San Francisco’s public toilets — or the glaring lack of them — always seem to be the stuff of national headlines and local complaints.
Residents say there’s too much poop on the streets, yet one recent solution — Noe Valley’s $1.7 million loo-to-be — provoked disbelief from coast to coast. What the mockery has failed to mention is that a bustling commercial corridor in a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes lacks a public place to pee.
Meanwhile, out on the Embarcadero, one of SF’s new “space age” toilets — approved four years ago to replace JCDecaux’s stylish but chronically out of service self-cleaning green kiosks, and appearing on corners in November like sleek silver bullets — took just three days to break down. (The outage only lasted a couple of hours, but still.)
The lack of options for urgent relief leaves the burden to SF businesses, putting them forever at war with customers and would-be customers, with mainstays like some Whole Foods and Starbucks trying to limit bathroom access because of a few users’ bad behavior.
As Gov. Gavin Newsom liked to brag during his time as mayor, San Francisco is a “world-class city” full of history, architecture, culture, and cutting-edge technology, and yet it’s sometimes impossible to find a goddamn toilet around here.
Public toilets date back to the Roman Empire, and 100 percent of people have to use one at some point; a shortage should not be possible in a modern city with ample resources.
But if you’ve ever taken a sudden call from nature, only to realize with horror that your nearest go-to spot for going is out of order; or tried to direct anxious out-of-towners to the nearest facilities; or dodged a “surprise” on the sidewalk, you know that the struggle is real.
There are overlapping reasons for this messy state of affairs, but here’s a surprising one to start with: Although private industries have the technological power to all but count the lint in your pocket from space, our city government doesn’t even know how many public bathrooms there are — much less whether they’re open, working, accessible to everyone, or stocked with toilet paper.
Answering those questions, it turns out, is nobody’s job.
No. 1 for No. 2
As San Franciscans head out for the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping, they shouldn’t have much to worry about, relief-wise, because — believe it or not — SF has won praise as one of the best American cities for public restroom access.
In 2021, the U.K. toiletries company QS Supplies ranked San Francisco number one among U.S. cities. And the publication Smart Cities praised Pit Stop, the Department of Public Works initiative that pays attendants to look after public bathrooms in some of the city’s busiest neighborhoods.
QS Supplies claims SF has twice as many toilets per square kilometer as the second-place U.S. city, Oakland. If you’re skeptical of these laurels, you should be: Even if they’re true, we still sport less than half the stock of public facilities the United Nations recommends for a city in a developed nation.
Cities [once] were bending over backwards to build bathrooms. Mayors showed up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies and bragged about how much they spent on marble finishes and terra-cotta floors.
Bryant Simon of Temple University
The Frisc asked SFDPW how many restrooms the city has; spokesperson Rachel Gordon says the agency doesn’t know. DPW manages 31 Pit Stop locations, but that’s as far as the department’s authority goes.
Instead, oversight is divided among a grab bag of departments, including but not limited to Recreation and Parks, Muni, the public library, and BART (although most BART bathrooms in the city have been closed for so long that kids born after those doors locked for the last time in 2001 can legally drink now).
Gordon adds that this isn’t unusual for a large city: “I know of no other large, multi-agency jurisdiction” with a single restroom authority.
“You know it’s truly an underserved issue when even a regional government agency has not established a committee, a task force, or a staff-level working group to conduct a study,” says John Goodwin, spokesperson for the Association of Bay Area Governments. This is exactly the kind of issue a regional body like ABAG should at least be nagging Bay Area cities about — but by its own admission, ABAG is as in the dark as everyone else.
Naturally, the private sector has stepped in: The aforementioned QS Supplies pours user data into its Pee Place map, which estimated over 220 SF locations last year. It has since dropped to about 140. Other private apps report different numbers and locations.
In all, SF seems to maintain between 20 and 26 restrooms per 100,000 residents. While that’s great compared with the U.S. average of eight per 100,000, it’s less than half of the 50 that the United Nations recommends; we’re operating on the level of countries like Botswana.
Nobody wants to take charge says Carol McCreary, manager of the Portland-based activist group PHLUSH (Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human). “It’s not on planning, it’s not on health, it’s not on transit — so where is it?” she asks.
PHLUSH argues that the Department of Public Health should oversee restrooms (“It’s so obvious”), but it isn’t surprising that no department wants to raise its hand and say, “Yes, in addition to all of our other work, please put us in charge of every toilet in San Francisco.”
It’s also hard to find a City Hall standard-bearer for restroom reform, because as McCreary puts it, the risk-reward ratio for being known as the “toilet person” is not attractive for most politicians.
However, SF has had a couple public servants who didn’t mind the association. One was “Mr. Clean” himself, former DPW head honcho Mohammed Nuru, who was often eager to embrace the image of the city’s janitor. Then an FBI sting turned up Mr. Clean’s own dirty laundry.
The other was Sup. Matt Haney, who championed Pit Stops in his District 6 and elsewhere. Now Haney has a seat in the state Assembly, although he promises to keep taking the plunge for more toilets.
“San Francisco has restrooms that are not open, we have ones that are open for only partial amounts of time — we’ve built them knowing we need the capacity, and then we just keep them closed,” says Nate Albee, spokesperson for Haney. “Now we’re more known for shit in our streets than for the trolleys or the bridge.”
The golden bowl age
The bathroom burden, if you will, falls heaviest on vulnerable groups like the homeless, the elderly, those with disabilities, and those who work outside the home or office. Dominique Smith, a rideshare driver in San Francisco, says that for hundreds of drivers and delivery persons like himself, finding a handy bathroom in SF is “an absolute panic” during an average shift.
“It has been a gamble to ever venture into the city limits without a bottle nearby,” Smith says (extremely) frankly. “I was never ashamed of disappearing into an SF back alley” when all else failed.
It wasn’t always this way. Around 100 years ago, American cities enjoyed something of a restroom renaissance. “Cities were bending over backwards to build bathrooms,” says Temple University professor Bryant Simon, who is writing a book on U.S. restroom history. “Mayors showed up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies and bragged about how much they spent on marble finishes and terra-cotta floors.”
In those days, new lavatories were seen as important public works that beautified cities, eliminated health hazards, and increased civic pride. Historians blame voluminous factors for ruining the restroom rage: car culture, conservative politics, class warfare, and even Prohibition. (A lot of early restroom crusades were about keeping men out of bars, with their handy lavatories.)
The professor has his own theory: human nature. Once Americans had access to a semi-private space outside their homes, they inevitably started doing unsavory but entirely predictable things in there.
“Starting in the ’30s there’s a campaign to close bathrooms to stop gay men from having sex,” on top of vandalism, drug use, and of course straight sex work as well, according to Simon. “Once the ‘wrong people’ are associated with bathrooms, no one’s showing up at the ribbon cuttings anymore.” After all, “who wants to maintain a place of perversion?”
Well, probably lots of people we could name, but the point stands.
I’ve had media queries about toilet shortages in half a dozen cities just in the last three months.
Steve Soifer, president of the American Restroom Association
“Toilets are stigmatized,” says sociologist Harvey Molotch, co-editor of the 2010 book Toilet, “so we just close them and deprive everyone.” In San Francisco in particular, Molotch notes, restrooms are associated with homelessness. And when the public gets frustrated that we can’t solve the homeless crisis, we settle for shutting the homeless out of shared spaces through hostile architecture, loitering laws, and yes, bathroom closures.
The story of the public toilet in America is similar to that of every other piece of vital infrastructure: After a building boom in the 20th century, we’ve seen decade after decade of gradual decline, as the national tenor becomes less committed to public investment. Toilets aren’t as flashy as highways, bridges, and dams, so it’s easier to overlook their neglect — because nobody wants to think about it to begin with.
Oh the places you’ll go
Rather than a solution to a problem, restrooms are now perceived as just a problem in themselves. We live in an era when “public diseases can be brought under control,” Molotch adds, so as soon as we were able to have people shitting in the streets without giving everyone cholera, that’s what we set about to do.
Sometimes this plays out in tragicomic ways: Once upon a time, cities like San Francisco hosted countless pay toilets, but in the 1970s activists challenged these facilities in court. The assumption was that if you get rid of the pay toilets, the city will have no choice but to replace them with free ones — because you can’t very well leave people with nowhere to go, right? You know how that turned out.
In September, UC Berkeley researchers released the study “Somewhere to Go,” which concluded that “increased access to public toilets reduced feces reports in San Francisco, especially in neighborhoods with people experiencing homelessness.” Which, yeah, of course.
The researchers specifically focused on Pit Stop, SF’s system of paid bathroom attendants. The success only goes so far, though: There are but 31 sites, and of those, only nine are open 24 hours. Most are in the Tenderloin, leaving larger neighborhoods like the Bayview with only a handful.
Plus, all those attendant hours add up. DPW says a 24-hour Pit Stop costs over $600,000 a year, and the program overall is running nearly $13 million annually. That’s well spent if it addresses the problem, but it also means SF is probably not going to cough up the cash for another 100 to 200 sites citywide.
The good news is people might finally have started caring more. “I’ve had media queries in half a dozen cities just in the last three months” about toilet shortages, says Steve Soifer, president of the American Restroom Association.
“It got really bad during COVID,” Soifer recalls, with so many businesses closed that the lack of available restrooms stood out in a way it hadn’t in generations, maybe motivating some real public pressure. The $1.7 million toilet debacle in Noe Valley (now endowed with its own Wikipedia page), has embarrassed city leaders, but it also drew attention to the fact that even relatively rich residential SF corridors lack basic amenities.
“Don’t let government off the hook,” says Taunya Lovell Banks, professor emeritus of equality jurisprudence at the University of Maryland. “Get the city or some interest group to do a survey of all bathrooms in the city […] that are open to anyone without requiring a purchase.”
Without knowing exactly where to go, Banks argues, SF won’t know where it stands — or sits.