From USA Today:
City officials have finally gotten rid of five high-tech self-cleaning toilets that cost Seattle $5 million — but sold online for just $12,549.
The city installed the modernistic stand-alone toilets four years ago, hoping they would provide tourists and the homeless a place to do their business while downtown. But the automated loos became better known for drug use and prostitution than for relief.
The reality is that the city of Seattle spent $5 million (minus $12,549) to set up cubicles for the use of prostitutes and their patrons and drug buyers and sellers.
Public toilets work in other cities. I wonder why not in Seattle. They seem nice enough, as public toilets go.
holy crap (pardon the pun), but $5 million? WOW.
ReplyDeleteyep, that would be $1 million each. Wow. I hope they had computer terminals and holographic entertainment or sumpin'. The ones in Europe have a self-cleaning disinfectant spray (I guess it's something like the scrubbing bubbles version you can get for your shower stall) that cleans things up after every client use - or so I've heard.
ReplyDeleteBetter let Dennis weigh in on this one. He always has choice words for Seattle. I liked Seattle a lot when I was there -- before the public toilets, though.
ReplyDeleteMimi, I'm counting on you to be the voice of reason this coming week, as I will not be online.
;) :p
It is where they put them. Idiots. F*cking idiots.
ReplyDeleteThe clowns out here thought that high tech toilets set in crack infested parks would be used by the tourists. (because, well the tourists should be exposed to different people so they will just do it, like, you know?) Yes, they are near the tourist areas but Seattle is overrun by aggressive homeless crowds (much like San Francisco) and the tourists are scared of them and stay in their designated areas. Locals stay away from the whole scene (the only reason we ever go near Pike Place Market is to show it to visitors).
City planners here are big on show (they like to spend money on projects that look good in newspaper headlines) but lack the guts to do projects that really change anything.
Public transportation here is in shambles. People here imagine that this is some sort of eco-friendly city. It isn't. If you want to go somewhere you had better drive. When they try to plan public transportation the not-in-my-neighborhood crowd organize and if ANYONE complains here everything grinds to a halt. And the radical nuts scream and march that we should all just take bikes and work in hippie collectives anyway (I'm not making this up, I'm not exaggerating. seriously.)
In Chicago if city planners figure out that something is needed they just do it. If the mayor says do it then it gets done. No need for a million public meetings infested by lala land activists. If you complain too much they write you a thousand tickets and tow away your house. BUT THINGS WORK. Life is better. I would rather have a functioning city than a make believe la-la land that is run for the sake of generating socially conscious make believe efforts that don't actually work.
How soon until we move back to a real city where things work and projects are completed and etc? Soon, I hope. Very very soon.
Lets compare: (1)one city on the west coast has its head stuck in its ass while it debates in city council imaginary plans to be a sustainable city with no (!) waste by 2050, while (2) the other city in the midwest has functioning public transportation, is getting all sorts of awards for progress in environmentally friendly actions and steps and things generally work ok. Progress happens.
One city is built on an imaginary sense of "consensus" and another city has the good fortune to have America's greatest mayor in office (Mayor Daley).
No comparison.
I will stop ranting now.
You knew that this would set me off!
Oh s***! cany beat me to it. I was going to say Holy Crap too. Gotta be fast around here.
ReplyDeleteby the way, the Chicago Bears are playing the Seattle Seahawks tonight.
ReplyDeleteBears should win this one.
Lindy, one must be fleet of foot here, or all the good lines get taken.
ReplyDeleteYou knew that this would set me off!
Dennis, that's why I didn't page you.
lindy --you could have said "--bet somebody's pissed off" !!
ReplyDeleteNah, they didn't work so well in San Francisco. Lotsa drugs there too.
ReplyDeleteNew York just sweeps its homeless problem under the carpet. They are here, but they don't tend to be very aggressive, nothing like San Francisco. Since the days of Giulianni, really aggressive panhandlers get ticketed or arrested. We used to have the really rude aggressive ones descend like a plague on the East Village every summer after Memorial Day. They were always kids and overwhelmingly white. They'd be gone by Labor Day. The locals always said they were college kids out slumming.
ReplyDeleteThe beggars here usually tend to be older and quite a bit more professional than what I've seen in San Francisco. Shouting insults just drives away business. And those who aren't beggars are buskers of one sort or another, usually on the subways.
Though the beggars, especially the rude ones, are fewer, homelessness in New York is at its highest level since the Great Depression. The majority are women and children shuttled about from shelter to halfway house to shelter until something close to affordable opens up (almost never). And not all the homeless are unemployed. A lot work in the lower levels of the restaurant and retail business. They are largely invisible. The visible ones are almost all single men and addicts of one sort or another. The mentally ill and the addicted sometimes get shipped off to camps up state, not to be treated, but just to be out of the way.
I'm afraid that most of this is driven, not by compassion or by any sense of social responsibility, but for the sake of real estate values and tourist business.
The old SROs and shelters were squalid because no one spent money on them, and the mentally ill and addicted had no place else to go; certainly nowhere for treatment.
No one wants to go out of their home and face squalor and rudeness at every turn, and no one should have to. And yet, in every town and city there will always be those with mental illness and substance abuse problems who must be dealt with responsibly, not just shipped off or jailed.
agreed, Counterlight, but the issue at hand is the inability of Seattle to do anything that resembles a sensible decision on the problem of homelessness, land use, environmental planning, etc etc etc
ReplyDeletemillions of dollars for a few hightech bathrooms is the kind of decision making that they specialize in out here. It makes nice headlines but does nothing. As usual.
Maybe instead of automated toilets for the homeless, we should give them housing? Or mental care? (Needed in some cases, I understand).
ReplyDeleteMaybe for the drug users, rehab? Alternatives? Hope?
You mean technology won't solve our problems? You mean we may have to get involved in the lives of individuals, and care about them, and work at this from the level of people, like Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa?
Dangit! Why doesn't anybody ever tell us these things?
These look like a cross between a bus stop and an elevator. Nice and shiny and high-tech looking but $5 million? No. At 5 million you should be able to employ some people to staff them around the clock!
ReplyDeleteWe have no homeless in our pristine little city. Show yourself on the street with any signs of being homeless, and you get a one-way bus ticket to New Orleans or Baton Rouge, an offer you cannot refuse.
ReplyDeleteoh, important point here - if you miss it you miss understanding Seattle:
ReplyDeletethe toilets were meant for tourists, not the homeless. They were placed in known homeless hangouts on purpose, though. To incorporate visitors to the city into places where the less advantaged hang out. It was some sort of "lets try to mix them all together" idea - make the homeless feel like they get some nice things and give them some nice tourist people to talk to
and it was, at the same time, an attempt to "clean up" the parks without the bad local publicity that clearing the parks out would have generated. Since they can't be bussed away without the radical types protesting, it was thought that the homeless and drug salespeople and prostitutes would "get the hint" that they weren't wanted in a park with 1 million dollar toilets.
If it doesn't make sense it isn't supposed to - because nothing out here makes sense.
Dennis, stop holding back. Tell us what you really think about Seattle.
ReplyDeleteI must say that the location of the plush toilets doesn't make much sense, as you explain it.
Of course, remember that many cities give their homeless a free one-way bus ticket to CA. So we have a lot.
ReplyDeleteSo many ofthe homeless have other issues of health and abuse. But they are still our brothers, so I I try to remember this encounter to remind myself of this.
one day years ago, walking along a beach near San Diego, I paused to watch a crowd of birds in the surge. A homeless guy pushing a bike through the sand with a bag of recyclables on the handlebars paused on the other side. We both started at the same time to continue on our ways and as we passed, the homeless guy smiled at me toothlessly.
"Sanderlings and godwits, godwits and sanderlings" he said. "They like to hang together."
I grinned back. He had it absolutely right: the birds were sanderlings, small grey and white sandpipers, and godwits, large sandpipers with outrageously long bills.
But this isn't obvious, because San Diego County is amazing for birds (it has the largest number of birds recorded in a single county) so you need to know your species. They coulda easily been whimbrels, semi-palmated plovers, snowy plovers, curlews, western sandpipers.... you get the picture.
I still remember that moment and hope that I live up to it.
IT
IT, I love your story. It almost made me cry. Not quite, but nearly.
ReplyDeleteA couple of men attend our church regularly, who could be mistaken for homeless, but I don't think they are, because they would not still be around. The rector got them to clean up when they come to church, and he probably got them some clothes, too. One is a toothless black man with one eye and one leg missing, but he gets around on his crutches better than I do. We had a potluck after church today, and I went to sit with them. What a pitifully small gesture, but, at least, it's acknowledging them as fellow human beings. They're too shy to dare to join a table where others are sitting.
What a fecked up society we are.
When I glanced at this post I feared this blog might be headed for the toilet but was relieved to see some substantial discussion. (teehee)
ReplyDeleteResponding to another thread - so glad to hear that William is better!
Paul, as soon as I read the account in the paper, I knew I had to find it online and post it - just for Dennis. I love him when he rants. I love you in your occasional rants, too. I think there's something WRONG with me.
ReplyDeleteThe homeless. Ah, that's a whole other thing. Let's just hide them away and pretend they're not there.
I haven't heard too much about the ones in sf lately, but they are(or were) timed to open after a certain short time and automatically cleaned themselves timed on when the had been occupied, not when the person left. I might have to check this out again. Oh, and they are French!
ReplyDelete