The economic and social costs of the demise of public restrooms
In the early 1900s American cities acknowledged the need for public toilets and started building facilities that were clean, comfortable and well marked. By 1940 there were restrooms in all of New York City’s 1,500 parks while the subway had 1,676 toilets and conducted regular inspections. Today there are a mere 78 public toilets in New York’s 468 subway stations. Sometime after mid century, the public restrooms of the nation’s cities started into a precipitous decline.
Portland, Oregon was no exception. Many Portlanders have childhood memories of downtown restrooms such as the one in Pioneer Courthouse Square. They were used by everyone and staffed by friendly attendants, who also received tips. “You’d get done, they’d hand you a towel — everybody left happy,” remembers Old Town Chinatown’s Howard Weiner while speaking to a journalist. “I don’t know about you, but I miss that.”
Today Portland’s Downtown Clean and Safe program is responsible for cleaning downtown’s remaining public restrooms and well as for responding to clean up calls. This program of the Portland Business Alliance has a contract from Portland Parks and Recreation and puts people to work providing a valuable service to city and citizens. Clean and Safe maintains public restrooms at a number of locations in the downtown core:1) On W Burnside in the North Park Blocks; 2)in Pioneer Courthouse Square; 3) under the west end of the Hawthorne Bridge, 4) on South Waterfront at Riverplace, 5) on SW Clay opposite the Ira Keller Fountain 6) in Lownsdale and 7) Chapman parks, which are bounded by SW 3rd, Madison, SW 4th and Salmon as well as the new Portland Loo on NW Glisan at 5th.
In 2005, there were 3000 emergency clean up calls for human waste
Clean and Safe cleans these restrooms two to four times a day and pressure washes them once a week. The facilities are open from 8 am to 11 pm. Keeping restrooms clean is an ongoing challenge at all sites. Staff as the Travel Portland information desk check the restroom in the Information Center at Pioneer Courthouse Square every 15 minutes yet it’s still hard to keep it clean. The restroom gets very heavy use with many people stopping not only to relieve themselves but for personal grooming.
Apart from scheduled maintenance of public restrooms, Clean and Safe responds to 6000 calls a year from people who call for emergency clean up services in public areas. About half of all calls are in regard to human waste throughout downtown and about 75% of these calls are in the Old Town Chinatown area.
There are approximately 2250 requests per year from citizens for clean up of urine and excrement in public places in Old Town Chinatown. And these calls probably represent only the tip of the iceberg; they are from the people who know whom to call and take the time to do so.
Both the scheduled maintenance of public restrooms and emergency clean-ups are expensive. Clean and Safe currently run their work program with twenty full time employees and at a cost of $10,000 per month.
The need for emergency clean up of human waste is largely due to a lack of access to public restrooms. Old Town Chinatown is the transportation hub for the entire city and the Heart of Portland in all senses of the word. Our businesses – from our renowned social service organizations to our lively clubs and restaurants – serve a 24/7 clientele. It is the nature of a pedestrian and bicycle-friendly neighborhood that people are continuously moving though public spaces. Visitors, customers, residents and workers all need access to sanitary facilities, just as they do to amenities such as sidewalks and street lighting.
In sum, the lack of public restrooms engenders a spiral of economic costs ranging from clean up costs to the loss of foot traffic that hurts business.
The social costs and the attack on human dignity.
In addition to these economic costs, there are heavy social costs. Human dignity is compromised: no person should have to relieve himself or herself in a public place and be subjected to public harassment, law enforcement or a potentially physically threatening situation.
The best way to understand the affront to human dignity that accompanies limited restroom access is to listen to the citizens who have experienced homelessness. The following conversations were recorded at Sisters of the Road Café in the course of research for the book Voices from the Street: Truths about Homelessness from Sisters of the Road.
I don’t know what the laws are here, but I know when I gotta go, I gotta go, and I’m gonna find a tree to go behind. And every time I do it, I say, “Oh boy. Please don’t let me go to jail tonight.
But what is a woman to do when she has to use the restroom at night-time, in the middle of the night, when everything’s closed up? And then, she goes and squats and uses the bathroom, what are you supposed to do? “Oh! You’re urinating in public!” Thousand-dollar fine. What am I supposed to do, hold it ‘til five or six o’clock in the morning, when something opens up? I mean, this really needs to be taken a look at it, it really is, it’s something really serious…….. it’s time to sit at a table and look at it, and do something about it.
Basically, I…I would not eat or drink because I was afraid that that I would not have a place to the bathroom, that is…that is another really terrible thing when you are homeless. I have been kicked out of places, even a bar, I was about to go into the bathroom and they came and grabbed my arm and said, “You’re out of here, you’re not a client here, you can’t go to the bathroom here,” and I was told in quite a few places….., that I could not come in there anymore even though I used to phone also, so it is pretty humiliating.
Those people caught breaking “civility laws” are arrested and fined. When they cannot pay the fine, they suffer added indignities and consume judicial resources. When homelessness is criminalized, people striving for a better life suddenly face new obstacles to finding employment and housing. Leaving citizens in poverty is an affront to the human dignity of everyone in society
