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Anson Stevens-Bollen

SOL

Why can’t cities—including Santa Fe—solve the public restroom issue?

by

I don’t have high-resolution medical imaging to prove it, but I’m confident I was born with a comically small bladder. Wherever I go, whatever I do—whether I drink a lot of fluids or I don’t—I generally need to pee. This is TMI for some people, I’m sure, while others will urge me to see a doctor. But it’s been this way all my life.

Point being, I’m a fan of convenient and plentiful public restrooms. The more the better. Sadly, this seemingly reasonable civic amenity is about as common as straight answers from presidential candidates or sound urban zoning policy in American cities—a couple of things that are decidedly unicorn-ish. You’d think the kind of community health and hygiene standards befitting a wealthy “developed” superpower of a nation such as ours would translate to being flush with flushing-based facilities. Not so.

According to a global index of public toilets compiled by British company QS Supplies, Iceland leads the world in providing public toilets, outpacing the United States by more than 700%. The US doesn’t even tip toward the top 10 in a world public-toilet tally. We are, in fact, locked in a dead heat with Botswana for the number of restrooms available per 100,000 people. Reporting on this imbalance last year in The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote, “The lack of public restrooms in the United States isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a sign of America’s failure to invest in communal necessities for the collective good. But progressive leaders at the local level have the power to change that.”

Indeed, in 2022, Santa Fe opened a new public restroom downtown to much fanfare over the long-sought sanitary solution, as well as criticism over the eight-year timeline and the $1.1 million cost. And, for what it’s worth, New Mexico bests the national average of eight public restrooms per 100,000 people by having 11 per 100,000, making the Land of Enchantment less Botswana and more Taiwan on the toilet front. These modest achievements count as progress, if not precisely as progressiveness.

“The downtown restrooms have been a resounding success,” City of Santa Fe Facilities Division Director Sam Burnett says. Burnett oversees a custodial crew in the Public Works Department that maintains the city’s properties. “My team is on site an average of three times per day,” he says. “And we get a lot of positive feedback on the presence of the restrooms and on how well-maintained they are.”

Despite this clear win, currently no plans exist to emulate the facility anywhere else in the city, nor to increase access to existing units such as those at the Railyard Park, which were closed for everything but special events following issues with vandalism. There are no permanent 24-hour facilities in the city.

This situation ultimately means my mini-bladder and I are frequently—to crib an adjacently appropriate phrase—SOL. Even so, this predicament is usually a minor inconvenience because I got a whole passel of privilege in my pocket.

As someone who can pee upright because of my biologically preinstalled extension tube, I am privy to a number of benefits not provided to people who pee more easily from a squatting or sitting position.

Gendered public restrooms with multiple stalls typically assign the same square footage to his and hers, but include more options (urinals) for Y chromosomes, which is the reason one line tends to move faster than the other. In cities with pissoirs, I’ve got no worries. These free-standing, modestly shielded pee pits are more common in Europe and are likely relics from when only men were expected to be out drinking, which is why everything about them is engineered around genetic expectations that favor my parts. A full bladder in Amsterdam is never that stressful for anyone able to swing their urethra around. And, as everyone’s urban nose knows, there’s the ability to quickly slip behind a bush or a settler colonialist statue and mark the territory.

I also have secure housing that includes indoor plumbing and a connection to a public sewer system. I’m able to use the restroom before I leave and depend on a private, sanitary space waiting for me when I return. And, although I may be belittled in the bladder, I have no diagnosed conditions that increase the sudden and urgent need for a restroom. In an older-than-average city (the median age in the US is 38.5 but in Santa Fe, it’s 44.5), such conditions should be a real consideration.

What’s more, I’m lucky enough to have disposable income. If I need to buy a charming tchotchke or a frickin’ frappucino in order to access the restroom of a private business, I can. Finally, I’m not toting around toddlers or infants, so I’m free from the unpredictable but ever-pending need for a washroom that trails children like a poopy specter.

All of which is to say there are many people for whom access to a public restroom is less a matter of convenience and more a matter of necessity, dignity or both.

Would you believe the United States was once a cornucopia of community commodes? It’s true. During the Industrial Revolution, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, churned out steam engines, farm equipment and socialists. One of the latter, Emil Seidel, wound up as the Socialist Party of America’s vice presidential nominee on the 1912 ballot alongside Eugene Debs. As the mayor of Milwaukee, Seidel was known for being a so-called “sewer socialist,” because he and his cohorts believed the reform of public works was more compelling than revolution.

Public health improvements in Milwaukee, through efficient city-operated water, power and sewer operations, were soon emulated nationwide. In Santa Fe, we celebrate the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal for its artistic legacy, but the WPA helped cement the expectation of public sanitation by building 2.3 million “privies” throughout rural America. Cities were eager to get in on the action but, as ever, budgets were tight. Luckily, a British stage magician had invented the coin-operated toilet and this ingenious scheme resulted in the proliferation of pay toilets. By 1970, the US housed 50,000 of the damn things.

Not only were they not free, pay toilets were actually an affront to freedom. Men were allowed a standing pee at no cost, while sit-down toilets required a toll. Feminists noted this discrepancy and, in 1969, California Assemblywoman March Fong Eu used a sledgehammer to destroy a porcelain toilet on the steps of the state Capitol to protest this asymmetrical tax. Around the same time, a group of students in Ohio decided a paywall to poop was unacceptable and began a campaign of grassroots graphic design and clever poetry to convince lawmakers to act. And it worked.

There are two key takeaways from this period of ass-centric activism. First, politics used to be way more fun. Second, righteous outcomes can have deleterious results. As state after state banned pay toilets and the units were decommissioned, they were replaced with…nothing.

Since the disappearance of widely available—if somewhat gatekept—toilets, many ongoing pain points highlight the lack of public services. The plight of parents of young children is common everywhere, and tourist towns like Santa Fe have felt a constant pressure to solve the restroom problem. Prior to settling on the current location of the downtown public restrooms, Burnett recalls city leaders weighing various options including a portable trailer unit, which was favored by tourism officials, and a more permanent industrial option. Branded “the Santa Fe loo,” one of the primary intentions was to alleviate the crush of tourists searching for release.

“In the end the units couldn’t meet certain standards,” Burnett says. “They couldn’t satisfy the historic design review.”

According to City Council meeting minutes from January 2018, the Historic Design Review Board was indeed unwilling to approve the units Public Works considered a viable option, which might just be the most Santa Fe thing ever. Presumably those sticklers for historic accuracy would favor the more straightforward and classic open trench down the middle of the street.

Even in tourist centers, however, nothing has crystallized the need for public washrooms quite so acutely as the nation’s cascading crisis of homelessness. The unhoused population in the United States has been increasing by double digit percentages each year. On a winter night in 2023, more than 650,000 people in this great nation went without shelter. In 2020, the Harvard Civil Rights Liberties Law Review railed against the lack of public restrooms.

“Aside from denying unhoused people the dignity of basic hygiene, the low supply of public bathrooms poses health risks,” the Review claimed.

Outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego in 2017 and 2018 caused the death of 20 individuals and illness for at least 600. The San Diego County Grand Jury, convened to investigate the matter, concluded lack of public toilets and handwashing stations was the primary cause of the outbreak.

Way back in 1990, a group of unhoused individuals sued the City of New York and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, claiming lack of access to public toilets was a civil rights violation. The result was a few years of concerted effort and the brief appearance of a few “European-style” toilets before the initiative was strangled in the strongest material on earth—red tape. Still, municipal legal departments everywhere should, by now, be clued into the relationship between lack of services and actual liability.

The COVID-19 pandemic taught cities to scramble on many fronts, including toilets. The most practical quick-fix was the increasingly ubiquitous “porta-potty.” Like other cities, Santa Fe increased its reliance on portable toilets during the pandemic and has since become more strategic and thoughtful about the placement of such units. As SFR has reported, the Interfaith Community Shelter, which runs Pete’s Place on Cerrillos Road, in March began operating a twice-weekly mobile hygiene unit, which has three shower and toilet stalls—one handicap accessible—and has now begun looking for a new Southside location.

“We feel very strongly about government’s obligation to people and to the social contract,” City of Santa Fe Public Works Director Regina Wheeler says. “We’re striving to provide the highest level of service we can with the resources we have.”

The City of Santa Fe currently contracts with Albuquerque-based AAA Pumping Service, Inc. to provide portable units. Wheeler and Parks and Open Space Division Director Melissa McDonald are both aware that portables aren’t anyone’s perfect solution, but say that replicating more full-service brick-and-mortar units like the downtown facility just isn’t in the cards for now.

“We’ve increased the number of portable units we’re deploying this year,” McDonald says. “And we’ve started to place units at trailheads as well as city parks. We’re working hard to accommodate the need.”

The city contract with AAA Pumping costs $135,400 per year for four years. In addition to supplying the units, AAA services them three times per week. No portable units are available in the winter months between Nov. 15 and March 15. It’s tempting to point out the eerie correlation in costs and timing: The 24 stalls in the downtown restroom took eight years and $1.1 million, while eight years of rented portable toilets at the current rate will also cost over $1 million.

“It’s not just the brick-and-mortar cost that’s prohibitive,” Wheeler says. “We know we’ll fail with permanent restrooms if we can’t fully staff them, and that’s another significant ongoing cost.”

Challenges to managing public toilets are real. Both the city’s custodial staff and the Parks and Open Spaces crews have received training to be qualified in handling and managing hazardous waste and materials. Sleepy, charming, Condé Naste tourism sweetheart Santa Fe has the same challenges as everywhere else: intravenous drug use, sex work, vandalism and too much heart-breaking need competing for too few tax-payer dollars.

“The permanent facilities are so often vandalized,” City of Santa Fe Public Information Officer Regina Ruiz says. “In contracting out for portable units, we don’t have to use our staff and our funds to repair and manage the situation—the contractor owns the units, cleans the units, replaces the units and we just pay the one set fee.”

Anecdotally, when I once telephoned AAA Pumping as a citizen to report a vandalized unit, the woman fielding calls explained to me that managing portable toilets is no picnic. Vandalism is frequent, including units being set on fire and run over by vehicles with inexplicable frequency. Still, the portable toilet business is a growth industry, worth as high as $22 billion last year and expected to double in value in the next decade.

If a proliferation of plastic, portable toilets meets the basic needs of Santa Feans, does it meet our community goals and values? They won’t be serving as tourist bait in glossy magazine features or getting the internet influencer treatment like Japanese restrooms with mesmerizing color-changing glass. And there’s little doubt the Historic Design Review Board would decline to endorse the units, despite their tendency toward dull uniform coloring.

The plastic panels of portable toilets are heat-formed from polyethylene resin pellets, an extractive petroleum product that is filling our waterways and our bodies with microplastic residues. The pumping trucks that clean and supply these units are large diesel-powered vehicles trekking from Albuquerque three times per week to deal with our waste. This can’t possibly be in line with Santa Fe’s earnest aspirations to be a leading green city. Of course it isn’t, McDonald acknowledges. But the fundamental work of government is always the balance of resources, she explains. And in this case, at least there’s a positive trade-off.

“The portable units do have a significant water savings over bricks and mortar facilities,” McDonald says. “And water conservation is something I’m always mindful of in our environment.” It’s worth noting McDonald has significant career expertise in resilient water management systems, even prior to assuming her role at the city.

Even when we go the extra mile to “be the change,” countervailing forces can intervene. The one composting toilet the city has installed, at Las Soleras Park, isn’t allowed to actually compost because of state regulations. Instead, the waste is carted off in yet another internal combustion pump truck before it has half a chance to drift toward fertilizer. At the local level, we need to figure out how to stop passing the muck, as well as the buck.

There are two great social dynamics working as braided forces against better restrooms. One is the tendency of bureaucracy toward stasis over active change and the default of constant low-grade triage over the heavy lift of meaningful problem-solving. The other is the citizen tendency toward whininess and a grievance-based democracy that rarely allows for the patient work of consensus-based changemaking and the fulfillment of policy backed by data rather than ill-informed demand.

The us-versus-them mentality that divides this nation as starkly as the lines in our flag is also a defining feature of controversy around public restrooms. A clear disconnect is that many people who want more public restrooms also want those restrooms to be unavailable to those who are most in need of them. One comment on the Santa Fe New Mexican’s July 2022 coverage of the newly opened downtown restrooms reads: “...the homeless, panhandlers and buskers need to be kept away from the new ones. Arrested if necessary.”

As we head into national elections this November, it’s worth considering how both political stasis and voter behavior need to change if we’re going to alter the path our nation—and our cities—appear to be stuck on.

People vying for elected office need to be more substantive than pandering to fears—of immigrants, of unhoused people, of taxation, of authoritarianism, of women’s bodies—and present clear, inspirational visions rooted in attainable policy for moving us into a better future. And voters need to set aside kneejerk nearsightedness and demand responsible lawmakers deliver the appropriate application of regulation and resources. These two sides of representational government need to operate as intended if we’re ever going to cure the most constipated of current issues and get to the bottom, as it were, of our most intractable challenges.

Until then, we’re literally left pissing in the wind.

Zane Fischer previously served as both an editor and writer for SFR and has written for numerous regional and national publications. Learn more at zanefischer.com.