Nowhere to go: Albuquerque's human waste cleanup underscores housing crisis

Sporting gloves, masks, goggles and baggy cleanroom bunny suits, Juan Delgado and Luis Martinez get to work on the southern edge of Downtown in a condo parking lot.

They aren’t mopping up a chemical spill, clearing out a drug lab, or protecting themselves from a virus.

They’re picking up human feces.

For nearly 30 minutes, the duo picks up the feces and sprays down the spots with a cocktail of chemicals — all environmentally friendly, according to their boss — and making sure none of the water or treatments drip off the lot and into the grass.

For the past seven months, Specialized General Services, or SGS, has been tasked with cleaning up human waste in public spaces across the city as the number of people experiencing homelessness grows and public restrooms remain few and far between.

In 2019, Portland residents were shelling out nearly $316 per human waste call, according to the Oregonian, and last year San Francisco residents called 311 about human waste 32,234 times despite the city having more than 280 public restrooms, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Last year, in Denver, a businessman dropped a bag of human waste he collected at city hall to show how fed up he was.

Since April, the Albuquerque City Council and the city’s Environmental Health Department have allocated $300,000 to tackle the issue. But city spokesperson Staci Drangmeister said the city might have to spend $700,000 to keep the service going year-round.

To date, the city said it has received 659 calls and is still tallying the number for October. SGS has said it’s responded to over 700 reports, with the week of Balloon Fiesta presenting a spike in reports.

As the city is faced with a housing crisis — according to Mayor Tim Keller around 5,000 people have no shelter — many of those residents have nowhere to take care of one of their most basic human needs and want to see a different solution to the issue.

Janet, 61, said she has been on the streets of Albuquerque for nearly six years. She currently stays in the International District.

“It’s very difficult. Each person goes through their own experience and not everybody’s is the same,” Janet said. “It has a lot to do with the weather, and especially when it’s raining and you’re drenched in rain and you’re somewhere where it’s muddy. That’s not good.”

Janet also said as a woman she has to be cautious about when to put herself in such a vulnerable position. She said the experience of having to use the restroom in public is degrading.

“Different things go through your mind. You feel at your lowest point of your life; ‘How did it come to this?’” Janet said.

On a Friday afternoon in October, Leroy hangs out outside the International District Library. Leroy, a 26-year-old who has been homeless for two years, described the feeling of having to use the restroom outside.

“We shouldn’t have to purchase our bathroom rights. I think that goes against your civil rights ... here in America. I mean, we’re not a third-world country,” Leroy said.

Leroy was with Maria, 42, who said that those living on the streets have to sign up on a waitlist to use the library’s restrooms. She added that she tries to time her bathroom usage so she can use one in an indoor public restroom like those available at the library.

The Journal is not publishing the last names of the unhoused residents it spoke to for this story to minimize harm or humiliation to the individuals.

Where is the defecation?

From April to September, the largest number of defecation incidents were reported at First Unitarian Church, near Carlisle and Comanche NE.

Church leader, the Rev. Bob LaVallee, told the Journal he is saddened by the amount of defecation around the church and more worried about the circumstances of those doing it.

“It’s unfortunate, and it’s hard on our landscape that is maintained by volunteers. It’s unhygienic and all that, but also, more importantly, think about how dehumanizing it is that people are having to rely on a churchyard to do something as fundamental as using the bathroom,” LaVallee said. “Unfortunately, it’s an indictment of our giant failure to attend to our unhoused folks.”

He said he wants to see the city and state increase their housing supply.

“I would like to see a state-level investment in housing. And I believe there’s some of that pending for the upcoming (legislative) session, but I also think we need rapid rehousing as a solution to housing for the unhoused folks,” LaVallee said. “Like all the other things that follow on about mental health or addiction or just health issues in general, they’re all much more resolvable if somebody’s got a steady place to live.”

The highest numbers of calls April to September — 84% — are in the city’s most densely populated council districts: District 6, which includes the Southeast Heights, University Heights, Nob Hill and the International District; District 7, which is made up of the Mid-Heights and parts of the Near Northeast Heights; and District 2, which consists of Downtown, Old Town, portions of the West Mesa, and the entire valley east of the river.

“Those used to be the three districts where there were the most unhoused folks at any given time, but I think that those numbers are fluctuating daily,” said Councilor Tammy Fiebelkorn, the District 7 representative who sponsored the bill allocating the initial $100,000 for cleanup efforts. “We have a housing crisis and so there’s more and more folks unhoused every day.”

Fiebelkorn, whose district has received over 100 calls, said she believes the city needs to add more public restrooms.

According to the city’s website, of all of the parks it operates only 10 have restrooms — most have vault toilets and no running water — and two occasionally have portable toilets set up. Many of those parks close their restrooms at night, too. Additionally, the city has 18 public libraries, most of which have restrooms open to the public, but most close no later than 7 p.m.

“Everyone has the right to use the restroom with some dignity. Everyone has to go to the bathroom, whether we like it or not,” Fiebelkorn said. “So providing public restrooms is a huge service to our community, not only to our unhoused neighbors but to all of us.”

Fiebelkorn’s district also has one of the city’s few 24/7 public restrooms located at the Uptown Transit Center.

On Oct. 18, the Journal went to visit the transit center’s bathroom, but it was locked. A security guard said it had been locked for three days due to feces being smeared on the walls.

But Madeline Skrak, a spokesperson for the city’s Transit Department, which manages the restroom, said the restroom was open when she went to check that evening.

Chris and the contract

For SGS CEO Chris Pacheco, business is growing and he’s eyeing a statewide expansion after landing the contract in Albuquerque.

“Just recently, I saw the homeless crisis in Albuquerque, and I said, ‘Well, I have this good equipment that I can customize, and we can help the city because there’s no public restrooms,’” Pacheco said. “So then I went to the city with this and proposed, ‘We can do a biohazard cleanup for you guys to remove the feces that I’ve been seeing everywhere.’”

Pacheco said he’s also in talks with the city of Santa Fe and in a couple weeks he’ll most likely have a crew fielding calls in the state’s second-largest city: Las Cruces.

But he says he and his team are still prioritizing their hometown.

“Our main focus is in Albuquerque right now,” Pacheco said. “We’re natives of Albuquerque, we appreciate the landscape and we understand that there’s a bad homeless crisis here, and we feel that we have an important role on a daily basis on responding to these 311s.”

The business’ work for Albuquerque began in February, when the City Council unanimously passed a bill creating a program to cleanup human waste — allocating $100,000 to the issue. Specialized General Services, an independent contractor, was awarded the bid and began services in April.

According to records, Specialized General Services used up $65,000 in the first month.

It isn’t clear how many calls went unattended after the initial funds went dry, but on May 1, an employee at the Walgreens near the Indian Pueblo Center who called 311 to have feces picked up led to the following response: “Due to the popularity of this service the Environmental Health Department needed to renew the contract with our vendor Specialized General Services. 311 responses were delayed but we expect responses to be back to normal soon. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

The city said the Environmental Health Department wasn’t made aware of the issue until 16 days after the report was made. Tim Walsh, a city spokesperson, said in a statement: “The department became aware of a week lapse in service due to a breakdown in communication. Once discovered, services were restored immediately.”

Walsh said SGS was awarded a bid and on May 23 given $35,000, the remainder of the $100,000 allocated by the City Council, to continue services.

On July 1 — the first day of the 2025 fiscal year — the Keller administration’s Environmental Services Department allocated $200,000 more to SGS.

In an email shared with the Journal, Pacheco tells Terrance Smith, the city’s deputy director of Environmental Health, that the weekly billing average is $10,000 to $15,000 and monthly cost ranges from $40,000 to $60,000. Over a year, those costs project anywhere from $480,000 to $720,000.

“If you run those projections for the year, I mean, it could potentially, probably be more than $700,000 because the way it’s trending, it’s trending up,” Pacheco said.

An invoice to the city from SGS for the final week of October shows that most half-hour calls cost $147 for the biohazard cleaning and after the cost of reclamation, power washing and disposal, calls are costing $295.

Hour long service calls are costing $635 — $195 for reclamation and $145 for disposal.

Matthew Whelan, deputy chief administrative officer for the city and former director of the city’s Solid Waste Department, said the city is exploring its options and considering bringing the services in-house due to the expense.

But people on the streets would rather see that money spent on giving them a place to go.

“I would ask them (the city) if somehow they could accommodate the people that are in need of lavatory facilities, at least. Please, think of them out here in all seasons,” Janet said. “If there’s a will, there’s a way, at least help. Think of the people that are out here and help them with resources to make their lives at least a little bit more comfortable and easier.”