San Francisco launches ‘Poop Patrol’ to clean human feces on sidewalks

Melia Robinson/Business
Insider

• Some San Francisco streets are so covered in human
  feces, the city is launching a “Poop Patrol” to clean the
  mess.
• The Poop Patrol will ride around the Tenderloin
  neighborhood in a vehicle equipped with a steam
  cleaner.
• San Francisco’s poop problem is a symptom of the
  housing crisis that has forced thousands to live on the
  streets.

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In San Francisco, people call the city’s telephone hotline about
65 times a day to report piles of human feces on streets and
sidewalks.

That adds up to 14,597 calls placed to 311 between January 1 and
August 13, the
San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Now, city officials are ramping up their response to San
Francisco’s “poop problem.”

Starting next month, a team of five Public Works employees will
take to the streets of San Francisco’s grittiest neighborhood,
the
Tenderloin, in a vehicle equipped with a steam cleaner. They
will ride around the alleys to clean piles of poop
before city denizens have a chance to complain about them, the
Chronicle reports.

The poop problem has become a key issue for new Mayor
London Breed, who grew up in public housing in San Francisco.

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

The feces piling up on sidewalks is a symptom of a much
broader issue. San Francisco is in the thralls of a housing
emergency. 

The median
two-bedroom rent of $3,090 is more than double the national
average of $1,180, and only
12% of families can afford to buy a home in the city. Due to
a variety of factors, including a shortage of affordable housing
and shortcomings in the mental healthcare system,
m
ore than
7,400 homeless individuals live on the city’s streets without
access to public restrooms and other necessities.

There
aren’t enough public bathrooms in San Francisco to accommodate
the city’s homeless population.
Jeff
Chiu/AP

Is the poop problem dangerous?

In February, the

NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit
spent three days
surveying 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco to see what they
would find. Their search turned up drug needles, garbage, and
feces in concentrations
comparable to some of the world’s poorest slums.

The poop problem is unsightly, as well as potentially dangerous.

When fecal matter dries, some particles become airborne and can
spread potentially dangerous viruses, such as rotavirus. Inhaling
those germs can be fatal,
according to Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at
University of California, Berkeley. In Los Angeles, an
outbreak of hepatitis A was linked to the city’s 50,000
homeless people, who sometime defecate in the streets and spread
disease.

In San Francisco, Breed and the director of Public Works,
Mohammed Nuru, hatched the idea for a Poop Patrol over
conversations about the city’s filth.

“We’re trying to be proactive,” Nuru told the
Chronicle. “We’re actually out there looking for
it.”