NY Times Op-Ed on Public Bathrooms: Just a Starting Point for the Real Discussion

Advocates and electeds must start to grapple with the costs behind public restroom proposals

In her NYT Opinion piece yesterday, Leah Goodridge mentioned privately owned public spaces (POPS) bathrooms as a potential solution to NYC’s lack of public bathrooms. In my most recent post, I argued that POPS bathrooms are neither a scalable solution nor a reasonable expectation, given how difficult it is to build in NYC already.

I agree with Leah that NYC needs more public restrooms 🚽—but who’s covering the bill? Today, it costs over $3.6M to build a public bathroom in the city, and I’ll dig into annual maintenance costs below.

I agree with Leah’s main point, which is that NYC needs more public restrooms. Her op-ed is giving this issue the attention it deserves– keeping it top of mind for electeds and the community. Her writing is the type of advocacy that’s needed in order for change to actually happen.💪

But her solution is too simple. She says: “The government should fund and build [public restrooms].” I’ll propose that this is where we need more nuanced discussion. Everyone agrees that we could use more public bathrooms– no one’s advocating against them. The reason we don’t have them is that the cost is currently unworkable. Given that the cost is unworkable, what tradeoffs are we willing to make to bring the cost down and then pay for it?

In my next post, I’ll share more about why it’s so expensive to build a public toilet in NYC. Today, I’ll take a stab at maintenance costs.

I couldn’t find stats on NYC public bathroom maintenance costs, but in 2017, NYC’s best public bathroom, the Bryant Park one –which is privately funded– cost $271K to maintain:

The upkeep of the bathroom runs to $271,000 annually, which includes $27,000 for 14,040 industrial-size rolls of single-ply toilet paper and $14,160 for flower deliveries. The bathroom attendants earn between $25,000 and $30,000 a year.

Bryant Parks’ public bathroom is widely celebrated as the best in the city

That’s $350K in today's dollars. Regular public bathrooms are not as fancy as Bryant Park’s– so let’s estimate that a regular public bathroom costs just a third of that to maintain. That’s still $117K a year per bathroom. There’s a bill before the City Council that would require at least one public restroom for every 2,000 residents. At our current 8.3M residents, that’d be 4150 public bathrooms, which (by my math) would equate to at least $486M in maintenance costs per year.

Again, I’m with Leah. I have a small bladder, I like to stay hydrated, and my favorite activity is walking around NYC. I’m here for this proposal for more public bathrooms!

So how do we propose to cover that $486M per year?

• Raise taxes?

• Put ads in the bathrooms?

• Charge bathroom users?

• Decrease businesses’ taxes if they allow the public to use their restrooms?

• Use technology like self-cleaning toilets?

The real question is not whether or not to build more public bathrooms, but how to fund them in perpetuity.

The City Council is expected to vote on this bill in 2025. Before they mandate thousands of additional public restrooms, they should be able to let us know the cost of maintenance, what are the factors that determine cost, and how the city will cover that cost. All new spending has tradeoffs, so let’s start the conversation now about what we’re willing to give up in exchange for convenient pee stops.