It constantly blows my mind how dysfunctional SF is. Having lived in clean, safe, well run cities around the world, the amount of WTF generated by SF is unbelievable.
Its sad that 1) so many people just throw trash on the steet, 2) there is no law enforcement preventing this behavior, 3) the city isnt paying any people (in my area the prisoners do it from the jail) and then 4) that it has come down to the residents to come up with their own pool of money to pay for this... every week you read stories of the human feces on sidewalks, public urination, needles left on sidewalks, public drug use, all this is without law enforcement action to stop it. Its up to the leadership of elected officials to allocate money and make decisions to stop this type of behavior, but from most of what I have read about the subject it seems that the elected officials want to condone and even encourage this type of plague going on in san francisco. Its up to the voters to vote for the right people to make these changes, but I would never want to live like that or in that type of environment personally. I think thats why you see an exodus of families leaving san francisco. (I lived/worked there for a year)
From a relatively well-known perspective, that is essentially slave labor. The argument is this: The Constitution's 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, made an exception for prisoners. The obvious path, which many believe was taken, was to arrest many of the same people who were enslaved and use them as slave labor. And after segregation was ended in the 1960s, the US government's 'war on drugs' began the era of mass incarceration, which resulted in the former victims of segregation going to jail in large numbers.
There are arguments for doing it too, and picking up trash isn't hard labor. However, we need to think about who ends up picking up trash for a minor infraction, and who gets a warning and is sent home (I now nothing about your county in particular).
I'll be honest in my area I'm out in a suburban part a Florida about 50 miles outside of Tampa and people who are not from the area who are caught doing drugs and homeless people and all this kind of stuff what happens is the cops they tell them I don't want to see you in this county anymore and then what they do is they bring them to a road called county line road and then they drop them off there and if they come back they get arrested... so you just don't see homeless people and all that kind of stuff out where I live because I'm being serious that's how the cops are out here
> people who are not from the area who are caught doing drugs and homeless people and all this kind of stuff what happens is the cops they tell them I don't want to see you in this county anymore and then what they do is they bring them to a road called county line road and then they drop them off there and if they come back they get arrested... so you just don't see homeless people and all that kind of stuff out where I live because I'm being serious that's how the cops are out here
This is pretty well-known in a lot of places. Around major cities, the police will send the persons into the city. Then the suburban people say there must be something wrong with the city, with all these problems. Personally, I'd rather be the community that takes care of the people that need it.
> doing drugs and homeless people
I don't equate the two. Even doing drugs is just a vice and now frequently legalized, and I'm sure the locals do plenty (without needing to know the locality). But to the extent that the drugs are illegal, being homeless certainly is not. There is nothing wrong with it or illegal about it. Some homeless people do bad things, and so do some people of every other group, including HN readers, rural locals, and wealthy people in big houses (and measured by total cost to society, there's no doubt which group does more).
In response to this, I'd say that I do equate the two. a lot of people think that you can help homeless people. but for most homeless people being homeless is a symptom of a greater problem. the problem is usually drugs. and I'm sure that's not true for all 100% of the cases but I'd be willing to bet that it's true for about 80 to 90% of the cases. you can give a homeless person a million dollars, and a large percentage of those people will use that money to squander it on things like drugs and other things that degrade their behavior and not improve it so that's the only reason I'd say I equate the two. drug abuse is a direct affect of what causes someone to become homeless. homelessness like I said for most situations is a direct result of being a drug addict and having mental illness caused by drug abuse, specifically crystal methamphetamine. I have hundreds of rentals and I see this everyday, and I'd say it's getting worse because 20 years ago there was not as many mentally ill people caused by drug abuse as there is today and specifically crystal methamphetamine. crystal methamphetamine the way that it's produced the last 15 years it produces permanent psychosis and brain damage it literally turns your brain into Swiss cheese so to say that drug abuse isn't related to homelessness means that you're just not looking into the correlation as much as you should be and it might be just because of a lack of experience.
In Taiwan the locals, usually the elderly, sweep and clean near their own houses or the parks where they congregate. Some do it as part of a neighborhood group, while others clean parks and areas near temples for religious reasons. Good way to build community.
On another note, let people read without pop-ups please.
I used to clean up near my front door, but it became overwhelming.
I live in a "bad" part of SF, by choice - I have a huge, cheap apartment. Until about 5 or so years ago, the homeless situation was not that bad around me. There would be periods where people with problems would be around, but generally it wasn't a big deal. I'd clean up around my and my downstairs neighbor's doors, and a bit wider if needed. Some of the folks that used to live on the street here would also help keep things clean.
Then the cops decided we are good place to funnel campers. Inevitably, dealers followed, and the street went to hell.
I won't go in to all the ins and outs, I can become very boring on this topic. Suffice to say, when you have a local small business that considers piles of garbage a competitive advantage, sweeping out my bit of sidewalk became pointless.
He probably lives in the Tenderloin. It’s right next to union square which is full of hotels and tourists, and adjacent to Market Street which is all upscale shops, offices, and hotels that are heavily policed. The Tenderloin is known for having a larger population of drug dealers and people experiencing homelessness than many other parts of the city. I don’t think I’ve ever seen cops dump people off in trucks as the other commenter suggested, but I would characterize it as being policed differently
And it's a good model I think, to take some responsibility for public property. Not just "your sidewalk", as in the sidewalk that touches your private yard, but also "your street", "your town center", and "your local parks". I'm not interested in hearing about if it's "your job" or "your trash", if there's a situation you are unhappy about, and you can directly impact it, why not do so?
I live in Oakland, CA, just off a major street. When I moved into this place I got annoyed at the litter on the street, until I eventually just started picking it up. The first day, I filled a trash bag travelling just 100ft along the sidewalk. A week later I would fill a trash bag every two or three laps of the entire street. Now I think I fill one trash bag per week. And I just feel better looking at, walking, or biking down my street, and I've gotten good conversations with neighbours to boot.
Culturally, right now, people will keep on littering on American city streets, and you and I aren't equipped to change that. It takes surprisingly little effort to carve out a considerably improved space though, and I find that when I consider it a gift to my neighbourhood and a constant task fighting against entropy (rather than something that can be "finished"), it's easier.
("you" in this context is a general "you", and not meant to be singling another_story out, of course)
I pick up litter when out in nature, because I don't think anyone but me will pick it up. In a city like San Francisco there's a multi-billion dollar budget and a sanitation department that tax payers pay for so that they won't have to do it themselves.
It's ridiculous to pay taxes and then be told to clean street trash if you don't like it.
Yup. There are doggie bags on my pack despite the fact I've never owned a dog. There's also a larger trash bag in the pack in case I encounter larger stuff and am in a position to bring it out. (I only pick up larger stuff if I'm not going to be making much more use of my poles. Otherwise it's just too much of a pain handling a trash bag and my poles.)
This idea that a lot of money is involved therefore every imaginable need must be fully covered is extremely dangerous and unreasonable. Just one example of how this goes is residents have pushed the City to take responsibility for trimming of all street trees which used to be the responsibility of property owners. The result is a lot of trees either ignored or hacked to death by untrained workers in a hurry. Large amounts of money are not infinite amounts of money and still have to be carefully managed in order to get good results and make reasonable trade offs.
And yet that is completely unrealistic. The City currently funds weekly teams clearing out all the most troubled areas and that costs a fantastic amount up front as well as competing for increasingly precious landfill space. Defining the job of public works to be picking up all the trash that veritable armies of homeless generate does not make that job possible. You are absolutely and undeniably using your imagination to balance a spreadsheet that is a complete mess and that is not working and will never work.
Well the “armies of homeless” are also a public policy failure. If the homeless policy across the 50 largest American cities was identical, there would not be so many homeless in SF.
In Canada they clear the snow/ice from the pavement in front of their own house. I've since heard it's (in at least some areas?) required though, which ruined the image a bit.
(And sort of odd isn't it? Instead of taxing you and providing you with this service, we'll require you to do it? Seems inefficient.)
It’s highly dependant on cities. It’s not happening at all in Quebec for example.
Toronto is probably the poster child of that idea but it is actually going away. The city decided they will plow the sidewalks themselves starting this year. While you were “required” to do it, tons of people wouldn’t do it and enforcement wouldn’t be consistent. This would leave you with dangerous sidewalks where the people who need it the most (disabled, elderly) would be stuck walking in the street because the roads for car would be perfectly plowed.
This is true in most of the U.S. as well. If you've got a sidewalk in front of your house, you'll get a fine if you don't clear the snow 24-36 hours after the end of a snowstorm.
A workaround is to buy your home in a neighborhood without sidewalks.
I gave up cleaning the trash in my apartment courtyard as certain neighbors took it as an invitation to dump ever increasing amounts of trash (including entire kitchen sized trash bags) knowing "someone" would pick it up. Sometimes you just can't win.
Similar here just north of SF, I find it to be a bit of a community psychology thing. I found it the same when I lived in Japan (though wherever you go there are always those few houses, or that one park...)
It's not official but a lot of us take trash bags out on our walks and hikes too. I like to save up the really out of reach stuff for new years day. It's a nice way to start the year and kinda fun to go MacGyver on those really long-neglected beer bottles under blackberry bushes. Close in feel to geocaching...
It wasn't until I rented a floor of a house (and garage and front yard) in SF (Outer Sunset) last year that I really noticed the problem in North America with personal responsibility and keeping streets clean.
I'm constantly picking up litter from my tiny front yard, sidewalk, and curb. Cigarette butts are the worst and I bought a small electric leaf blower to help deal with it quickly. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if everyone took care of their own front property as well, instead of leaving litter and letting it blow onto mine. Also doesn't help that people see a full garbage can at nearby fields and just place their waste next to it instead of bringing it with them.
I think the big problem here is that there's no inertia to keep the place clean.
I recently ran into a great youtube video※ about how Japan stays clean (spoiler: it's about personal responsibility from a young age). When kids have to clean their own classrooms and be held accountable by their peers, they grow up with good habits. When I lived in South Korea, it wasn't as spotless as Japan despite a similar education, but not as bad as North American cities.
I would absolutely support littering enforcement officers, paid by large fines (in addition to community service), constantly roaming areas. Not sure how practical it would be in lower density areas like Outer Sunset but I can see it working along any commercial strips, or downtown.
Singapore is sparkling clean. Like walk down a back alley in the center of the city and you will not find trash. It’s almost creepy.
It’s mostly certainly not due to civic mindedness. Join the Singapore subreddit and examples abound of locals throwing trash everywhere and generally being dicks.
It’s clean because the government has a pool of cheap labor they can use to constantly clean.
I was a Patreon supporter of Clean Streets and was pleased with having cleaner streets in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, these guys just closed shop. Here is the email I received on Oct 23:
> Alas, Clean Streets is closing up shop.
> You may have noticed the falloff in times and quality the past couple weeks. [Redacted name] lost his main cleaner and has not been able to adequately replace him.
I don't understand. I often hear about people making $200k, $300k a year in that city. I know that it's not everyone, but I think there are lots of people like that. Why is this problem not solved by the market? That may make a good YCombinator project, go to San Francisco-based tech companies, ask them (or the people in them) to give you money to clean the streets. Is this because there is no cheap labour in San Francisco?
If you’re willing to use money to solve the problem, you move to the suburbs. No sense paying property taxes to a municipality that squanders them and then paying the equivalent of property taxes all over again for a private company to actually do what the government was supposed to.
Great question. Maybe markets aren't a functional solution to problems of public commons? I can't think of a community problem where a market-based solution even helped, let alone solved the problem.
> I can't think of a community problem where a market-based solution even helped, let alone solved the problem.
While I agree that the market isn't the panacea and God it's portrayed to be, I didn't understand the GP that way.
Your point goes much too far the other way. Most of most community problems are solved by 'free' markets, including food (most food is bought and sold in the market), much of transportation (cars, planes), shelter (most homes are owned by private parties), etc.
I think the interesting question is, where is the market good at, and what are other tools good at?
Food and shelter clearly aren't solved by the free market, or malnutrition and homelessness wouldn't be so prevelant. It just moves the problem to someone or somewhere else, and has to be augmented by public funds to keep the problems from exploding. And transportation isn't even close to a free market... when is the last time you traveled somewhere entirely on private unsubsidized infrastructure? You can't even leave your driveway.
> Food and shelter clearly aren't solved by the free market ...
That's shifting the goalposts and not what I said. They are mostly solved (along with other issues) by free markets. Most people get their food and shelter that way, and the market generates most of the wealth needed to feed and shelter the others.
The community problem--of how the "rest" of the people get their food/shelter/transportation--is not solved via markets. "Most" isn't good enough. "Most" of the sidewalks in SF don't have feces on them. So with the free market approach, you could already say there isn't actually a problem.
Free markets have a great time servicing 80% of the people with 20% of the resources and then pocketing the rest of the resources as profit. Community solutions need to be able to service 100% of the community. It's like the "last mile" problem of economics. "Sorry, it's not profitable for the police to protect your neighborhood" is unacceptable.
Food at least is solved by government subsidies and safety regulation. The market aspects are tacked on at the end to appease the rich who want priority over the poor when getting the best quality food
I can’t remember the details but Google tried to create free WiFi across all of SF and eventually dropped it due to the problems of getting everything through city hall.
One of the things that causes littering is a lack of trash cans or a lack of non-filled trash cans. Not all littering (or throwing recycling in the trash) is done out of pure malice. If you make it easy for people to throw trash out, they generally will. If you make it hard to throw trash out, many will litter.
Stronger fines and other enforcement would help, but the first thing is to make sure that you actually have accurate places to throw stuff out (or have the culture where people bring stuff with them and throw out at home, like some non-American countries). This article mentions how the streets got really bad during the pandemic when the city stopped doing certain things.
SF, NYC, and other cities with trash problems could significantly solve this just by having more trash and recycling cans and by changing them more often. You'll notice how much cleaner DC and its surrounding urban areas are than SF and NYC and that's because they have a bigger commitment to making it easy to not litter and they do more cleaning.
Worse than that, SF has tried removing trash cans on a theory they’re and attractive nuisance. An absence of trash cans works in Tokyo, not so much in North America:
This seems self defeating? They removed the trash can near my corner. Sure, people used it for personal trash and often dumped unwanted items next to it.
Getting rid of it seems…to make things worse? People still dump their trash, it’s just more spread out now.
> One of the things that causes littering is a lack of trash cans or a lack of non-filled trash cans.
Yes, surely a primary cause. There are areas without trashcans anywhere. Which is so insane. As public policy it seems obvious to maximize trashcans everywhere to make it convenient to keep it clean.
The vast majority of people aren't out to be filthy, but humans are also lazy. To keep a city clean, make sure there is a trashcan within sight at all times no matter where you are, and nearly everyone will use them and keep things clean. Remove trashcans and lots of people will give up and litter.
Same issue with public toilets. Make them available everywhere and nearly everyone will use them, everyone is happy. Take them away and the inevitable consequence is obvious, what else are people going to do.
Tokyo used to have a lot of trash cans and removed them after a terrorist attack. I think everyone would prefer to have the trash cans. It absolutely sucks to carry around your trash for hours, and not everyone does it.
People do litter here, but there's an army of old people that clean the streets... like this article is suggesting.
Linked in the article, too. While it's not the only source of the problem, it's still a big reason people get tired of looking around for a can in SF and just toss their litter.
You're not going to stop a junkie from shooting up (without a comprehensive, life-changing program). So barring that, you might as well teach them how to be more safe so they don't end up in a hospital spending your tax money for emergency care... or worse, dead somewhere and likewise then consuming public funds to deal with it.
but it also sends the message that shooting up heroin is tolerated, even encouraged. it's like the people running the city have completely giving up on expecting any kind of standards of public decency or even upholding civilization itself. they gave up on collecting trash, they gave up on arresting thieves, they gave up building houses, they're considering whether to give up teaching calculus. nothing we can do! we'll just manage the decline into thirdworldization, be careful not to overdose while you drug yourself into a stupor.
> but it also sends the message that shooting up heroin is tolerated, even encouraged
So what? An addict is going to shoot up whether it’s tolerated or not, and non-addicts aren’t going to take up heroin because they say a billboard. If you really want to end it, it’s going to need to be a lot more comprehensive, expensive, and expansive than the presence or absence of a billboard.
>When you smash a window to rob a store, be careful not to cut yourself on the glass. Wear thick gloves.
after all, a billboard is not going to stop a burglar, is it? and if we're going to have burglaries, it's better that the burglars don't injure themselves while committing their crimes, because after all it will reduce the burden on hospitals. it will also protect the store owners from liability!
I'm not a nietzchean but I start to sympathize with how zarathustra must have felt when he saw those pathetic last men, bleating about "harm reduction" as they huddled together for warmth.
Why would you put up those billboards? What's the intent? Is there an epidemic of burglars bleeding to death in the streets? Sure it makes a good analogy, but it has nothing to do with the reality we live in. We don't live in a hypothetical world, so it's appropriate to consider methods that are specific to the realities of the world we really do live in.
The local public library has a sign that says obeying the law is required in the library.
I asked the librarian if there really was a problem with the library being a law-free zone. She shrugged saying "what can I say". Personally, I doubt that a sign would dissuade the types who go to the library to commit crimes.
Addiction is a physiological disease. Burglary is not. You cannot compare them just because they are both crimes, as they have different causes. Those that burgle choose to do so (and yes, their circumstances may lead them to do so, such as poverty) but those who are addicted cannot really choose, their body demands that they abuse the substance.
> You can stop a junkie from shooting up by imprisoning them, or better yet, putting them through drug rehab.
Those responses have been tried for many years, with very poor results. Also, it's not clear that there is anything criminal about the vice of drugs, and thus taking away their freedom would be highly unjust. We take away people's freedom for bad behavior or because other people are uncomfortable.
Based on the little I know, what does help people is giving them access to social services. I think several American cities are pioneering bringing the services to the person - when authorities are called, they don't send police or only police, but people who can connect the person to various agencies.
Apparently this approach results in a much higher rate of service use (which makes sense commercially - if someone had to wait in long lines and fill out dozens of forms, and then face long delays for service, you wouldn't have many customers. If someone showed up, when need the service, and offered it on the spot, you'd sell a few more). And those people gain more stable lives and are able to better care for themselves.
We can see plenty of wealthy professionals turn to damaging behavior under great stress. Imagine how they would do if added to that stress is having no roof or reliable food, the loss of safety, the loss of any credibility - even enough to get basic jobs, the harassment, etc. But then them: 'We'll take care of the shelter, food, etc., and here are classes to help cope with your other problems without using drugs', and I can imagine they would have a much better chance.
Putting a junkie in prison will indeed stop them, for the time they are in jail. But once they get out, they will return to the life they know. And then you're back with the original problem, but you've now also spent a ton of money to imprison them.
Obviously there's nothing safe about being addicted to drugs. But there are certainly methods of drug use which have wildly varied risk levels. Same for other things - drinking alcohol, eating unhealthy foods, etc.
I’d welcome Portugal’s approach, but it is very different. San Francisco doesn’t prosecute dealers, and encourages open drug markets and camps on the street by funding and encouraging the behavior with permanent enabling, no path towards rehabilitation, and lack of law enforcement on the dealers and the non-drug crimes the commit.
Compassion and understanding of drug use issues is a different world than enabling spiraling dens of despair.
I'm the GP poster but I don't agree with this social darwinist crap at all. I bet you would never apply this logic if your own kids fell into drug addiction. it is not "nature" taking its course here, it is a sick, stupid society that tolerates the proliferation of mind-altering poisons and then shovels vast amounts of public money into useless fake "rehab" charities run by politically-connected grifters. there are people out there getting rich off all this misery and it isn't just the dealers.
That gets at the heart of the issue, which is our weak social and familiar bonds. Addiction remains prevalent because so few individuals or social groups have the courage and standing to significantly intervene. A parent would hopefully neither let their child die nor abandon them to an enabling harm reduction program. But most adults do not have anyone who loves them enough to take them to a safe place—likely at some expense—for two weeks to help with withdrawal. It’s heartbreaking.
Why would you think a serious problem is necessarily simple to solve? Money for maintenance and cleanup is limited. San Francisco has legions of homeless, troubled, and then a big layer of irresponsible rebels on top of all of that. The idea that one of the greatest accumulations of irregulars and undesirables would be simple to clean up after does not correspond at all to the real scale of the problem. How many thousands of unhoused live in your city?
Isn't it that they're also saying 'it's too expensive to live here, keep taxes low' or 'it's too expensive to live here, I won't, I'll consume things and leave rubbish and them go home [and pay tax] elsewhere'?
That's what happens when people just vote for their party for local government—politicians don't have good ideas or successful policies cause they don't have to to stay in office
SF has ranked choice voting for local seats, no primary. Anyone willing to put an (R) next to their name doesn't have a serious chance, because they're clearly just out of step with the city.
In practice elections are often quite competitive between the two major Democratic factions: moderates and progressives. Right now the mayor (Breed), state reps (Weiner, Chiu), and congressional rep (Pelosi) are moderates. The board of sups is 6-3 prog dominated, partially due to Breed becoming mayor and her seat being lost to apartment-tax Preston.
There's a shuffle happening right now due to the downstream consequences of Harris becoming VP that will result in Chiu's seat being taken by prog-allied Haney or Campos (no viable moderate is running, I believe). The rest of the progs support Campos though, so Haney is shifting toward moderate positions (e.g. supporting housing approvals) to improve his chances.
This isn't new, in SOMA and other neighborhoods they have had different associations you pay into for years for someone to go around and clean the sidewalks and ask some of the homeless people to move at 7-9am.
Besides actually cleaning the streets, it brings very big spotlight to the problem.
And in some rare cases, if activity like this may go viral, some people in charge of public sanitation might remember of the shame enough to do their work.
There are bureaucrats making 6 figures sitting around and doing nothing for 40 years now. I don’t think shame is going to get them into action. Shame would be what they feel looking around their city. They must be used to it at this point.
I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated. There is virtually no argument for why someone should need or be allowed to throw or leave their trash on the ground.
Most of us manage to get clothes on before we leave the house each day, and that's a lot more complicated than just putting trash into a bin (or god forbid, carrying it until you reach a destination which has a trash bin). So there is no excuse for littering.
I would impose very strict penalties for littering - namely forcing the one who is caught littering to spend two hours every day for a week, or even a month, walking the streets (and beaches or riverbanks or parks) and collecting trash.
If an alternative punishment must be provided, they could instead sit on the spot where they littered for a day, holding a sign which says "I'm a poorly trained human, and I throw my trash on the ground."
People are shitting in the streets, shooting drugs in the open and shoplifting with no consequences and you think SF is willing to impose severe penalties on littering?
> I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated. There is virtually no argument for why someone should need or be allowed to throw or leave their trash on the ground.
It comes back to the policies around law enforcement adopted by SF. Since it is effectively the epicenter of progressive politics in the world, there are a lot of radical policies in play. One of them is "restorative justice", which claims to make criminals / law breakers less stigmatized and more able to constructively reintegrate into society. Personally, I feel the motivations are sincere and have good intentions behind them.
However in practice, that framework of restorative justice has been warped into something more like an us versus them narrative, where those who break the law are viewed as helpless victims while those who seek to enforce the law are viewed as oppressors. I think this is partly because of the divisive nature of American politics in general, and partly because of the extremist language used by some activists who support these policies.
While I agree there is no excuse for this, and it shouldn't be tolerated (alongside open drug abuse, shoplifting, defecating on the street, assault, armed robberies, burglaries, and so on), the reality is that the politicians elected in SF and people like Chesa Boudin (the District Attorney) are very much all-in on restorative justice. In effect, they've decriminalized most crimes. And unfortunately it is a two-tier justice system where law abiding taxpayers are subject to the penalties of the law, while criminals are somehow not subject to penalties.
As far as I can tell, the only practical way out for SF is for constituents to wholesale reject fringe progressive politics and return to moderate politics that is closer to the Clinton or Obama era left. However, I don't view that as being very likely despite all the complaints, simply because the voice of activists is louder and more feared than other voices.
Lot of people with serious mental health and substance abuse issues on the streets of SF, at least when I lived there (moved away about 6 months ago).
Beyond trash, the streets actually had a lot of shit and piss on them, too. I think it's hard to really understand just how bad it was unless you go there. I'd watch movies and they didn't seem real to me because the streets were too clean.
To me it seems like an obvious failure of the government, but perhaps it does reflect a popular sentiment of the dominant culture, that people's individual right to live a life of misery in squalor on the street trumps any other concern. I dunno.
How law and punishment works:
You can put death penalty for littering, but if you know you can get away with it because nobody is watching (and you don't care about it), you will continue doing it. The opposite a smaller fine but with good monitoring (where you know that you will get caught) is better.
Even better is getting the idea inside people's brain. "I don't litter, because this is how I am". There is a book titled "Made to stick" where they expose the case of Texas and the problem they had with littering. A campaign was made "Don't mess with Texas", basically everyone should police anyone who doesn't comply with this don't litter attitude. This was done by appealing to the ideal of what a Texan should be, through clever advertising and marketing. Never been to Texas btw :)
This is only part of the issue. I've been picking up trash for years while walking or hiking in the outdoors and have observed a lot of different situations and setups that are really common:
- Pocket design on clothing isn't designed to allow easy litter insertion, exactly. A lot falls out of coats, jogging pouches when people think it's secure. Open wrappers from things like candy or granola bars have this banana-peel splaying effect that can help them to practically leap out of pockets while being stuffed in.
- Animals like local corvidae can spread litter like crazy.
- Wind, especially on garbage collection day, or around outdoor events
- Some hilarious amount of litter is meant to stay there because someone really does intend to come back and get it later. From water bottles left by runners to legit trash left by well-meaning people who really will be back soon, and then feel angry and confused about how they are perceived when they find that another do-gooder picked it up
- Vehicles, from garbage trucks to other work vehicles headed from site to site...man, some of the trash vortices I've seen :D
The inexcusable people you mentioned, I guess, are easy to spot and often easy to clean up after because they'll put their trash in the bag before hucking it out the car window, so you can use their bag to hold other trash as well. Or at least it's thrown in the same general area, and amounts to a couple bottles.
If they are drunk/high you can often get their names and stuff really easy too. Starbucks cup, receipt...wallet...oops they forgot that lol. Stage a gentle community intervention if so inclined, nobody necessarily needs the police involved.
But emotionally if someone has just had it with rules and abuse of rule systems for control purposes, if they perceive that they have been unfairly treated by society, I find that those are the litter bugs people worry about. But I can also sympathize...
The animals thing is huge. I have a backyard with 8 foot fences and clean out 3-4 pieces of food wrapping every day from my backyard, hauled in by various animals.
The real question isn't the obvious, but what we find when, discovering that the obvious isn't working, we dig deeper.
Do you live in a community with these problems? Try speaking to the people there; you may learn a lot. They aren't fools who have never considered the issue; they are intelligent, mostly well-meaning human beings who nevertheless find themselves in this situation.
I'm not talking about the obvious, so please avoid pinning on me the anti-obvious ('I support litter!'). The obvious in this case is an obstacle, preventing us from seeing and addressing the reality.
> I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated.
Tolerated? Come around some neighborhoods and not tolerate it. Who said the problem is our toleration?
> I would impose very strict penalties
This is an understandable reaction to bad behavior, but it doesn't work. Humans aren't so easily pushed around and it becomes a tool for harassing innocent people (e.g., minor drug possession offenses).
I'm not convinced that a fine is going to change someone's behavior. It may put them in a regretful financial bind, but it's really a short-term pain. Spending a week cleaning trash is definitely something they will remember! (and for sure they will complain to friends and family who will then maybe be less likely to litter themselves)
So when the person you tell to do community service says, "No", then what?
SF has no willingness to actually punish crime. The cops won't show up to stop shoplifting, bike theft, or any number of other crimes, and now you think there's going to be a trash patrol that is going to actually do something?
the real hardcore street addicts really don't do or buy anything but sit in a heap on the sidewalk for hours at at time.
do you mean that casual users just get so ... crazy .. that they feel compelled to throw trash on the street just for the thrill?
the homeless (often drug using) do certainly contribute to th e problem since they do go through the trash and gather stuff they think they might be able to sell or use.
but somehow I don't think that's what you're asking
