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As Economic Inequality Grows In San Francisco, People Are Pooping More On The City’s Streets

As Economic Inequality Grows In San Francisco, People Are Pooping More On The City’s Streets

San Francisco
Photo: Richard Heyes/Flickr
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There are a whole lot of people pooping on the streets of San Francisco, and economic inequity is most likely to blame.

It’s no doubt that San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in America, as the annual household income is nearly double the national median household income, but with that wealth comes major economic inequality. And since 2011, reports of human feces in the streets has risen from about 5,500 reported accounts to more than 28,000 in 2018.

“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told NBC in a 2018 interview. “That is a huge problem, and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”

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It’s gotten to be such a problem that the city employs a “Poop Patrol” to keep the streets clean, Business Insider reported. It cost the city nearly $54 million last year to clean the streets. The San Francisco Chronicle predicted that by 2019 it will cost nearly $60 million.

There are certain areas that have more of a poop problem than others.

“More than 70 percent of all of the cases noted in the report occurred in 10 neighborhoods. Tenderloin registered the most cases, with 30,863 public feces incidents occurring in the historic San Francisco area. South of Market (23,599), Mission (19,150), Civic Center (6,232) and Mission Dolores (4,096) round out the top five neighborhoods with the highest number of cases reported, according to the report,” Daily Caller reported.

Why is this happening? As the economic gap grows, so has the homeless population in the city. According to a 2017 survey of San Francisco’s homeless population found nearly 7,500 people living on the street out of a population of  864,816 between 2016-2017.

One-time Republican candidate for governor of Illinois Adam Andrzejewski was the first to chronicle San Francisco’s problem with human waste and penned the op-ed for Forbes. And back in In 2014, software engineer Jennifer Wong launched a site called Human Wasteland to record and map feces-related 311 complaints. Another map by Realty Hop popped up in 2018, not only focusing on San Francisco but also Chicago and New York City. It found that in 2017 SF had more than ten times the number of feces complaints than NYC and nearly 21 times as many as Chicago, San Francisco Curbed reported.