Potty paucity: private providers offer relief to those who need to relieve themselves.

Visitors to the US—particularly those from Europe—have long criticized the Stars and Stripes for the dearth of public restrooms in tourist-rich urban districts: only about 8 per 100,000 people.  This ratio places this US on par with Botswana, but also Netherlands, Georgia, and Poland (so it’s not a uniquely American program, to all those Eurocritics).  Nonetheless, even if other countries suffer similar sandbox scarcity, the general perception (one to which Americans are typically inured) is that, if you gotta go, you wait until you reach your destination, whether it is a museum, landmark, restaurant, hotel, or retailer.  And, if you can’t wait, the potty paucity forces you to find the closest coffee shop or convenience store.  Meanwhile, if the loo is located in the latter two options, where “restrooms are for customers only”, you buy the cheapest item on the menu and absolve yourself of any angry admonitions among staff for simply using the commode without giving them any business.  That’s just how it works here.

This potty paucity has earned an elevated notoriety through the public’s increasing awareness of the lack of restroom options, especially for an ever-growing homeless community in American cities, who private businesses rarely encourage to use their facilities.  As recently as 2017, I was horrified when I learned that the Bay Area had developed a smart phone app that allowed people to report and georeference evidence of human fecal matter on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco (or Oakland or San Jose or where homeless were prevalent).  I’m not sure which repulsed me more: the fact that this famously tech-savvy region had blithely formed ranks to develop apps for such a (bodily) function, or that such a wealthy yet persistently unaffordable region suffered such homelessness that public defecation had become commonplace. 

What can I say?  I was wet behind the ears.  As both housing non-affordability and the opioid epidemic grew, the Bay Area merely served as the epicenter for this public defecation crisis, but San Francisco had fierce competition in the form of Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland—the West Coast has always suffered the worst homelessness, but it certainly isn’t improving in hot climates like Phoenix or cold ones like Minneapolis.  (I witnessed a homeless encampment in Fairbanks in 2021.  Yes, that’s Fairbanks, Alaska, where the first snowfall usually hits at the beginning of October and the snowpack sits until April or even May.)  COVID regulations hit the job market hard, forcing more people into unemployment, drug dependency, or both, to the point that homeless encampments and the accompanying public defecation morphed into a crisis affecting cities large and small.  Aside from the axiomatic unpleasantness of seeing human waste on the sidewalk, an accompanying problem to public defecation was the rise in Hepatitis A or shigellosis outbreaks, largely caused by people not washing their hands after relieving themselves.

(Meanwhile, Starbucks, long recognized as the “closest coffee shop” that allowed people a bio break in cities with a pronounced potty paucity like Manhattan, declared in 2018 an “open-door policy” for anyone on the street to use their shops and restrooms and shops to relax and relieve themselves, even if they purchased nothing…including homeless.  By 2022, the mega-chain had to close at least a dozen locations, mostly in prominent downtown spots, because of safety concerns that emerged with not excluding the non-paying.  And by January of 2025, Starbucks eliminated its open door policy altogether.  Gotta pay to use their privies.  And to even lounge around.)

As COVID restrictions eased, the subsequent economic improvement helped reduce the prevalence of encampments, though it may have more to do with city-driven crackdowns on loitering or public indecency indicative of widespread public disapproval of open drug use and defecation.  But the ratio of public restrooms remained terrible, including the nation’s capital, in tourist-rich areas just a stone’s throw from the Smithsonian Museums and the National Mall. 

Such a mismatch undoubtedly explains this fairly recent installation at Indiana Plaza in Washington DC, directly north of the National Archives and adjacent to an identically named WMATA Metro Stop.

Throne, the brand embodying a free bathroom for anyone who needs it, certainly doesn’t blend in with the surroundings, which I’m sure is the point.  While many public restrooms are moderately adopt an aesthetic to shroud the unpleasantness of “doing one’s business”, Throne appears to visually assault the drab winter street corner with its bright colors: a blue and white that are rare in both nature and city building façades.

It wants people to know it’s there, and the City of Washington DC, having resolved through a 2023 ordinance to finance a public restroom pilot in areas with concentrations of homeless people—including Indiana Plaza—partnered with Throne Labs, the private contractor/provider of the eponymous blue-and-white boxes.

By the DC Pubic Restroom Initiative’s own admission, many features help make Throne Labs a strategic solution to the potty paucity:

1. Absence of water/sewer connection requires little costly infrastructure.
2. They are easily movable if a certain location proves unsuitable or achieves little impact (a direct byproduct of feature #1).
3. Private contractors have a cost incentive to do a good job at servicing and maintaining the facilities; they will lose the contract (and associated $) if they fail at this.
4. They are private and exclusive, so people can manage other biological functions with tact and discreetness.
5. They are solar-powered and require a light electrical load, so they can operate “off-grid” without the need for a generator.
6. Sensors prevent abuse (vandalism and or physical damage), while timers prevent misuse (inappropriate or illegal activity within the locked, opaque restroom facility).
7. Visual and audio features further prevent deviant behavior: the walls use laminated vinyl and dense wallpaper patterns, while the mirrors feature a quick-peel veneer, all to prevent graffiti and scratchiti.  Music playing inside the toilets further enhances privacy, reduces criminality, and encourages people not to stick around.
8. Maximum accessibility: ADA compatible for wheelchairs and the visually impaired, with baby-changing tables inside.

The DC Initiative awarded the contract to Throne Labs in February of 2024, flagging Indiana Plaza as one of the six optimal pilot locations.  What makes Indiana Plaza so appropriate?

The roughly trapezoidal plaza, where Indiana Avenue NW, Pennsylvania Avenue NW, and 7th Street NW all converge, offers considerable architectural interest with its eclectic diversity of buildings presiding over immaculate brick, shade trees, historic markers, and clever picnic benches in which the seats double as swings.  

But the area lacks a great deal of uses that would generate foot traffic outside of business hours.  The handsome 19th century buildings in the above photographs are all empty on Saturday mornings, when I took the photo.  And while a few restaurants front Indiana Avenue NW, they don’t attract enough business to remain open much on weekends, nor do they seem all that stable; lots of tenant turnaround.  And, as previously mentioned, directly opposite the plaza is the Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter WMATA Metro Stop.  No public restroom exists at this stop.

Indiana Plaza is an area that many workers pass through on weekdays, but the comparative lack of activity or energy makes it a more desirable spot for loitering than much of downtown.  The lack of oversight—combined with virtually no defensive urbanism to deter loitering— translates to higher-than-usual tendencies for vagrants and homeless to dominate the seating.  Furthermore, relatively few storefronts or retailers compound the potty paucity in the immediate vicinity.

In short, the Plaza contains all the elements that might encourage loitering and public defecation, so the Throne is an immediate deterrent.  But does it work?

Access is moderately high-tech: the preferred method is to use smart phones to scan a QR code, which then enables a URL that allows a person to send a request, thereby granting him or her digital access.  Texting to a phone number is another option, or directly calling.  For those who ask the question, “What about homeless and the indigent, who lack smart phones?”  the answer is twofold: 1) many homeless do still have smart phones and 2) those that don’t can obtain tap cards at libraries, shelters, or social service providers.

Okay, so it seems Throne Labs has thought of everything in winning these City contracts to address the potty paucity.  But I, ever the contrarian, can still identify a few distinct iatrogenic side-effects to this beneficent provision:

1. Lack of a plumbing-based wastewater solution means that waste will accumulate and become unpleasant during periods of high usage
2. Single-use configuration creates an unmonitored interior; it would be illegal to do so.  An inside a Throne, illicit activity can still take place, particularly if one person “holds the door open” for another—not just amorous trysts but an exchange of contraband.
3. All of these bells and whistles, which help make Throne feel safe, clean, and appealing, cost a lot of money.  Budget crunches and a dispute on contract renewal forced the District to close the Thrones temporarily last summer.
4. Many cities cannot justify the expense of round-the-clock maintenance, so they are not usually 24/7.  Portland and Philadelphia started addressing the potty paucity long before DC, but hours are typically only a bit longer than the typical shift: from 8:00am to 7:00pm, which means those who “sleep rough” have no place to go overnight, when they might need it most.

The six DC locations for Throne are unequivocally a chance to move the marker in the right direction, but—forgive the expression—they’re a drop in the bucket (or can?).  This tremendous public cost earns its partnering private contractors loads of money, and it effectively overwrites a history that, these days, only Boomers and older are likely to remember all that well.  In terms of public restrooms, through much of the 20th century, American cities were actually quite accommodating.  Temperance movements, public health, and social reform all helped spawn the proliferation of public restrooms in the early decades of the 1900s, including tens of thousands of coin-operated toilets in American centers.  Roosevelt’s New Deal spawned many more “comfort stations”.  For a good half-century, the typical American city suffered no potty paucity, and most cities efficiently maintained them by charging a small fee to enter.  I will concede that I’m of the generation that associates “pay to pee” with my time in European cities.  Even the latest initiatives like Throne Labs are free, so that urban America’s poorest citizens have a place to go.  But it’s understandable that a Yank like me was indignant when I had to shell out a euro to gain access to a public privy; by the 1960s and 1970s in America, contemporaneous battles over racially segregated spaces, clandestine gay encounters, and overall decline of downtowns all combined to galvanize the collective notion that public restrooms were unsanitary and unsafe.  New York’s MTA had over 1,500 public restrooms in the 1940s; eighty years later, there are fewer than 100.

So is this restoration of public restrooms through contracts with private providers a like-for-like solution…a harkening back to mid-century when public restrooms were easy to find?  Not in the least.  Modern urban America is paying orders of magnitude more (even when adjusting for inflation) to get virtually nothing.  But the even sadder reality looms large: by the early 1990s, American cities had no public restrooms, yet they also had no problem of public defecation.  Homelessness wasn’t as pervasive, nor was opioid addiction (the biggest cause of homelessness today), and a prevailing public disgust toward the indecency of public defecation translated to strict enforcement.  The much smaller homeless population of 1995 had proportional social services and resources, which prevented them from overwhelming public libraries, train stations, or Starbucks the way they did by 2020.  Or the devastating freeze on interior social services that spawned something akin to Hoovervilles in the early days of the COVID pandemic lockdowns.

No abatement to entropy.  It does not reflect highly on an advanced society if it begins to shrug its shoulders toward public defecation—a condition which Americans and Europeans previously associated with overpopulated, developing countries like India.  Yet the problem has grown in the US and Canada (with spikes in drug addiction), as well as unattended homeless needs in those European countries that have never faced a potty paucity.  For all the technological sophistication Throne Labs and its competitors might offer, they belie the deadening of a social stigma regarding indecent behavior in public, juxtaposed with its counterpart: an inability to manage homelessness and the addictive behaviors that predicate its most chronic manifestations.  When budget crises hit a place like DC and the City puts padlocks on the door to a Throne, what next?  Indiana Plaza, at the very least, offers an irony to the potty paucity, barely visible in the photo below:

See the four-story brick building, just to the left of the Throne?  And in one of those first-floor windows, is there a green round thing?  Even if browsers make it hard to zoom in, it’s pretty to easy to guess what it is.  I bet they were happy to see the installation of Throne.