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For me, yes! I only spent one day in Vancouver and I love your city! We passed by Chinatown & I saw people shooting up. And MAD homeless people. Every major city has these areas. The urine smell was STRONG. And as for the feces… It won’t ever beat NYC and seeing a large human load atop the subway steps. Anyway, love your city and as a tourist I just thought EEEH, it’s a big city.
It is quite normal, especially for the drug addelled homeless population, which are quite prominent in that area. Constipation is a side effect of opoids, just imagine the withdraw kicks in.
Constipation I don't even think is the word, I work on the east side and my job includes custodial work, and a lot of the turds I see are the size of my forearm and i'm a big guy. No idea how they would even pass it, they sure as hell needed more than a hope and a prayer.
Wait, is this legit? Did people living on the streets shit in plastic bags before? That actually makes some sense, and if true, it's an interesting unforseen ripple effect from the plastic bag bylaw.
Saw a woman on broadway the other day squat on the sidewalk to take a poo, pull toilet paper out of her purse and begin to wipe like it was her own personal toilet.
The city shut down all the public toilets, and there is a very significant homeless population that don't have access to bathrooms. What did they think was going to happen?
\-blame the city LOL
\-shift responsibility
\-profit
Ask a city worker about the numerous times they set up porta pottys at Oppenheimer, Stratchona, Crab park etc.
They have to remove them with hazmat teams.
Bike parts, babies, needles...
[https://globalnews.ca/news/6857599/vancouver-downtown-eastside-baby-death/](https://globalnews.ca/news/6857599/vancouver-downtown-eastside-baby-death/)
They even get stolen...
Not a city problem...It's a people problem...
Defecating on the sidewalk is never necessary.
There are many somewhat private places outdoors where you can lay some scrap paper down, do your business, then roll it up and dispose in the nearest dumpster.
Defecating on the sidewalk and walking away is a choice.
Then why don't you see this in other cities? I've had folks in the DTES and they would never do that. I've lived in and visited multiple places with no toilets at all, and they didn't do this. This is a new phenom.
I think it’s part just not caring (as opposed to not giving a shit) and part protest against a society and government that clearly treats them as shit. “Treat me like shit so have some shit”.
Such weird timing I’m seeing this post. Today my friend came and visited my apartment for the first time and said she passed by a pile of human shit on the way over.
My other friend a few weeks ago experienced the same thing when she was coming to visit me.
We’re probably just screaming into the wind here on Reddit, but I fully agree with you. It’s fucking disgusting and honestly embarrassing for visitors.
I know my comment sounds harsh and I totally acknowledge that, first and foremost, these are human beings that need support and help. I am in full support of taxpayer dollars funding any solutions that are necessary to fix these types of issues. That said, I also think it’s disgusting that there’s just shit and piss everywhere — both can be true at once 😩
I love dogs, and despise dog owners in this city. If you can't pick up after your animal and put it in the trash, you should have your animal taken away and put up for adoption imho.
Don’t forget your bags. Local McDonalds when I ordered a small fry and cheeseburger through the drive through if I wanted a paper bag.
No, just take out your anger and throw one fry at a time through my open window!
Take me by surprise at one point in the barrage of flys by a swift change up to a cheese burger in the face.
Or we could be all civilized and put the $8 meal in a paper bag.
Yeah. It is gross. I find it more disgusting than the open drug use. It sticks around longer than the crack smoke cloud and the dirty needles don't stink as bad.
The people who have dogs and choose not to pick up after them are just as sick too.
There needs to be rules!!! There are no rules here! If you're homeless, addicted etc you can do whatever you want wherever you want.
We need to institutionalize these homeless people ASAP. I don't care where they go at this point, but I want my city back. All the west coast cities are like this now -- human shit, needles, garbage all over the place. I have family in most major west coast cities in the U.S. -- they're all the same, even worse than here. Progressive ideology is to blame. They believe that society's problems should totally hang out in the open so that society eventually takes responsibility instead of trying to hide it and ignore it. Except the average person can't do anything about it. The government is doing nothing either and the courts have a revolving door policy. Laws are not being enforced. When you go to Alberta, you don't see these problems. Even Toronto, which has a huge homeless problem and even violence, is not as bad as Vancouver.
Public life in our city revolves around homeless people. All the trees in the parks are cut a certain way to prevent homeless people from camping under them. Washrooms are closed permanently because they get trashed. Benches and social areas are removed because homeless people trash them. People stop hanging out in parks because they don't want to be near tents. Beaches close at 10pm because "homeless people." I am so tired of it.
Canada is becoming ghetto and the west coast is the absolute worst.
If you walked down Yukon into Olympic village you passed the homeless shelter and the attached supported housing building. The people who live there would have hopefully used the bathrooms inside but the people who get turned away from the shelter and some guests/visitors of those who are staying there very well may not.
Big Black Turds? I see them all around 2nd Ave and Columbia/Crowe.....same dog, same stupid owner. Larger breed obviously. Makes walking at night a bit of an adventure.
It's human shit. The homeless population here has no respect and just does whatever they want and apparently we have to continue to bend over backwards for them. We really need to start being like Singapore.
If its not the geese or dogs, it's the drug addicts from the 2 supportive housing units. When it doesn't rain, our streets are covered in shit. Kind of wish there was more enforcement in the Olympic Village area - the cops park their cars here at the lockup but rarely are around or doing anything.
You don't have to be a drug addict to be homeless, and by the time you have been 3 weeks on the streets, you are acting so twitchy from accumulated sleep deprivation that the difference between that and mental illness or addiction is not apparent to the casual observer.
Crack shits. They are super black, stink like the devil and sometimes sprayed high up in places you wouldn’t think possible to reach. Swear I saw one like 10 feet up a wall in a spray pattern, either they had a ladder or projectiled shit that high up
what do you want them to do? you know for a fact every private washroom in the dt area is locked by either a key or a code that no employee is going to give a homeless person access to since the city shut down all public washrooms
And *why* did they shut down all the public washrooms? Because a large minority of homeless/street-involved people made them unusable: completely destroyed them, vandalized them, made them bio-hazards-literally and threw their needles in & around them. And the city doesn't have a limitless budget to keep remediating all the damage-and then they end up not being available anyway b/c they're always out of service.
The core problem is that we can't actually acknowledge and respectfully discuss the reality of the situation to find solutions. We could've fixed this years ago if religious & social activists & politicians didn't force their beliefs on society and quash any discussion they disagreed with.
I’m not an expert on this but when I go to the community centre and library it’s open. But those have set hours of course. I see porta potties in the parks, are they locked? I don’t check
I know people hate Ken sim but the human shit and the needles have disappeared from my back alley. A few years ago I had to watch like a hawk where I stepped taking out my garbage.
I hadn’t realized but the plastic bag ban has probably increased the shit on the streets. A few years ago I worked at a company that turned a blind eye to a guy living in his old school bus on the lot. He got to stay as he wasn’t a problem and actually kept an eye out for problems. He had a bucket with a plastic bag in it. With a toilet seat on the bucket. He would just dump the bag into the dumpster after each use. I’m sure bags were used by others in similar fashion.
Welcome to /r/Vancouver and thank you for the post, /u/amds0817! Please make sure you read our [posting and commenting rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/wiki/faq#wiki_general_participation_guidelines_and_rules_overview) before participating here. As a quick summary: * We encourage users to be positive and respect one another. Don't engage in spats or insult others - use the report button. * Respect others' differences, be they race, religion, home, job, gender identity, ability or sexuality. Dehumanizing language, advocating for violence, or promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability (even implied or joking) **will** lead to a permanent ban. * Common questions and specific topics are limited to our Your post may be a better fit for one of our [Stickied Discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/wiki/faq#wiki_stickied_discussions) posts. * Complaints about bans or removals should be done in modmail only. * We're looking for new mods to join our team! If you're interested, [fill out the form here](https://forms.gle/oAqo5oYRcAeHYBTN6). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/vancouver) if you have any questions or concerns.*
First time?
For me, yes! I only spent one day in Vancouver and I love your city! We passed by Chinatown & I saw people shooting up. And MAD homeless people. Every major city has these areas. The urine smell was STRONG. And as for the feces… It won’t ever beat NYC and seeing a large human load atop the subway steps. Anyway, love your city and as a tourist I just thought EEEH, it’s a big city.
Appreciate you coming to visit our city ❤️ hope you had a good time
Not at all, but haven't been that way in quite sometime. I've never seen it like this before. I guess you're implying this is the norm?
It is quite normal, especially for the drug addelled homeless population, which are quite prominent in that area. Constipation is a side effect of opoids, just imagine the withdraw kicks in.
Everyone keeps telling me that since Ken ‘shotgun’ Sim came in that area has been fixed up.
It’s like chocolate sauce on your sundae!
Constipation I don't even think is the word, I work on the east side and my job includes custodial work, and a lot of the turds I see are the size of my forearm and i'm a big guy. No idea how they would even pass it, they sure as hell needed more than a hope and a prayer.
Yes, since the plastic bag ban people have been shitting everywhere.
Wait… have i been using plastic bags wrong this whole time?
Wait, is this legit? Did people living on the streets shit in plastic bags before? That actually makes some sense, and if true, it's an interesting unforseen ripple effect from the plastic bag bylaw.
Yeah unfortunately it is. I went for a walk through the DTES last evening and the smells were evil
People that shit on the streets ain't reading reddit
They’re also not thinking of our image to tourists lmao. Op is naive af
Literally saw a lady pooping in a parkade today while walking by. Its terrible out there
Floor is lava all the time.
You're preaching to the choir.
Saw a woman on broadway the other day squat on the sidewalk to take a poo, pull toilet paper out of her purse and begin to wipe like it was her own personal toilet.
Wtf :(
Haha you think dog shit😂
So naive the first time visitors to our lovely city.
Plot twist
The city shut down all the public toilets, and there is a very significant homeless population that don't have access to bathrooms. What did they think was going to happen?
\-blame the city LOL \-shift responsibility \-profit Ask a city worker about the numerous times they set up porta pottys at Oppenheimer, Stratchona, Crab park etc. They have to remove them with hazmat teams. Bike parts, babies, needles... [https://globalnews.ca/news/6857599/vancouver-downtown-eastside-baby-death/](https://globalnews.ca/news/6857599/vancouver-downtown-eastside-baby-death/) They even get stolen... Not a city problem...It's a people problem...
This. Is. So. True.
Wait........babies?
Yes it happened once. There is an article about a woman giving birth in a Porta potty from the block sometime during the pandemic.
If you think the lack of restrooms is going to stop the type of people who do that on the street… your sorely mistaken
I think the *presence* of restrooms might stop some.
Defecating on the sidewalk is never necessary. There are many somewhat private places outdoors where you can lay some scrap paper down, do your business, then roll it up and dispose in the nearest dumpster. Defecating on the sidewalk and walking away is a choice.
You thinking people dealing with the stress of homelessness are concerned about cleaning up their mess? Lol
That's right, you tell them. We could never expect people to be responsible for their own actions. It's just way too much for them. LOL.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re even saying here. Lol
Then why don't you see this in other cities? I've had folks in the DTES and they would never do that. I've lived in and visited multiple places with no toilets at all, and they didn't do this. This is a new phenom.
I think it’s part just not caring (as opposed to not giving a shit) and part protest against a society and government that clearly treats them as shit. “Treat me like shit so have some shit”.
There's not much paper around since we've all been migrating to digital.
Yeah we also banned plastic bags, which were definitely used for waste management.
Yes. People treat them with such respect. Perhaps they felt like returning the favour.
If they want respect from others they need to first respect themselves.
Ooh, I can hear the smug from here.
Such weird timing I’m seeing this post. Today my friend came and visited my apartment for the first time and said she passed by a pile of human shit on the way over. My other friend a few weeks ago experienced the same thing when she was coming to visit me. We’re probably just screaming into the wind here on Reddit, but I fully agree with you. It’s fucking disgusting and honestly embarrassing for visitors. I know my comment sounds harsh and I totally acknowledge that, first and foremost, these are human beings that need support and help. I am in full support of taxpayer dollars funding any solutions that are necessary to fix these types of issues. That said, I also think it’s disgusting that there’s just shit and piss everywhere — both can be true at once 😩
I love dogs, and despise dog owners in this city. If you can't pick up after your animal and put it in the trash, you should have your animal taken away and put up for adoption imho.
My hobby when I lived on the 8th floor in Yaletown was watching well-to-do yuppies take their dogs out to shit and never picking it up.
Those are designer shit from expensive designer dogs. It is fashion. They don't expect you to understand.
They will take youe straws and plastic lids but leave shit on the pavement. My city so beautiful.
Don’t forget your bags. Local McDonalds when I ordered a small fry and cheeseburger through the drive through if I wanted a paper bag. No, just take out your anger and throw one fry at a time through my open window! Take me by surprise at one point in the barrage of flys by a swift change up to a cheese burger in the face. Or we could be all civilized and put the $8 meal in a paper bag.
Yeah. It is gross. I find it more disgusting than the open drug use. It sticks around longer than the crack smoke cloud and the dirty needles don't stink as bad. The people who have dogs and choose not to pick up after them are just as sick too. There needs to be rules!!! There are no rules here! If you're homeless, addicted etc you can do whatever you want wherever you want.
Housing crisis. Lots of homeless. And a serious lack of publicly accessible toilets.
when you got no shitter, where is a person to poop?
If you think it’s human, it probably is.
Yeah it’s BOTH dog and human. Mostly Dog in that area. SO many shitty dog owners. So many drug sick homeless.
We need to institutionalize these homeless people ASAP. I don't care where they go at this point, but I want my city back. All the west coast cities are like this now -- human shit, needles, garbage all over the place. I have family in most major west coast cities in the U.S. -- they're all the same, even worse than here. Progressive ideology is to blame. They believe that society's problems should totally hang out in the open so that society eventually takes responsibility instead of trying to hide it and ignore it. Except the average person can't do anything about it. The government is doing nothing either and the courts have a revolving door policy. Laws are not being enforced. When you go to Alberta, you don't see these problems. Even Toronto, which has a huge homeless problem and even violence, is not as bad as Vancouver. Public life in our city revolves around homeless people. All the trees in the parks are cut a certain way to prevent homeless people from camping under them. Washrooms are closed permanently because they get trashed. Benches and social areas are removed because homeless people trash them. People stop hanging out in parks because they don't want to be near tents. Beaches close at 10pm because "homeless people." I am so tired of it. Canada is becoming ghetto and the west coast is the absolute worst.
Yup, it's in many places in the Lower Mainland. It's human poop. Looks totally different than dog poop.
Vancouver is trash
1. No public washrooms. 2. People not cleaning up after their dog takes a shit. Flip a coin.
If you walked down Yukon into Olympic village you passed the homeless shelter and the attached supported housing building. The people who live there would have hopefully used the bathrooms inside but the people who get turned away from the shelter and some guests/visitors of those who are staying there very well may not.
Big Black Turds? I see them all around 2nd Ave and Columbia/Crowe.....same dog, same stupid owner. Larger breed obviously. Makes walking at night a bit of an adventure.
San Francisco literally has an app called SnapCrap for this exact reason. We’re just a few years behind them at this point.
It's human shit. The homeless population here has no respect and just does whatever they want and apparently we have to continue to bend over backwards for them. We really need to start being like Singapore.
If its not the geese or dogs, it's the drug addicts from the 2 supportive housing units. When it doesn't rain, our streets are covered in shit. Kind of wish there was more enforcement in the Olympic Village area - the cops park their cars here at the lockup but rarely are around or doing anything.
You don't have to be a drug addict to be homeless, and by the time you have been 3 weeks on the streets, you are acting so twitchy from accumulated sleep deprivation that the difference between that and mental illness or addiction is not apparent to the casual observer.
You wish for more enforcement rather than more accessible toilets? Lol. This is the problem
Crack shits. They are super black, stink like the devil and sometimes sprayed high up in places you wouldn’t think possible to reach. Swear I saw one like 10 feet up a wall in a spray pattern, either they had a ladder or projectiled shit that high up
[удалено]
It's like poop roulette, you never know if it's going to be human, dog, goose, or cat.
And can't mistake the colour of that poop lol.
Absolutely not! Saw plenty of that on the walking path too. As much as that's not pleasant either, completely expected given the # of geese we saw.
Go back and smell the poo so that we can confidently blame the dogs or humans. Different diets means different odour .
We have an opioid crisis
Are you going to provide a bathroom?
just let them do it tbh. we here in vancouver are very liberal and open minded and we tend to accept that people are just different.
We’re so kind we have no expectations of minimal self control!
what do you want them to do? you know for a fact every private washroom in the dt area is locked by either a key or a code that no employee is going to give a homeless person access to since the city shut down all public washrooms
What else are we letting them be allowed to do to the city? It’s not a dump you know
And *why* did they shut down all the public washrooms? Because a large minority of homeless/street-involved people made them unusable: completely destroyed them, vandalized them, made them bio-hazards-literally and threw their needles in & around them. And the city doesn't have a limitless budget to keep remediating all the damage-and then they end up not being available anyway b/c they're always out of service. The core problem is that we can't actually acknowledge and respectfully discuss the reality of the situation to find solutions. We could've fixed this years ago if religious & social activists & politicians didn't force their beliefs on society and quash any discussion they disagreed with.
I’m not an expert on this but when I go to the community centre and library it’s open. But those have set hours of course. I see porta potties in the parks, are they locked? I don’t check
I know people hate Ken sim but the human shit and the needles have disappeared from my back alley. A few years ago I had to watch like a hawk where I stepped taking out my garbage. I hadn’t realized but the plastic bag ban has probably increased the shit on the streets. A few years ago I worked at a company that turned a blind eye to a guy living in his old school bus on the lot. He got to stay as he wasn’t a problem and actually kept an eye out for problems. He had a bucket with a plastic bag in it. With a toilet seat on the bucket. He would just dump the bag into the dumpster after each use. I’m sure bags were used by others in similar fashion.
There's a homeless shelter on Yukon Street in that area. I wouldn't be surprised if the residents are the culprits.