Maher: San Francisco Seems ‘Proud’ of Its Dysfunction

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that San Francisco seems to be “proud” of how difficult it is to do things to fix problems in the city.

During his closing on bureaucratic red tape, Maher said, “In San Francisco — the city so nice you’ll step in poop twice — there’s an area where homeless people were urinating and defecating, and it was starting to annoy the people breaking into cars. So, the city tried to build a public toilet last year, but then gave up when the cost hit 1.7 million. Not 1.7 million for a public toilet system, 1.7 million for one toilet. And this wasn’t some magic toilet that catches your phone when you drop it. So, then a private company took pity on San Francisco and offered to build them their toilet for free, but after project management, construction management, architecture and engineering fees, permits, civic design review, surveys, contract preparation, and cost estimation, the free toilet was still going to cost almost a million dollars. You know, if you tack on fees like that, you’re not a city, you’re an airline. It feels like San Francisco is actually proud of being impossible. Asked about the toilet, a spokes[person] for the Department of Public Works said, ‘We are a city of public input.’ Okay, but I’m stepping in public output.”

He continued, “Meanwhile, the median time to get approval to build a house there is 627 days. That’s 217 days longer than it took to build the Empire State Building. You need 87 permits: fifteen from the Planning Commission, 26 from the Public Utilities Commission and the Fire Department, 19 from building inspectors, 17 from the Public Works, 10 related to public spaces, and one from a guy in a t-shirt that says ‘Federal Boob Inspector.’ It’s no wonder that, in 2021, San Francisco issued only 2,000 permits for new homes. Sure, there are people living in the streets, but that’s because we want to make sure the apartments they don’t live in are perfect. I don’t fear AI anymore because it couldn’t possibly be any more robotic than the humans who run things now.”

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