San Francisco's public restroom program has been a huge success. Before the pandemic, San Francisco provided 24 public toilets, all staffed and regularly cleaned, with 3 of them open 24/7. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the city dramatically expanded the program using FEMA funds, bringing the total number of locations to 61, with 49 open 24/7.
According to the Department of Public Works, "complaints about human waste in public spaces around the Pit Stop locations have gone down" and "since the Pit Stop began [...] we have seen a steady increase in usage and a reduction in steam cleaning requests.” Each toilet gets used once every two minutes, on average.
But despite the success of the program, the 2021-2022 budget cuts the number of bathrooms down to 25 and eliminates all 24/7 bathrooms. Supervisor Matt Haney blames the Mayor, the Mayor blames limited funding, but in my opinion everyone shares some blame.
Bathroom Budget
The Pit Stop program was launched as a trial program in 2014, and made permanent in 2015 with an initial budget around $1 million. Under Mayor Breed's leadership, the program was expanded to 24 bathrooms and the budget increased to about $8.9 million, providing one bathroom facility for every 242 homeless people (roughly).
Enter the Covid-19 pandemic. Suddenly San Francisco had both the political will to increase services for the homeless and the federal funding to do it. The Pit Stop program grew to 61 locations, funded via $16 million in Covid emergency money. As the pandemic has wound to a close, and our homeless population has exited the high-risk category as they got vaccinated, the federal aid dried up. At the time of writing in June 2021, San Francisco is only operating 36 Pit Stops, with 14 of them open 24/7.
Mayor Breed has just proposed a budget for the 2021-2022 fiscal year that does not include any funding for 24/7 bathrooms and keeps the bathroom budget the same as it was in 2019 — $4.6 million. Supervisor Matt Haney has taken to twitter to complain about it, as he is apt to do.
Fund-a-Potty
On the one hand, it's reasonable that a temporary program returns to pre-emergency levels of service when the emergency ends and federal dollars stop coming. Indeed, the Department of Public Works highlights this as a main concern:
The department’s COVID budget includes funding to temporarily expand the Pit Stop program by extending hours at existing sites and adding new locations. Revised guidance from FEMA requires service populations to meet increased COVID risk criteria, therefore, the majority of Pit Stop expansion costs are not expected to be eligible for federal reimbursement.
But on the other hand… our city has a budget of over $13 billion and the $4.6 million it costs to run public toilets amounts to just 0.035% of our budget. In my eyes, this is shitty political gamesmanship playing with the dignity of everyone who needs to use these public restrooms.
The great irony is that Matt Haney's own Proposition B from the 2020 election, which needlessly breaks up the Department of Public Works, has an implementation cost of about $7 million — enough to double the number of public toilets and keep many open 24 hours a day. As outlined in the Tech Worker Voter Guide in 2020, Prop B just adds extra bureaucracy with no promise of better performance. His performative accountability for DPW is now having real consequences.
The 2021-2022 budget is being actively negotiated right now. On Friday, June 25 the Board of Supervisors' Budget and Appropriations committee discussed the budget and took over 9 hours of public comment. I have no doubt that the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors will come to an agreement to keep some bathrooms open 24/7, and hopefully even increase the number of bathrooms. But for something as basic as public restrooms, we shouldn't even be having this fight.
Look, I'm not demanding perfection, I'm not even demanding the government do a good job. I just think that one of the richest cities in the richest country in the history of the world should not be struggling to fund public restrooms. San Francisco Progressives have focused on solving fake problems like banning chain stores while ignoring basic necessities and the incredible suffering all around us.