Bathroom Breaks
Why is it so hard to find a bathroom in American cities?
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I was jogging one morning when I suddenly had to shit.
It was early, predawn, and the world was dark but for the sodium-nitrate glow of the street lights. Muted in the fog, they cast the world in a shadowy haze of orange.
I was running around Oakland’s downtown lake, alone but for the other early risers exercising or headed to work. Ensconced in ochre gloom, a twisting tightening twinging in my guts.
The body will usually negotiate. You can haggle with those lower functions: ignoring hunger to feed your kids first, squirming against your bladder during an endless Zoom meeting, abstaining from pooping in the McDonalds ball pit. Basic adult stuff.
Hunger, fatigue, micturition, and yes, defecation—these can be bargained with, deferred until the appropriate time and place.
But not always.
Sometimes the urge announces itself like a wealthy buyer, whose opening bid blackjacks the auction. It strikes: intestine, sharp, and unyielding. Pressure—expanding and enveloping; pressure—acute and mind destroying; pressure—an inside that wants out. And, dear reader, that pressure was happening to me.
But where to go? Several bathrooms along Lake Merritt were not far off. But were they open this early? To chance a foray toward a potentially locked stall risked precious minutes, and the enemy was at the gates. There was only one guaranteed bathroom available, one I knew would be open—the one in my apartment nearly a mile away.
So I paused, steadying my peristaltically seizing innards, and trotted toward the porcelain respite of home.
The End of American Bathrooms
My skepticism about an unlocked bathroom was warranted. While public facilities were once common in the United States—public toilets proliferated during the reformist health measures of the Progressive Era and a wave of New Deal construction of “sanitary privies”—budgets for common restrooms were cut as public space was racialized and politicized in the 1970s and 1980s. Neglected restrooms in subways and central areas became, and remain, sites of drug use.
It’s not just a story of urban disinvestment. A sizable nail in the coffin of the public toilet came from the political left. Pay toilets, which charged a token fee of a few cents were the target of a feminist campaign that highlighted the inequity of charging coins to use stalls but not urinals. Many states and cities banned pay toilets in the 1970s and these coin-based facilities were never replaced.
Even highway rest stops, the last bastion of public toilets in America’s car-crazed culture, are feeling the budgetary squeeze. An extreme example is Colorado, which shuttered an astonishing 28% of its highway rest stops between 2007 and 2016.
So when America’s urban housing crisis reached feverish levels of hardship during the pandemic, it’s not surprising a flurry of media coverage focused on the lack of public bathroom facilities in American cities.
As the poor, the vulnerable, and the unwell clustered in encampments beneath underpasses, along rail lines, and at the edges of parks, detritus spilled into view. People living on the street, means people defecating on the street. And this became a sign of social decline in American cities.
Why is it that a pile of human feces on the sidewalk signals that society has gone off the rails?
Bathroom’s Civilizing Effects
Norbert Elias has an answer. A German sociologist, Elias explored the seemingly mundane social processes that shape individuals through the interactions of manners, etiquette, and comportment.
Within Elias’s most famous work, The Civilizing Process, was an exploration of the evolution of shame and embarrassment in tandem with broader shifts in societal norms and values. As societies grew more complex, Elias observed a corresponding emphasis on cleanliness, bodily decorum, and self-discipline, reflected in the adoption of strict hygiene practices and norms governing bodily behavior.
So as the burgeoning urban landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries brought forth a pressing public health need to manage the bodily functions of burgeoning populations by investing in public sanitation infrastructure, municipalities also aimed to instill a sense of order and decorum in communal spaces, even as they mitigated health risks.
Public toilets emerged as arenas of social regulation and bodily control, where adherence to established standards of cleanliness and etiquette was expected. Public defecation became obscene.
We now imbibe and internalize these norms which are instilled from from childhood and reinforced through education, social pressures, and legal mandates governing public conduct. The gutter is no longer for shitting.
Such norms are what compelled me to hold on through uncomfortable mincing steps in Oakland’s morning gloom, sphincter in high duress.
Walk-jogging through agonies, I spotted a sleek, metallic bathroom. It was a recently installed Portland Loo, a couple hundred yards away. Salvation! I clenched for one last shuffle. Waddling, innards in a state of climatic tension. Stride by stride. Closer with each step. Reaching the door in a gasp, I fumbled for the handle and . . . it was locked. Out of options. Out of time.
Embarrassed, ashamed, already leaking, I squatted between some bushes. Eyes darting back and forth, animalistic, feral. I worried someone would amble past as bowels emptied and urban green space was besmirched.
“The real cost of a public bathroom is not building a bathroom—it’s the upkeep.” So noted The Hustle on the effort to build more public toilets. Maintenance isn’t cheap, which is why the toilet was locked when I tried to use it.
Human anatomy doesn’t turn off at night, but keeping a toilet open is expensive. The city of Sacramento estimated that keeping its city hall restrooms available 24 hours/7 days a week would cost $341,500 annually. The cost of restoring five 24-hour bathrooms in San Francisco would cost $600,000.
This is real money, a bill we taxpayers would have to pay. Such expense makes it tempting to think public restrooms are a subsidy for faceless others. We fret at the cost, rationalizing it as wasteful spending for someone else, not us.
But at some point you, your parent, or your kid are going to be like me. They’ll need a public bathroom. In an op-ed Nicholas Kristoff observed, “Taxi drivers, delivery people, tourists and others are out and about all day, navigating a landscape that seems oblivious to the most basic of needs. The same is true of parents out with kids.”
The same is true of me. And the same is true of you. It’s not a matter of if you’ll find yourself in need, but when. We’ll need a bathroom break with essential infrastructure for us all.
Thanks for reading.
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Great story and well plotted points. My son has a disability that greatly impacts his continence and ability to regulate or communicate his poop- related needs. Knowing where there is a toilet has been an unexpected source of distress in our lives. We’ve also learned a lot about saying, fck it, and digging a hole 😂 not so easy when he’s a teenager though.
I wonder if some of the costs are a result of some form of concentrated harm. When public restrooms are few, the ones that exist will bear the brunt of drug activity and other gross things requiring extensive monitoring and cleaning. But if they are common, the typical bathroom doesn’t get destroyed on the regular.