As any San Franciscan with working eyes and nasal passages can attest, city streets are rife with waste of both the human and intravenous narcotics variety. Now the annual Street & Sidewalk Maintenance Standards report, released last week by the city’s Controller's Office, confirms what you already know: there’s a lot of used needles and feces on city sidewalks.
Ew.
Picked up by Hoodline and SFist, the report, for the fiscal year 2015-2016, notes that 311 reports of the biohazards jumped significantly from 2015.
“Hypodermic needles saw the biggest jump in reports—a 41 percent increase citywide, from 2,527 in the 2015 fiscal year to 3,551 in FY2016,” notes Hoodline. “Of those reports, the vast majority were concentrated in District 6, which encompasses SoMa and the Tenderloin. D6 had 1,653 reports of needles on the sidewalk this year, compared to 1,106 last year, making for a 49 percent increase.”
Behold:
And as SFist points out, “Human waste reports were up 39 percent, with District 6 bearing the brunt of that.” District 6 being South of Market.
As for the fecal clean up, the city is good one wiping the problem away. Per the report: “Public Works crews generally kept up with demand by meeting their target of responding to 90% or requests within 48 hours, until the end of the fiscal year when requests increased significantly and the department was managing between 1,400 and 1,600 steamer-related service orders per month.”
Details:
Reports of broken glass (care of the many, many car break-ins) and graffiti were also up. We should also point out that the city’s population has grown over last year (“60,000 more residents as of January 2016,” says SFist) as has the number of 311 reports.
Here is a wildly helpful, albeit jarring, interactive map:
