San Francisco Neighborhood Takes Up Collection To Hire Its Own Private Poop Patrol

San Francisco is now famously the city of feces-covered sidewalks. But one particularly affected neighborhood — the city’s Tenderloin district — is so fed up with the mess they’ve taken up a collection from local businesses and residents to hire a private company to clean the sidewalks in between visits from the city’s official “poop patrol.”

Fox News reports that the Tenderloin, which, according to the San Francisco “poop map,” is “ground zero” for the city’s waste problem, with dozens of reports of human feces littering the sidewalk being called into the city’s 311 non-emergency hotline every month, and despite San Francisco’s reported overtime commitment to keep the streets feces-free, the city’s “poop patrol” cleanup unit is only able to thoroughly wash the Tenderloin’s public sidewalks around once per month because demand is so high.

The new program, the Tenderloin hopes, will increase powerwashings to at least once per week.

“The Tenderloin Community Benefit District, which is a non-profit neighborhood group, secured an additional $260,000 this year to essentially quadruple the number of times the neighborhood’s sidewalks are professionally cleaned a month, according to the program’s supervisor Matt Haney,” reports Fox News. “Property owners within the district’s 30 square blocks helped fund the program as the neighborhood continues to be plagued by a large homeless population.”