before being returned the next day, making them unavailable for late-night shenanigans.

One portable bathroom station will be at Golden Gate Avenue between Jones and Taylor streets, a block from the St. Anthony Dining Room. Another will be on Ellis Street between Jones and Taylor, across from Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. The third will be on Hyde Street between Turk and Eddy streets in what Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru described as a hangout area that scored high in the city's feces count in April.

During the last fiscal year, Nuru's agency responded citywide to more than 16,000 requests for steam cleaning, about half of them for human feces, officials there said. Last month, the city acted on nearly 1,000 requests to clean up human feces, and more than half of those - 529 - were in the Tenderloin, according to public works officials, who described the problem as both a cleanliness issue and a health hazard.

An estimated 4,000 children live in the Tenderloin, according to city figures, as do many seniors or people with chronic illnesses.

Kids' testimony

"We have data that indicate this definitely is a problem in the Tenderloin," said Nuru, who said the point was driven home this year during a community meeting on budget priorities at De Marillac Academy, a Catholic school across the street from St. Anthony's.

"The kids talked about their walk to school and the things they have to encounter," Nuru said. "That just hurt to see that kids had to deal with that."

Nuru dispatched staff in April to catalog the feces on more than 13 square blocks of the Tenderloin on four different days. They cross-referenced that with requests for sidewalk and street steam cleaning. The result was Tenderloin Pit Stop, a pilot project that will run until mid-January at a cost of about $150,000, officials said.

"I think the taxpayers' money is going down the drain," Mohsin Gul said Monday as he sat on the ground smoking a cigarette, his back against a chain-link fence next to the planned bathroom station on Golden Gate Avenue.

"They already tried it," said Gul, 62, referring to the city's decision under former Mayor Frank Jordan to install public toilets from France-based JCDecaux.

Another man, approached moments after shooting up what he said was heroin about 20 feet from the entrance to St. Anthony's, disagreed.

"It may be chaos, it may be a pain in the butt to run, but it's still better than having people defecating on the sidewalk ... or just having to deal with the psychological and physical distress of not finding a place to go," said the man who identified himself only as Jim, 36 years old and homeless in San Francisco for 13 months.

The city's poop survey found that most often people who defecated in public sought some sort of privacy, whether it was a fire-exit doorway, alleyway or between parked cars.

Gail Gilman, executive director for Community Housing Partnership, a nonprofit at Jones and Market streets, said trying this approach "makes sense."

If it's successful, the city will look to replicate it in other neighborhoods, with the first candidate likely to be South of Market around Sixth Street.

"It's a pilot," Nuru said. "We don't know what the results will be."