In what started as a joke at a 2012 hackathon, app developer Jennifer Wong created , an online heatmap that shows the highest concentrations of human poo found on the city’s footpaths. It works by pulling in publicly available monthly data from the city council’s reporting hotline.
Human Wasteland was Wong’s way of drawing attention to a homelessness situation that has spiralled out of control. Basically, as San Fran’s booming tech sector has attracted wealthy workers from around the world, the city’s housing costs have skyrocketed.
The booming tech sector is pricing average people out of the housing market and into the streets.
Wong thought her message was pretty clear: San Fran needs to rethink how it provides housing for its most vulnerable residents; or, at the very least, how it provides public toilets. But recently, conservative politicians have pointed to the map as proof that San Fran needs to crack down on homelessness, even criminalise it.
In the American imagination, Chicago has been used as a metaphor for gun violence, New York represents a general moral depravity, and judging by the recent interest in the Human Wasteland Map, conservatives are now using San Francisco to illustrate the failures of the most progressive city in America, painting it as a lax, lawless city with ineffectual leadership.
This conservative message has caught on. As wealthier people have started to live and work in and around the city, there has been more of a push for police to enforce strict ‘quality of life’ laws, including punishing people for sleeping on the street. Former St Anthony’s homelessness support worker Arturo Guillen tells The Feed, “We have failed in the way we talk about addiction and homelessness. We associate these things with lack of morals and ambition. People believe that homeless people want to be homeless.”
As of 2017, the city had an estimated population of 7,500 homeless people. But what’s particularly interesting is that 70% of these people had housing in San Francisco prior to becoming homeless. So, unlike what conservatives would have you believe about a recklessly liberal city attracting homeless people, the stats show that when housing is treated as a speculative commodity rather than a human necessity, residents are priced out of their homes and into the streets.
Many cafes and restaurants in the city’s CBD prohibit non-customers from using their toilets. So, when private institutions refuse bathroom access, it’s up to the city’s public institutions like libraries and police stations to pick up the slack. And, to an extent, the City is responding. San Francisco’s Department of Public Works has 25 self-cleaning public toilets, primarily in the city’s busiest commercial and tourist districts. While this program is a good first step, most public toilets close overnight, so there’s a gap when many need them most.
Along with toilets, offers safe needle disposal and dog poo bags, addressing two other critical needs in the city. That’s right, the crusade against dog poo that saved Harvey Milk’s political career (and arguably America’s gay rights movement) is still being waged in San Fran’s streets nearly half a century later.
will appear as a ballot initiative in San Fran this November. The measure proposes a 0.5% tax on businesses that earn more than $50 million annually, and would allocate it to housing, mental health services and hygiene programs, including the Pit Stop toilets.
Contributor to The Feed, Juell Stewart, is an urban strategist and researcher based in San Francisco.
