It's Impossible To Pee Legally In San Diego

By MacKenzie Elmer, the Voice of San Diego

December 3, 2024

I can rarely find a decent pot to piss in around San Diego. And becoming pregnant made this more obvious.

I recently waddled into a new coffee shop near Balboa Park only to find it outfitted with a placard that read: No public restroom.

“Is that the case for paying customers?” I asked the staff. “Unfortunately, yes.” they told me.

I had two choices: Hold it until I got home or waddle toward the park’s public bathrooms. A security squad car sat parked outside the public ones. That didn’t appeal to me in my current state.

I left for home feeling a bit like Jesus’ mother, turned away at the inn after many uneven miles atop a donkey. I bet she really had to take a leak.

Then the denial enraged me. Not only are San Diego’s public restrooms few and unreliable, but now I can’t pop a squat after buying a coffee. So began a furious Google search for some kind of state law that reserved peeing privileges to those disabled by a disease, a medical device, or a baby. Jackpot. In 2023, AB 1632 passed requiring businesses to permit access to the employee toilet for people with various medical conditions (mine included) or face a civil penalty.

My protruding baby bump apparently wasn’t enough evidence for the baristas. The law permits business owners to require evidence of my condition. So, begrudgingly, I got a note from my doctor. But I’m too embarrassed to use it. No one should have to carry documentation proving they’re scientifically less capable of holding it in.

Other neighborhoods in San Diego softly ban going to the bathroom. I’ll own up to squatting over a bush or two in Windansea after dark when all private business bathroom access has closed. Arrest me and my fetus.

San Diego’s got such a bad reputation for restroom access nationwide that Bryant Simon, a professor at Temple University, studied San Diego for his upcoming book on the life and death of the public restroom.

“Bathrooms have been used over and over again to exclude and disappear people,” Simon told me. “When we close them, we remove upsetting people” from society.

In the 20th Century, those upsetting people were men who used public stalls for sexual escapades with other men. So began the first wave of bathroom shuttering. Next, bathrooms were used to segregate Black and White people. Recently, Republicans in the House backed bans on transgender women from using female bathrooms on Capitol Hill. And nationwide, San Diego included cities shutter or curfew public restrooms to deter homeless people.

“With no public restrooms, people who are unhoused have to rely on the streets and what you get eventually is an outbreak of a disease that affects everyone,” Simon said.

San Diego knows this well. Outbreaks of hepatitis A in 2017 and Shigella in 2021 among the population have been blamed on the lack of places to go. Investigative grand juries four times chastised the city of San Diego for its inadequate public restroom system, our Bella Ross reported back in 2021.

Mayor Todd Gloria’s Office “categorically rejected” Ross’ conclusion that the city struggled to address the public restroom issue, pointing to 23 public restrooms downtown. The office released a map of all available public restrooms and handwashing stations. To me, the map shows you’re pretty much screwed unless you’re on the west side of downtown or hanging out in Mission Bay.

Just because a bathroom exists doesn’t mean it’s open all the time, clean or in working order. Homeowners living near parks spend a lot of time complaining about public restrooms and push to get them closed or never built. In October, maintenance crews found the public restrooms in Pacific Beach on Fanuel Street smeared with feces and its toilet ring holders were stuck with needles. Parents told NBC 7 reporters they don’t allow their children to use those stalls which stand near a playground.

I talked with parents at the bathroom-less Trolley Barn Park, a slice of greenspace accompanied by a jungle gym in University Heights, who said they let their kids pee in the park bushes or ask the bars nearby for bathroom access. When the city suggested adding bathrooms in 2022, homeowners nearby poured out with signs reading, “no poo in our park,” claiming the mere addition of toilets would attract unsavory behavior and unhoused individuals. A few weeks ago, I heard another story of a young girl using the public toilet at Robb Field whose private time was horrifically invaded by a Peeping Tom.

What’s more, the cost of building new public restrooms is insane. There’s the case of the Portland Loo, prefabricated, single-stall metal restrooms, the city tried to build next to Petco Park. The final cost estimate was half a million dollars. Another example: the famously expensive, alphabet-themed bathroom on the downtown waterfront which cost $2 million to build.

Searching for revenue to build bathrooms, this year the San Diego City Council suggested challenging the state’s ban on charging for public restrooms to pursue a fee to pee. The backlash was swift. Homeless advocates called the move an inhumane toll on the unhoused. The proposal never made it anywhere.

I asked Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, a fee-to-pee proponent, whether he still thought it was a good idea.

“I understand why the initial law was put in place but the consequence is no public restrooms,” he said. “Being able to recover some costs for maintenance would be the difference between people having access to restrooms or not.”

As American cities hemorrhage public porcelain, people rely heavily on the private sector to answer their call of nature. And that means more inequality, Simon, the professor at Temple University, said. Starbucks famously retreated from its open restroom policy around 2018 citing worker safety concerns. In April of that year, police arrested two Black men waiting for a business meeting inside a Philadelphia store after one man asked to use the restroom, and an employee said he had to purchase something or leave.

Simon, who also wrote a book about Starbucks, said the chain’s policy change is a soft way of reinstituting the concept of the pay toilet.

“They’re just charging latte prices,” he said.

I typically buy something to justify my trip to the bathroom at a private business, purely out of guilt. But lately — my trip to the “no public restroom” placard-bearing coffee shop as the latest example — it seems paying for a coffee isn’t enough to get you access to the facilities.

I found desperate bathroom seekers flocking to San Diego Reddit threads looking for “secret poop spot” recommendations. People shared they too feel guilty walking through a business to do their business without buying anything. Previously reliable johns at fast food chains are monitored by cameras or require a door passcode. (I now keep a list on my phone of bathroom passcodes at San Diego businesses I frequent. Even some that I don’t.)

Simon put it this way: We’ve eroded this public amenity to such a degree that we’re all equal now in that nobody can find a bathroom no matter who you are.

The solution?

We need to build bathrooms that fit as many bodies as possible, Simon said. And fast. Our health is at stake.

“We have to recognize this is a public health issue that affects us all. San Diego has had this experience, and that’s a pretty good reason why it should be a leader,” he said.

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