San Francisco has a reputation for sweeping vistas — but it’s also known for trash-plagued corridors and the infamous “poop map.”
A new report from the Controller’s Office for the city and county of San Francisco, tallying sightings of feces, litter, and graffiti from July 2023 to June 2024, provides some relief — and some horror.
Citywide, sightings of litter dropped slightly. But poop sightings are way up.
In the city’s doo-doo discovery efforts, 2,662 streets were surveyed. A whopping 30% had animal or human feces on them; the last time the survey was carried out, between January and June 2023, the crap counter clocked in at 18.5%. The names of the streets that were surveyed were not released.
Graffiti sightings remained broadly unchanged, with 18 observed instances on average for each street the researchers traversed.
The city scores on a 0 to 5 scale. This time around, it recorded a 2.55. In the first six months of 2023, it was 2.75.
Illegal dumping declined slightly, with 27% of surveyed streets having at least one large dumped item during the 12-month period, down from 29%.
SoMa’s stool spike
Two San Francisco neighborhoods experienced significant increases in street poop.
The percentage of blocks in SoMa with feces rose from 10% in the first half of 2023 to 61% between July 2023 and June 2024. The Castro and Upper Market similarly experienced a sharp increase, from 10% to 48% during the period.
Christian Martin, head of the SoMa West Community Benefit District, a nonprofit that employs an army of street cleaners, questioned the validity of the report, criticizing it for small sample sizes and random street selections.
Martin pointed to his nonprofit’s internal “Code Brown” data showing that average daily feces clean-ups have dropped from 150.49 in 2022 to 145.14 in 2024. Workers bag $3 for every “Code Brown” they scrape off streets.
In response to Martin’s critique, a Controller’s Office spokesperson said their study was “relatively rigorous,” pointing to the more than 2,600 streets they examined, and that randomly selecting streets is the best way to study their condition.
Martin’s data cover only the CBD area, which spans 107 blocks roughly bounded by Mission, Third, Townsend, and Division streets. The controller’s study covers the entire SoMa neighborhood as part of its citywide analysis.
“In our neck of the woods, this doesn’t reflect our experience,” Martin said, adding that Minna, Natoma, and Clara are among the particularly bad SoMa streets.
“Those are the popular spots to take a dump,” Martin said. “Most of it is dogs — but a lot of it is people.”
Andrea Aiello, executive director of the Castro CBD, said she also believes that dogs are responsible for much of the uptick in feces in that neighborhood.
“There are a zillion dogs in the Castro,” Aiello said. “And people don’t clean up after their dogs.”