San Francisco Doesn’t Have to be Gross

San Francisco, why you gotta be so gross?

In advance of Saturday’s conservative Patriot Prayer rally, San Francisco dog owners expressed displeasure by leaving droppings all over Crissy Field. Hahaha, won’t it be funny when event attendees show up to find their venue covered in shit?

What is wrong with you people? This is literally your own backyard! A basic rule of civilization is that you don’t shit where you sleep. Even bears know this! It seems that San Francisco residents have grown so desensitized to public excrement that it’s now become a point of pride. Look at how good we are at turning our national parks into a latrine!

San Francisco wasn’t always this gross. In the 60s, hippies could run around barefoot without immediately contracting typhoid. Since then, the city’s homeless population has risen above 10,000 without a corresponding increase in public facilities. When nature calls, there’s no place to go but the sidewalks, subway trains, BART escalators, children’s sandboxes, stairwells… San Francisco is basically an urban litterbox.

There’s an app for that.

Tech workers are here to help, and their solutions are universally dumb. Pooper is an Uber-like app that summons underpaid chumps to pick up crap on the sidewalk. It’s supposed to be for dogs, but who would know the difference? Airpnp allows users to offer their bathrooms as public pay toilets. Hey, open up the bedroom for hourly rentals while you’re at it.

The non-stupid solution is to build more public facilities, but not everyone wants that. Public restrooms cost money, and wealthy taxpayers would rather allocate that money to virtuous green initiatives. Why should they subsidize public toilets they’ll never need to use?

Map of human waste reports, courtesy of Human Wasteland.

Sidewalk shit is ready for some tech industry disruption, and I have just the solution: Open up tech office bathrooms for public use.

Office restrooms are largely underutilized, especially after business hours when the homeless population needs them most. It’s also no coincidence that the crappiest part of the city is home to a large number of tech firms. San Francisco offers an incentive program that exempts Mid-Market companies from payroll tax, known as the “Twitter Tax Break”. It was designed to attract tech companies who might create jobs and gentrify the neighborhood. The area didn’t gentrify so much as displace existing residents onto the street.

Tech beneficiaries promised to give back to the community, but they’ve been awfully stingy about doing so. This is an opportunity for them to help out with almost no overhead cost! Maybe tech workers have become inured to treading through fecal matter on their way to work, but let’s help the city recalibrate. Sane humans don’t like to wallow in filth, especially not other people’s filth. So come on, Twitter, Uber, Square, and all you other Mid-Market tech companies. Let the homeless into your bathrooms. San Francisco doesn’t have to be disgusting.

Update: Looks like the Patriot Prayer has been canceled after receiving threats of violence. So San Francisco shat itself for nothing.

9 thoughts on “San Francisco Doesn’t Have to be Gross

  1. Here’s an idea. Just like the 5 cent deposit on soda cans created an incentive for people to collect discarded cans and bottles and return them to the recycling center, create an incentive for people to collect feces and return same to a recycling center. The waste product would have to be collected in a transparent plastic bag and could be redeemed by weight at authorized collection points.

    Voila! Thank you!

    1. That’s actually a really good idea! Instead of digging bottles and cans out of the trash, homeless people can clean up the sidewalk for nickels! I will send this proposal to Mayor Ed Lee.

  2. Not nickles…quarters because slang for 25 cents is “two bits”. Which leads me to the slogan:

    “Collect The Shits and Collect Two Bits”.

    Where do I pick up my trophy?

      1. Oh no. We’re not giving this to the city. They’ll just screw it up. You and I will be keeping this for ourselves….partner!

        And, taking a page from Elon Musk’s “The Boring Company”, we can call our new venture “The Shit Company”. You can be the head shit. 🙂

        1. You know, I bet we could raise money for this venture by doing a token sale on the blockchain… the tokens can be called “shitcoins”

  3. I had stepped on some “excremental” recently on my way to work. The best way to describe the sensation was like stepping into a warm chocolate birthday cake. The expression on my face was one of surprise but surprise not the “surprise it’s my birthday kind”. Honestly I think the Chinese were incorrect to say this is a omen of luck or else I wouldn’t continue to have this experience living in this city.

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