City bathroom debate has got to go
San Francisco’s housing discourse is in the toilet. Supervisor Matt Haney is preparing to do battle with Mayor London Breed’s administration over the number and placement of portable bathrooms serving the city’s unhoused and unsheltered residents. Opportunities for the supervisors to do anything about the conditions putting people on the streets, meanwhile, go begging.
At issue is the city’s complement of temporary public toilets for people sleeping on the streets, whose numbers swelled during the pandemic as the coronavirus endangered those in shelters and other group quarters.
With thousands rehoused in converted hotels and other accommodations, the administration has moved to decommission the portable privies. In the indelicate language of recently revealed emails among city officials, homelessness official Jeff Kositsky worries that “San Francisco attracts unsheltered people” and that the temporary bathrooms “lead to encampments” in a city the mayor wants to be “tentfree.”
Haney, who championed the pandemic potties, accused the administration of attempting to deal with the optics of homelessness at the expense of people’s basic dignity. He’s expected to focus on the issue in a hearing Thursday.
The supervisor’s emergency toilet deployment expired in September, and he is by his own admission still working on an extension. But he has a point insofar as the city should not try to address street homelessness by creating artificial bathroom scarcity. As the region’s cities and transit systems can attest, denying people public restrooms is a cruel and counterproductive tactic that will only force a certain number of them to relieve themselves elsewhere.
“It’s beneath a city as wealthy as ours to make people go on the streets,” Haney told The Chronicle.
More important, it’s beneath the city to make people live on the streets. The Board of Supervisors, unlike the mayor, has jealously guarded the artificial housing scarcity that puts rents out of reach of an outsize proportion of San Franciscans. Take, for example, the board’s votes in favor of more needless review of minor development, against moderate housing density and in support of killing construction that incrementally blocks the city’s inconstant sunlight. No wonder they’re more eager to talk about the outhouse supply than the housing supply.
As Kositsky notes in one of the disclosed emails, toilets don’t cause homelessness. The supervisors should keep in mind that they don’t solve it, either.