San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Supervisor pushes for more public 24/7 toilets
Bola Mydrs, who has lived on the streets of San Francisco for 20 years, now resides in a bluetarped tent outside Boeddeker Park in the Tenderloin.
Before the pandemic, when Mydrs had to use the bathroom, he went to a gym south of Market or to nearby businesses. But when those closed, he depended on a cityrun public bathroom a block away – especially overnight.
The toilet started operating around the clock under a pilot program extended by Mayor London Breed two years ago – but under her proposed budget, it would revert to daylight hours only. While Breed has expanded locations and hours for public bathrooms in the past, her proposed budget would not keep any temporary toilets that popped up during the pandemic and would end overnight hours at three locations. Her department heads said the reasons were scarce resources, fewer homeless tent encampments and more indoor facilities reopening.
“They say it’s funding. But we’re out here. We’re using the restrooms. It’s going to go back to a s—hole,” Mydrs said as he sat calmly on the
edge of his tent. “Where would people go? That’s the milliondollar question.”
Supervisor Matt Haney, who has crusaded over the past of couple years to put more bathrooms on the streets, plans to answer that question with $3 million a year set aside to add five sites, which would bring the total to 30 across the city, and make five sites 24/7. Some locations have more than one toilet.
He said you can’t put a price tag on dignity.
“There are huge costs to a filthy, inaccessible city that are much higher than the costs of these bathrooms,” Haney said. “Access to bathrooms is a human right and that the provision of clean, safe and accessible bathrooms is an essential part of any ... modern city.”
Breed’s proposed program budget was $4.6 million annually for 25 toilets, none 24/7. Haney, who will hold a rally at Boeddeker Park on Friday, has asked the mayor to add five more new bathrooms and five more 24/7 bathrooms on top of her proposal.
Breed told The Chronicle on Wednesday she was looking at the data to see usage before she directs more resources to public bathrooms as budget negotiations continue.
City officials have praised the free toilet program and say more are needed in general, but differ on whether they’re critical to fund right now as the city reopens. Breed grew the number of public bathrooms from three locations in the Tenderloin in 2014 to 24 before the pandemic. Two years ago she also expanded a pilot program to make three locations 24/7 until the next budget cycle. When the pandemic shut down San Francisco, including homeless shelters, the city increased the number of public restrooms. By May 2020, the city had 31 temporary sites — now it has 11. One more permanent site was added during the pandemic.
The most highly trafficked sites have tracked up to 200 flushes a day over the past year.
The Department of Public Works, which runs the toilets, said the removal was due to lack of money. The eyepopping price tag ranges from just over $100,000 to nearly $632,000 a year to staff and rent a toilet depending on hours and type.
Toilets set up for COVID relief cost a total of $12.9 million until May 2021, with $2.5 million reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It is a very expensive program, we simply just didn’t have the money to run and keep all those units up and going,” Public Works acting director Alaric Degrafinried told supervisors during a recent hearing.
But emails from earlier this year in public records requests also show that Jeff Kositsky, head of the city’s Healthy Streets Operation Center, which responds to tent encampments, pushed Public Works to remove toilets after encampments were cleared to prevent people resettling in an area. In one email, Kositsky wanted it done before the city’s tent count, which showed a reduction in the number of tents on sidewalks this year.
Degrafinried told supervisors fewer toilets were needed as encampments were resolved and “it wasn’t necessarily true to say we were under pressure from HSOC.”
Public Works would determine the best locations for the new toilets based on usage data, Haney said.
Public bathrooms aren’t only used by people living on the streets. Matt Ploscik, formerly homeless, now lives a block away from Boeddeker Park, and said once when the shared bathrooms in his single room occupancy hotel were broken, he used it at night.
“We need more places,” Ploscik said outside the toilet. “Not just in impoverished or ghetto areas, but if you’re walking down the street at 2 a.m. Businesses are not open 24/7. This isn’t a 24/7 city. There’s nowhere to go.”