Street housekeeping keeps SF Mayor Breed – and everyone else – hopping
Street housekeeping keeps SF Mayor Breed – and everyone else – hopping
By Matier & Ross
Aug 22, 2018
Mayor London Breed, who won her election largely on a promise to clean up the city, is stepping up efforts to scrub San Francisco’s streets, including playing a bit of cat and mouse with her own city department heads.
Breed has taken to making unannounced walks through hard-hit neighborhoods — at times with reporters in tow — but without giving the police or Public Works officials the usual heads-up that in the past allowed for the cleanups that usually precede a mayoral visit.
“I don’t want the areas to be clean if it’s not clean on a regular basis. I want to see what everybody else is seeing,” Breed tells us.
And when Breed spots a problem, she texts the department head.
The sight of human waste, discarded hypodermic needles, trash and general grime is nothing new to anyone walking in downtown, in the Mission District or in any of a number of other San Francisco neighborhoods these days.
And, as Breed notes, “We’re spending a lot of money to address this problem.”
No kidding.
San Francisco Public Works has a $72.5 million-a-year street cleaning budget — including spending $12 million a year on what essentially have become housekeeping services for homeless encampments.
The costs include $2.8 million for a Hot Spots crew to wash down the camps and remove any biohazards, $2.3 million for street steam cleaners, $3.1 million for the Pit Stop portable toilets, plus the new $830,977-a-year Poop Patrol to actively hunt down and clean up human waste.
(By the way, the poop patrolers earn $71,760 a year, which swells to $184,678 with mandated benefits.)
At the same time, the Department of Public Health has an additional $700,000 set aside for a 10-member, needle cleanup squad, complete with it’s own minivan. The $19-an-hour needle cleanup jobs were approved as part of the latest budget crafted largely by former Mayor Mark Farrell.
The new needle crew is on top of the $364,000 that the health department already was spending on a four-member needle team.
Breed is also leaning on Chief William Scott for more foot patrols.
“I’ve definitely had discussions with the chief and asked that beat officers be out there,” Breed said.
City officials say foot beats have nearly doubled in the past year, from 76 to 140 officers.
The problem, however, is that every time the cops arrest someone for a low-level, quality-of-life or petty street crime, the beat cops have to write up an incident report and transport the suspect to jail for booking, all of which takes them off the street.
Breed said she and the police are now looking into the possibility of using sheriff’s deputies to help transport prisoners, in turn allowing beat cops to stay on patrol.
The mayor, however, makes clear that the burden of solving all the city’s street problems doesn’t rest solely on City Hall.
“The responsibility is with everyone,” Breed said. “People shouldn’t be comfortable throwing their trash on the ground, and if people have recommendations on where they want trash cans, they can call 311.”
San Francisco published this study on feces on public sidewalks. This is from page 11.
https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/CY22_Street_Sidewalk_Standards_Report_05222023.pdf
About 30% of evaluated streets and sidewalks report feces.
Observations of human and animal feces were less common in the Core Citywide sample, with about 30% of evaluations observing feces on the street or sidewalk.
In contrast, almost half (47%) of evaluations in all Key Commercial Areas observed feces. At the neighborhood-level:
▪ Feces on streets and sidewalks were least likely to be found in Noe Valley and Glen Park.
▪ Feces were most common in the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, the Mission, and South of Market.
A blue city in a red state doesn’t have any clean water. Whose fault is it?
The city of Jackson is controlled by Democrats.
The state of Mississippi is controlled by Republicans.
Whose fault is it that the city doesn’t have any clean water?
Reuters wrote:
Jackson, Mississippi, to go without reliable drinking water indefinitely
Jackson, Mississippi, will go without reliable drinking water indefinitely, officials said on Monday, after pumps at the main water treatment plant failed, leading to the emergency distribution of bottled water and tanker trucks for 180,000 people.
The city linked the failure to complications from the flooding of the Pearl River, but Governor Tate Reeves, who declared a state of emergency, said the cause was unknown and that the city-run water treatment plant had been poorly operated and understaffed for years.
In any case the capital city of 150,000 people and 30,000 in surrounding communities could go without running water indefinitely, as officials warned anyone with access to tap water should boil it for three minutes.
Jackson, the state capital, is more than 80% Black or African American, according to U.S. Census data.
“Do not drink the water,” Reeves told a hastily called news conference. “In too many cases, it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes.”
YouTuber Not Just Bikes: We Have No Garbage Day in Amsterdam!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JtoSafhvLM
In Cuba, this doctor’s home has running water for only one hour a day
Here’s a six minute video on what it’s like to be a doctor in Cuba.
At 4:53, when the doctor is at her home with her husband and their daughter, the narrator says:
“… they only have running water one hour a day…”
If that’s how Cuba treats its doctors, I wonder how they treat the average citizen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBC5w2O4jVI
Bangladesh stops open defecation in just over a decade
This is a tremendous amount of progress, in a very short amount of time, done by one of the poorest countries on earth.
If Bangladesh can solve this problem, then there’s no reason why all the other countries that still have this problem can’t solve it too.
https://apnews.com/6d881414fcc44ba89a8b47fdea037215
Bangladesh stops open defecation in just over a decade
July 16, 2016
BORMI, Bangladesh (AP) — Answering nature’s call was once a nightmare for Rashida Begum, who had to creep around the jungle for a suitably private spot. Her home had no toilet, like the thousands of others in her crowded cluster of farming villages outside the capital.
In just over a decade, that’s all changed, in her neighborhood and many others.
Through a dogged campaign to build toilets and educate Bangladeshis about the dangers of open defecation, the densely populated South Asian nation has managed to reduce the number of people who defecate in the open to just 1 percent of the 166 million population, according to the government — down from 42 percent in 2003.
“Once it was our habit to go to the fields or jungles. Now, it is shameful to us,” Begum said in Bormi, a cluster of poor farming villages just outside Dhaka, the capital. “Even our children do not defecate openly anymore. We do not need to ask them; they do it on their own.”
Bangladesh’s success in sanitation — something so far unattained by its wealthier neighbor to the south, India — came from a dogged campaign supported by 25 percent of the country’s overall development budget.
“The government has made a huge commitment,” said Akramul Islam, director for water, sanitation and hygiene of the development NGO Brac. “The government decided that funds should go to the extreme poor who do not have latrines. So that basically gives a big push from the public sector for spending on sanitation.”
The government’s engineers also partnered with village councils and charities to spread the message on how toilets are key to better health. Rising incomes — moving from an average of $1,154 in 2012-13 to $1,314 in the last fiscal year, according to the World Bank — also helped to drive demand, Islam said.
Activists say small-scale surveys show that the campaign has improved public health, though there are not yet any government statistics to prove it more broadly.
“We see clearly that there is a decline in waterborne diseases and diarrheal diseases, so there is a clear link there,” Islam said, while acknowledging that the improvement was something “we have to study.”
Begum said her children have had no stomach illnesses since she installed an in-house toilet.
Open defecation is considered a major public health menace, causing childhood diarrhea, parasitic worm infections and other scourges that contribute to childhood stunting, malnutrition and tens of billions of dollars in lost productivity every year. Diarrheal diseases kill 700,000 children every year in India alone — most of which could have been prevented with better sanitation.
India has spent about $3 billion since 1986 on campaigning and sanitation programs, but has not come close to Bangladesh’s success. Two-thirds of India’s 1.25 billion people still use the great outdoors as their public latrine. About half of Nepal’s 30 million people and about 20 percent of Pakistan’s 182 million also do not have facilities at home.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made public sanitation a hallmark of his “Clean India” drive, promising that every home would have a toilet by 2019 and setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars for the job. India has already built around 20 million toilets, but still has another 111 million to build to reach its goal.
Bangladesh’s sanitation victory didn’t come easy. Millions of dollars from the government and charities were spent, and campaign volunteers said they worked hard to change public attitudes and habits.
Many villagers — particularly men — preferred going outdoors, where they could think in private, survey their lands or just feel the evening breeze or gaze at the sky. For women, however, having no toilet was both a nuisance and a danger, as many said they had to wait for nightfall for privacy.
“We had to cover our noses during rainy season because of the bad smell,” said field campaigner Al Amin Akand of the charity Plan International, which works on community issues. “We had to work for years to motivate the villagers.”
Back in 2008, most people in Bormi had no choice but to use the surrounding forests to defecate.
“We had to do fierce campaigning,” going door-to-door for years, said Mohammed Badal Sarker, chairman of a local village council. The council even turned children into whistleblowers — literally.
“We provided schoolchildren with whistles to alert the villagers. It worked like magic,” the chairman said. Children were encouraged to shout slogans like “Defecating in the open is the enemy of the people” and “No one will marry your daughter if you do not have a toilet at home.”
The drive has even sparked a new industry in household sanitation, with small businesses cropping up across the country to sell the components for making inexpensive latrines. All it takes, they say, is an investment of $12 to $60 to buy two to three concrete rings and a concrete pan.
“Now you will not find a home without a sanitary latrine,” Sarkar said.
There is still cause for concern. Bangladesh’s overpopulated urban areas are proving to be more of a challenge, mostly because the opportunity for contaminating the water supply is much greater.
“People might be using a toilet or a latrine, but then where does the human waste go from there?” said John Sauer, senior technical adviser of the Washington-based Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Population Services International (PSI). Waste water could be dumped on a field where children play, or where food is grown. “We must address where the human waste goes and how it is treated, disposed or reused.”
Still, Sauer said, the achievement of virtually eradicating open defecation in just a decade is astonishing.
“Bangladesh has a lot to teach the rest of the developing world,” he said.
India turns to public shaming to get people to use its 52 million new toilets
I’d like to see the TV show Black Mirror do an episode on this!
India turns to public shaming to get people to use its 52 million new toilets
November 5, 2017
BEED, India — The patrols started at dawn, and the villagers scattered, abandoning their pails of water to avoid humiliation and fines.
Every morning in this district in rural India, teams of government employees and volunteer “motivators” roam villages to publicly shame those who relieve themselves in the open. The “good-morning squads” are part of what one official called “the largest behavioral-change program anywhere in the world.”
This is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship Clean India initiative in mission mode. By October 2019, Modi has vowed, every Indian will have access to a toilet, and the country will be free of the scourge of open defecation. Since Modi came to power, more than 52 million toilets have been installed. But the trick, sanitation experts say, is getting people to use them.
To win favor with the ruling party’s top brass, government officials have set to work, trying to outpace one another with toilet-building races and eye-catching information campaigns. Many are resorting to controversial public shaming tactics.
“This is harassment,” said one villager, Ranjit Gonjare. “The person becomes the laughingstock of the village.”
India’s sanitation crisis is an urgent priority: 53 percent of Indian households had no toilet in 2011, the latest census figures show. Human feces litters public spaces, spreading diseases that contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. People wait all day to defecate in darkness, which has health and safety implications. Children, especially menstruating girls, skip school because of a lack of toilets. One report pegged the economic cost of India’s sanitation problem at $106.5 billion in 2015, 5.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Santram Gonjare felt the sting of humiliation one recent morning, when a squad flagged him down as he was walking along a highway.
They knew what the 55-year-old was about to do because he was holding a pail of water that he would use to wash himself after defecating. They knocked the pail out of his hand and crushed it under their feet. Then they offered him a flower, a sign of goodwill, and told him to use a toilet in the future.
Gonjare hung his head as he walked home. He went out to defecate, he said, because his nine-person household has only one toilet, and he couldn’t bear to wait his turn. “How can that feel okay?” he said of his experience with the squad. “I felt worthless. It’s not the right way to treat old people.”
Such encounters are routine in Beed, where people without toilets risk having their welfare benefits taken away and can be barred from running for public office. Elsewhere, officials use methods that verge on coercion — or worse. In one recent case, a man was publicly lynched after he tried to stop authorities from photographing women who were defecating in the open. A news channel urged viewers to send in images and names of those who defecate in the open so they could be shamed on national television.
“This work has to be done,” said Dhanraj Nila, chief executive of Beed district, who regularly goes out on morning patrols. He said the squads’ shaming methods were necessary to “motivate” people to use toilets. “People keep saying Beed is a backward district.”
Modi’s Clean India mission has drawn international support. After a recent visit to India, Bill Gates extolled the mission’s “impressive” speed. USAID pledged $2 million annually and introduced ranking systems to trigger “competition between cities.” The World Bank offered a $1.5 billion loan to help speed the sanitation programs. UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, is providing training and education tools, although a spokesman distanced the organization from the Indian government’s “name and shame” programs.
Some argue that Modi is overly optimistic about the pace of change. “No country anywhere in the world has come anywhere close to eliminating open defecation that fast,” said economist Dean Spears, a sanitation expert, referring to the 2019 target. “There’s no reason to think this is going to be an exception. It’s very easy to say that it’s a behavioral-change program. But when 500 to 600 million people defecate in the open, you need an awful lot of people on the ground to change that.”
India is vast and difficult to govern; in outlying regions such as Beed, where central control is weak and corruption levels high, shame and honor are the mechanisms through which communities police themselves. Many villagers in Beed praised the government’s methods, showing off areas that once were open-air toilets and now are children’s playgrounds.
Many said the squads are doing a service. “This is the only way. People have stopped [defecating] outdoors because of fear,” said Meera Bandu Bhise, one of Gonjare’s neighbors.
Satish Umrikar, who oversees sanitation activities in the state of Maharashtra, where Beed is located, said the mission’s ambitious targets are crucial to its success. An estimated 91 percent of people in rural areas in Maharashtra now have access to toilets, double the percentage in 2014, with 1.9 million installed in the past fiscal year.
Despite rapid economic growth, India lags behind in sanitation, partly because people don’t want to do the undignified work of cleaning latrine pits, labor traditionally reserved for lower castes. To change attitudes, squads use several techniques, including door-to-door visits and sanitation workshops.
The village of Lolad is considered free of open defecation. People described how, at first, older residents refused to use toilets. “Little children used to chase people blowing whistles,” one villager said. “If we saw anyone with a pail of water, we’d send our own children after them.”
Beed’s geography makes it a particularly difficult region in which to change habits. In the summers, particularly in years of drought, the land becomes parched, and lines to collect water from communal pumps stretch for hours. Villagers buy water from local authorities for drinking and bathing. To them, clean toilets are a luxury. Many villagers who have toilets at home said they go outdoors to save water.
“The government should concentrate on providing necessary services,” said Vandana Prasad, a public health activist. “In many villages there is no regular water supply, no sewage system. This government has an attitude of clamping down. It’s a bit more stick than carrot.”
Squad members described their work as “gandhigiri,” referring to Gandhi’s nonviolent method of tackling problems. Maharashtra official Umrikar said the public shaming tactics are only one part of a wider government effort to change habits. “This is required in initial phases,” he said of the squads. “Once there is understanding, we will phase it out.”
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