If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to bring some hand sanitizer, because the city is now becoming a literal “s**thole.”
According to the Fresno Bee, a trash bag filled with roughly 20 pounds of human feces was left sitting on the sidewalk over the weekend in downtown San Francisco.
“It’s the latest — and perhaps most alarming — sign of the increased filthiness of one of the most popular cities in the United States,” reports FB. “The bags of human poop were said to be left in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.”
The photo went viral after being posted onto San Francisco’s Citizen app for identifying crimes; a picture of the post made its way onto Reddit.com.
“Walked by this yesterday without knowing it had been a reported thing,” wrote Reddit user green_street. “Arguably the worst smell I’ve ever encountered. Plenty of things smell bad/weird/nasty, but the sheer stench of this was massive.”
A spokesman for SF311, San Francisco’s non-emergency customer service for governmental affairs, said though human waste on the sidewalk is common, this amount is “not typical.”
The fecal drop comes at a time when San Francisco is currently experiencing a public health crisis, becoming a city whose sidewalks are frequently littered with urine, feces, and discarded syringes. A website that allows residents to request maintenance has received 16,015 complaints with the keyword “feces” in the last week.
“Homeless encampment is blocking sidewalk and creates a health hazard w trash and feces,” wrote one user. “Please move them, and send a cleaning crew. Sidewalk is impassable, forcing pedestrians into the street.”
“Homeless individuals sleeping along Funston between Clement and Geary,” wrote another user. ”Observed homeless people shooting up at 5pm on Monday, July 2nd. Lots of feces and garbage in the area. Please clean up area and see if homeless individuals need services.”
According to Yahoo News, San Francisco distributes an estimated 400,000 drug syringes every month in the name of reducing HIV among drug users. Of that number, 246,000 syringes get discarded into the city’s 13 syringe access and disposal sites while the other remaining thousands end up on the streets, sidewalks, parks, or other public areas.
Earlier this year, NBC News reported that the homeless haven of San Francisco has become so filth-infested that the city spends approximately $30 million a year to clean human feces and syringes off the sidewalks. People actually pay an arm and a leg to live in this literal “s**thole.”