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âI Just Want to Clean Up the Messâ
In 1977, a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors invited reporters to a press conference at a local park. He said he was going to announce legislation essential to improving the quality of life in the city. With a pack of cameras waiting for him, the man walked across the grass toward them before stopping, making a face, and lifting up his foot to look at the bottom of his shoe only to discover, in feigned horror, that he had stepped in dog poop. After pretending to be surprised, and flashing a big smile, the man turned toward the cameras and announced legislation he would introduce, once elected, that required San Franciscans to pick up their dogsâ poop.1
It was a savvy and ultimately successful move for the handsome forty-something-year-old candidate. The number one quality-of-life issue for San Franciscans had become the large amount of uncollected dog feces on sidewalks and in parks. The man had run for supervisor twice before, coming in tenth the first time and seventh the second time. But he never connected with a majority of voters. This time, having identified an issue that people cared about, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors.2 His name was Harvey Milk.
Today we remember Milk as perhaps the most significant gay rights leader of all time. He is the person who unlocked the secret to reducing prejudice against same-sex relationships, by people disclosing to friends and family that they were gay. Sean Penn won an Oscar after immortalizing Milkâs life in a 2008 film. But Milk owed his political career to dog poop.
Shortly after taking office in 1978, Milk introduced the âScoop the Poopâ Act,3 which by the end of the summer the Board of Supervisors had passed.4 Afterward, a journalist said to Milk, âThe police department says it may be hard to enforce this,â to which Milk replied, beaming, âI think it will be easy based on peer pressure. Itâs going to be hard to write citations. But when a San Franciscan is walking down the street and sees someone breaking the law you say âHey!ââwith a smileââYou broke the law.â And after a while, when enough people do that, the message will be clear. It will be an education process. I really hope not one single citation is ever issued. . . . I donât want to put anybody in jail. I donât want to fine anyone. I just want to clean up the mess.â5
People overwhelmingly complied. Itâs true that dog owners still sometimes fail to pick up after their dogs. But dog owner behavior has changed drastically, and for exactly the reason Milk predicted it would: peer pressure. Dog owners felt, and feel, a moral obligation to take responsibility for their pets. As such, Milkâs campaign to remove poop from San Franciscoâs parks and sidewalks was a resounding success. At least, that is, when it came from dogs.
In 2018, San Franciscoâs mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. âI will say that thereâs more feces on the sidewalks than Iâve ever seen,â said Breed. âGrowing up here, that was something that wasnât the norm.â
âThan youâve ever seen?â asked the reporter.
âThan Iâve ever seen, for sure,â she said. âAnd weâre not just talking about from dogs. Weâre talking about from humans.â6
Complaints about human waste on San Franciscoâs sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from 10,692 to 20,933 between 2014 and 2018.7 In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaningâfour times more than Chicago, which has 3.5 times as many people and an area that is 4.5 times larger. Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.8
The underlying problem was homelessness. Between 2013 and 2016, complaints of homeless encampments to the cityâs 311 line rose from 2 per day to 63 per day.9 In 2018, a major medical association decided to host its annual convention, worth about $40 million for the local economy, elsewhere, after decades of holding events in San Francisco.10 The condition of the homeless in San Francisco is internationally recognized as inhumane. In 2018, the United Nationsâ special rapporteur visited San Francisco and said, âThereâs a cruelty here that I donât think Iâve seen, and Iâve done outreach on every continent.â11
Many of San Franciscoâs homeless live in densely populated, centrally located areas. The most infamous of these is the Tenderloin, a downtown neighborhood that borders government buildings including City Hall, a major shopping district with several large tourist hotels, and many of the cityâs concert venues and museums.
Some argue that the homelessness situation in San Francisco isnât worse than other cities. âNew York City has a worse per-capita homelessness problem than San Francisco,â wrote a New Yorker reporter in 2020. âCaliforniaâs proportion of homeless residents trails that of New York; Washington, D.C.; and Hawaii.â12 The difference is that San Francisco has a far higher number who are unsheltered, sleeping on the streets or in tents rather than in homeless shelters.
Many studies show that warmer climates and more expensive housing are major factors behind higher rates of homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered, in San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles.13 In much of California, one can sleep outside for most of the year without freezing. Half of the unsheltered homeless population in the United States is in California and Florida alone, even though the two states are home to just 19 percent of the population.14 High-tech companies like Salesforce, Twitter, and Stripe, progressives noted, had attracted thousands of employees who had driven up rents, resulting in tenant evictions.15
In 2016, representatives from San Franciscoâs business, philanthropic, and media communities committed to halve the cityâs chronic homeless population in five years. They created a media initiative called the SF Homeless Project, and raised over $130 million in the first year, with $100 million raised by an organization called Tipping Point and another $30 million coming from Marc Benioff, the billionaire CEO and founder of Salesforce, the customer relations software giant.16
The San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit organization, led a campaign to fund housing and services with a special tax on San Francisco businesses that gross more than $50 million annually.17 At first, few believed the measure, put before voters in the form of Proposition C, could pass. CEOs of other high-revenue tech companies in San Francisco, including Patrick Collison of Stripe and Jack Dorsey of Twitter, opposed Prop C, as did Mayor Breed. And the Coalition on Homelessness didnât have the money to pay for large-scale advertising and other costs of a citywide campaign.
But then Benioff donated millions of dollars to the campaign for Proposition C. âWhat I see is a crisis of inequality in San Francisco,â he said. âWe have 1,200 homeless families, each with two kids. . . . We have 70 billionaires here in our city. Thatâs incredible.â18
Benioff criticized the high-tech companies opposing Prop C. âSquare [is] worth $30 billion,â he said. âTwitter [is] worth $20 billion. Stripe, $20 billion. . . . These are immaterial amounts to us. $10 million doesnât mean anything. Thatâs less than the private plane that [Twitter founder and CEO] Jack Dorsey is going to fly around on.â19 Benioff added, âYouâre either for the homeless and for the kids and for the hospitals or youâre for yourself.â20
Benioff gave a $30 million grant to Dr. Margot Kushel at the University of California, San Francisco to study homelessness.21 âWeâve always known that most homelessness is a result, pure and simple, of poverty,â she said.22 One of the biggest myths is that it is âcaused by mental health and substance use problems,â Kushel explained. âWe know that most hom...