San Francisco has long been the laughingstock of the nation.
The poop problem isn't getting better, however. It's getting worse — so much so that the city's paper of record, the San Francisco Chronicle, is having to comb through reams of doo-doo data to make its point:
The amount of feces, graffiti and illegal trash dumping on San Francisco sidewalks slightly increased over the last year, according to a recently released city report.
Some neighborhoods reported a slight increase in graffiti, feces and large items dumped between July 2024 to July 2025, officials said in an annual report published Monday by the Controller's Office. The report evaluated the cleanliness and condition of city streets and sidewalks by counting the sightings of sidewalk litter, street litter, large dumped items, graffiti and human or animal feces.
San Francisco controllers tracking the amount of "street litter, large dumped items and human feces" in the city:
That's a formidable task in and of itself. There's a lot of garbage in the city, for one. But apparently there's just a ton of feces — to the extent that the Chronicle can create a legit bar graph to show how bad the problem is:
As you can see, in some time periods the surveyed streets reach near-40% levels of poop saturation.
The city, however, wants its residents to know that it's really not all that bad. One official said,
San Francisco struggles with cleanliness and sidewalk conditions in a number of areas, but the average street will not have significant accumulations of litter, debris or health hazards.
Ahh, the "average street" will not have "significant" amounts of human poop on it.
Take heart: If you've been looking to move to San Fran and drop $1.7 million on a 700 square foot shed, you can at least be comforted in knowing that the "average" byway in the city will have acceptable levels of biohazardous waste!
The city, meanwhile, says the "likelihood of seeing some graffiti on a city street or sidewalk has remained high," but in a bit of good news, "most neighborhoods reported less than a 5% increase in dumped items compared to last year."
Congratulations, San Francisco, you're entering your golden age!
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