“San Francisco tried to build a $1.7 million toilet. It’s still not done,” reports the New York Times. “An expensive public bathroom project has come to symbolize the city’s bureaucratic inefficiencies.”
The city obtained state funds for the toilet in 2022. But it hasn’t even built the toilet yet, because of how many different city bureaucracies have to approve its installation: “Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet … requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.”
All for “just one loo in 150 square feet of space,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The difficulty of building a bathroom in San Francisco has shed light on why many projects face cost overruns and delays. A recent state report found it takes longer and costs more to build housing in San Francisco than anywhere else in California. It takes 523 days, on average, for a developer to get the initial go-ahead to construct housing — and another 605 days to get building permits,” reports The Times.
The process of designing the toilet was very slow. As was reported back in 2022:
An architect will draw plans for the bathroom that the city will share with the community for feedback. It will also head to the Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee comprised of two architects, a landscape architect and two other design professionals who, under city charter, “conduct a multi-phase review” of all city projects on public land — ranging from buildings to bathrooms to historic plaques, fences and lamps….The project will then head to the Rec and Park Commission and to the Board of Supervisors. According to the city’s statement, it will also be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Then, the city will put the project up for bid.
“Once we start the project, we’ll have a clearer timeline, but we expect to be able to complete the project in 2025,” the statement read….
Other cities spend much less on public toilets, according to Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. When a reporter asked Hardiman to guess what San Francisco was spending to build a single toilet occupying 150 square feet, he wrote back, “I’m going to guess high, I think, and say $200,000.”
The reporter says, “I seemed to nearly give him a heart attack by telling him the actual figure in a subsequent phone call. ‘This is to build one public restroom?’ Hardiman asked incredulously. ‘What are they making it out of — gold and fine Italian marble? It would be comical if it wasn’t so tragically flawed.’”
San Francisco overpays for almost everything. The city pays employees who scoop up poop from its streets $185,000 per year. But poop remains on the streets, which are far from clean. A huge medical convention pulled out of San Francisco, according to CBS affiliate KPIX. The organizers of the event said participants don’t feel safe on San Francisco’s streets.
Tourists once took home memories of famed cable cars. These days, too often it is of the image of someone begging, or dancing in circles, or just wandering around the streets intoxicated or mentally ill.
“You can smell it,” says one tourist.
“I come from a third world county and it is not as bad as this,” says another.
Those tourists may have been reacting to a stinky 20-pound bag of human excrement that someone left on the sidewalk in the city’s Tenderloin district. Or maybe the open-air urinal that the city installed in its Dolores Park in 2016 in the hopes of discouraging public urination on the streets.
But it’s not just the stench of human waste that is driving people away from San Francisco. The cost of living coupled with the city’s over-the-top-left-wing politics has resulted in an exodus of residents. 46% of San Francisco Bay Area residents said in 2018 that they want to leave.
