1 week Ago By New York Daily News Editorial Board
On one of the most basic of human needs, access to a toilet outside the home, New York City gets pretty miserable marks. To the rescue, in part, comes the City Council, with a bill adopted this past week . In the time of the Founding Fathers the privy was also known as the necessary, being so instrumental to every person.
At George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia there were several such necessaries on the grounds . What they knew about biology hundreds of years ago still applies, but while George slept here often during the Revolutionary War and when New York was then the first U.S.
capital under the present Constitution and he was president, there is a dire dearth of public toilets in New York. Understandably, it’s literally illegal to urinate or defecate outside, a sanitary proscription that must be obeyed and enforced. The flip side of that prohibition ought to mean that it’s easy to find a clean and relatively pleasant place to take care of a person’s needs.
It hasn’t been, not for years. Public toilets are few and far between, and even when they’re technically open, they’re frequently disgusting. This Editorial Board has been banging the drum for better treatment.
“Let my people go,” we wrote in 2022; “Going on the go,” we wrote in 2023, cautiously praising the partial reopening of subway bathrooms; “Good to go,” we said in 2024 as Mayor Adams unveiled a new map cataloguing places where one might find relief. To repeat ourselves, New York City has long been pitiful in the public potty department. A 2019 report by then-city Comptroller Scott Stringer put the number of city toilets open to all at 1,428, the vast majority of them in parks and playgrounds.
More conservative counts say 1,100. Very few of those include changing tables for babies or are accessible to people in wheelchairs. How do these numbers compare with lesser cities? Not well.
With just 16 public bathrooms per 100,000 residents, we’re far behind flush-with-bathrooms Buffalo (84 per capita), Pittsburgh (86 per capita), Cincinnati (125 per capita) and Milwaukee (113 per capita). And none of those places are magnets for commuters and tourists. The new bill sponsored by Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, which passed the City Council on Thursday, would put in place a plan to increase to 2,100 the total number of publicly available restrooms in the city, with many of the new ones added via incentives encouraging the private sector to get in on the game.
It costs way, way, way too much to build and renovate public toilets; a 2019 study put the average construction price tag at $3.6 million. Modular loos in parks, which the city was testing out a couple of years ago, cost a ridiculous $1 million a piece .
Fortunately, the mayor and his administration have made some progress cutting costs. The Department of Design and Construction this year touted an upgrade of 25 restrooms for just (“just”) $9.7 million.
Officials need to find ways to drive those costs ever lower. But while that’s happening, let’s find smart ways to bring more johns online. A city of nearly 9 million people can only hold it so long.
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