San Francisco Debuts Human Waste Map
What do you get when you visit San Francisco, the city with the highest tech and the lowest morals? If your answer is, "An online map showing block by block where the human excrement is", you'd be 100% correct! Every city has a crime map, showing block by block where crime is, but only San Francisco has a human waste map, showing block by block where to watch your step!
The map is customizable to show neighborhoods, and you can even chart it month by month, so you can see the months with the heaviest amount of solid precipitation. I suppose you could think of this as man-made weather, just like global warming (ha ha).
Note the big deposits near the Bi-Rite Creamery, perhaps the most famous ice cream eatery in the city. People line up around the block to order every flavor, except, oddly enough, for chocolate.
If you spend big bucks and book a stay at the Hilton in Union Square, you can be within easy walking distance of the Golden Gate Theater and other downtown attractions in the increasingly trendy but still lethal Tenderloin district. Well worth up to $260 a night!
Web developer Jennifer Wong (a.k.a. mochimachine) created the Human Wasteland map out of that public data. The project, which won Zillow's SF office Fall 2014 Hack Week contest, offers monthly maps from January to June 2013 — but that's enough to give you a sense of where the problem is.
"It's easy for people to place blame on the homeless themselves," Wong tells Mashable. "But they need to take a look at the bigger picture and see that they have nowhere to go, to sleep, use the toilet, to shower... the obvious solution is to provide more public facilities throughout the city."
Or... the obvious solution is to deal with the homeless problem that San Francisco is so lax in coping with. Homelessness drives away tourists, hurts local businesses, and makes it unpleasant and even unsafe to live in areas where people are living on sidewalks. Just because a sidewalk is a "public" space doesn't mean the public has unlimited rights to it. Well-ordered suburbs don't have homeless problems because they enforce vagrancy laws. You won't find a human waste map for Naples, Fl, Fairfax, VA, Ridgewood, NJ, or Newport Beach, CA, just to name a few, because they wouldn't allow such a problem to fester. To see my solution to the homeless problem in greater detail, have a look here.
Pedro Gonzales is the editor of Newsmachete.com, the conservative news site.