Sex, drugs and filth plague city-sponsored public restrooms
Prostitution and drug use aren’t what San Francisco bargained for 14 years ago when it allowed a private company to install public restrooms across the city. But among the 25 freestanding units, several have been routinely closed for a week or more because they were regularly hijacked by junkies and sex workers.
Even when used by legitimate patrons, the toilets have been hard to keep up to modern sanitary standards. Most of the so-called “self-cleaning” toilets are now so filthy that even after automatic cleanings, they require one to five manual scrub-downs each day.
How messy are we talking about? One indication: Homeless people in the Tenderloin say they are so repulsed by the conditions inside that they avoid using the bathrooms, preferring to relieve themselves on adjacent sidewalks, alleyways and bushes.
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Drugs are commonplace in the units, as they serve as convenient, private spaces that cannot be unlocked from the outside — ideal for getting a quick fix. In more than a dozen visits to four public restrooms over the last month, a Public Press reporter found two where hypodermic needles were strewn across the floor.
There are also clear signs of prostitution at a bathroom just beyond the balcony of Mayor Ed Lee’s office — even during business hours. At the self-cleaning facility in Civic Center Plaza, just steps from City Hall, the automatic door stayed open just long enough for one man to come out and another to go in, while a woman who remained inside entertained each for up to half an hour. (Rules posted on the bathroom limit occupancy to one adult at a time, with a 20-minute maximum.)
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But the network of city toilets isn’t as clean as city officials had first promised. What was intended to be a service for poor residents without access to basic hygiene, as well as a relief for tourists, has become a health hazard for undaunted patrons and the staff who clean and maintain them.
Robot janitors not enough
The facilities are designed to clean themselves during a 55-second automatic cycle in which a cleaning solution is sprayed on all inside surfaces. But the bathrooms weren’t designed for the job of cleaning up after drug users who leave needles and the other paraphernalia behind, or those who disable the doors by wedging them shut from the inside. The loads of garbage and human waste that end up everywhere often remain, soaked with detergent, until a human janitor bags them.
Public Works spokeswoman Chan insisted that the city was not responsible for the maintenance, cleanliness or safety of the facilities. Rather, it is written into the city’s 20-year contract with JCDecaux that the company must keep the facilities in a “clean, graffiti-free, safe, and first-class condition” by providing “the necessary personnel to assure the maintenance of Automatic Public Toilets.”
As a result the facilities, which frequently go in and out of service because of mechanical trouble, trash or police activity, are shuttered by the city. For residents of low-income, high-density neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin, that means the closure of the only bathrooms available to the public at night.
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Community activists say the filth is equally distressing. Dina Hilliard, interim director of the North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District, which advocates for better public services in the neighborhood, said that in their current condition, the city’s public bathrooms are not a safe option.
“Those of us who know them don’t want to use a bathroom like that,” Hilliard said. “You don’t know who is going to be inside or who is going to greet you when they come out.”
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When Vongseni arrives each morning at the City Hall bathroom, he usually encounters broken toilet parts that need fixing, five or six drug needles and often an inexplicable amount of excrement spread everywhere.
“Every day it’s a huge mess,” he said. “There’s poop on the floor, poop on the wall.” He said the maintenance crews “get together after work and complain. We don’t know how they do it.”
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The toilet at City Hall is among the most heavily used, with maintenance records clocking in just over 500 uses in two days over a recent weekend. But Vongseni said the other two public restrooms in the Tenderloin, located at McCauley and Boeddeker parks, are equally unclean.
Wedged between a small fenced-in children’s playground and the New Century strip club on Larkin and O’Farrell streets, the McCauley Park facility is frequently trashed. At 11 a.m. on a recent weekday, a pair of pink-striped children’s underwear was found stuffed beneath feces in the metal toilet bowl. The restroom receives about 70 flushes a day, and despite being serviced four to five times daily, it is constantly abused.
Because of the number of complaints of illicit activities after hours, the city ordered JCDecaux to close the McCauley Park restroom between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.
“It helped a little bit, but I think it’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality,” said Adam Solarzano, director of operations for JCDecaux. “The cops could help us, but they don’t.”
The other bathroom, at Boeddeker Park at the corner of Eddy and Jones streets, just opposite the Tenderloin Police Station, stayed closed for three weeks over February and March due to construction. It then reopened — only to see a return to its state of misuse.
