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According to NBC7, the city of San Diego spends nearly $1 million every year sanitizing sidewalks from human feces and other biohazards including needles and personal hygiene waste.
Many residents believe this is a major public health threat that the city isn't working hard enough to fix.
One Sherman Heights resident Essence McConnell has taken matters into her own hands by organizing a group cleanup. Every week families, friends, and strangers meet up around Sherman Heights Elementary School and spend an hour cleaning up the sidewalks.
“Maybe this is really gross,” McConnell told NBC7, “but I feel, since doing the cleanups, I know the difference between the smell of human feces and animal feces. I know that’s really disgusting.”
NBC7 Investigates also went through thousands of 311 app complaints and found hundreds of reports of human waste.
They found that there were 430 complaints about "human excrements" in just the first eight months of 2021.
San Diego State University assistant professor Jennifer Felner studied a recent Hepatitis A outbreak in the city that killed 20 and sickened nearly 600 others from 2016-2018.
She found one of the main ways the outbreak spread was through human fecal matter.
Felner said the study concluded that San Diego lacks well-maintained, 24-hour public restrooms.
“This is really preventable,” Felner said. “This is something we could easily — not cheap — but we could easily address by increasing access to bathrooms.”