San Francisco’s clean up should spur new city solutions

For a brief, shining moment, San Francisco was clean. The arrival of world leaders for a high-profile summit earlier this month prompted the city to jump into action, hosing down its streets and sprucing up neglected downtown neighbourhoods. The change was dramatic. It was also shortlived. 

San Francisco is a city of stains. The sunshine glitters and the waters of the Bay sparkle but at street level, the centre is noticeably filthy. Some of these stains are palatable. Warm weather means fruit trees grow along the roads, dropping cherry plums and carob pods that get squashed underfoot. But most are man-made. Every year, the SF Department of Public Works receives thousands of reports of human faeces on its streets. 

Understandably, this is a subject that preoccupies locals. Not long after I moved here, a friend sent me an unusual guide to SF neighbourhoods known as the SF poop map. Created by a non-profit called Open The Books, the online map claims to show the location of every one of these reports made between 2011 and 2019. Zoom out and dots cover almost the entire city. Only a sliver of Pacific beach and the hills of Presidio park are clear. 

The problem persists. I looked up SF’s latest Street and Sidewalks report and found that nearly half of the busiest streets in the city are still affected. In Nob Hill, 89 per cent of the streets evaluated had human and animal faeces present. In the Mission, it was a comparatively clean 61 per cent. 

This is the side of San Francisco that the city was keen not to showcase when presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, tech leaders and the world’s press gathered for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings. Hence the clean-up. There were grumbles from some residents that the efforts were being made for visitors, not for the people who live here every day. But there was also surprise that the city had proved it was possible, even if just for a few days. Unfortunately, it will take more than a one-off clean up to address the causes of San Francisco’s grime.

The more intractable problem for the city is a large homeless population plus a lack of public bathrooms. Officials point out that the city’s homeless population fell between 2019 and 2022. But the overall figure remains high. In 2022, there were 887 people without homes per 100,000 residents, according to a report by the City & County Of San Francisco Office of the Controller City Performance Unit. Many of those people live on the streets. Last year, there were 503 unsheltered people per 100,000 residents. Compare that to Washington DC, where the figure is 100 people per 100,000 residents. In central London, it is roughly 112 people per 100,000 residents.

This group is most at risk of illness from exposure to dirty streets. Although extra beds in shelters are being made available, the city has also become more active in simply moving homeless people away from some areas. 

San Francisco has been trying to tackle homelessness for decades. A lack of bathrooms seems like the sort of practical issue that might be easier to solve. Researchers at UC Berkeley tracked the impact of portable restrooms and found an immediate drop in reports of human waste on the streets. But in fact, the city already has a lot of public bathrooms. It’s just that many of them are closed. Proper maintenance requires attendants, which costs money. Recouping this from users is not possible. In California, as in many other states, it is illegal to charge entrance fees for bathrooms. 

Public spending on new facilities is controversial. When San Francisco planned to add a public bathroom to the well-heeled Noe Valley Town Square Park at an initial $1.7mn cost, there was instant pushback.

That leaves street cleaners. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu told a local news station that he hoped momentum from the Apec clean-up would make the situation sustainable. But walking through the Civic Center in the heart of the city, it is already clear that this is not the case.

If you live in San Francisco it is easy to get defensive. It has become famous for problems that are also found in other cities. But the publicity could be a spur to test out new solutions — making use of empty office space, for example, or expanding the number of supervised, portable public bathrooms. Clean public spaces make us happy. Living in grime does not.

elaine.moore@ft.com