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Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This is Planet Money from NPR. We have all been there. Do you have a restroom I could use? No? No. You're walking around in a town, in a city, and you have got to go. So you pop into a nail salon.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
A public good. In economics, a public good is something that everyone can benefit from. And very importantly, one person benefiting from it doesn't stop another person from benefiting from it as well. Think clean air or lighthouses. Governments typically decide what to treat like a public good. And Rick says he would put public toilets on that list.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
The problem is the U.S. government has never fully embraced toilets as a public good. It's just not been a priority.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Toilets fall into this economic and legal netherworld. Where pay toilets are prohibited, the government is preventing the free market from solving the problem. But they also aren't treating it like a public good. They're not providing sufficient bathrooms to the public. And when they do, it can be the stuff of nightmares. Like this bathroom Rick once used in Central Park.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
In most places, there are some basic bathroom rights. There are building and plumbing codes requiring certain types of businesses to offer bathrooms. Or if you have a pressing medical need, you can get a card and legally access just about any bathroom. But most people don't know these rights. They don't know how to hold businesses accountable. Someone's going to have to enforce that, right?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Would you call this like a regulatory failure?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And the way, of course, that many of us fill that need is by paying, just not the way we used to.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Is it so bad? Is it so terrible? I think it's not a great idea. One, businesses can pick and choose who they let into their bathroom, and that leaves a lot of room for discrimination. Plus, a lot of businesses just don't want to be a public bathroom provider.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And now, every time she's out in the world, she's adding and subtracting from her bathroom map. We check out a dim sum place.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
So providing toilets has just fallen into this huge crack where some of our most complicated needs also get stuck, like housing, healthcare, education, somewhere between a market solution and a government one. The pure market solution would be to bring back pay toilets. Have a bougie $10-a-visit boutique pay toilet, Insta-ready with neon, music playing, oons-oons, fresh-cut flowers.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
If you're balling on a budget, You get fake flowers and you pay $2. And then there's the no frills, but you just gotta go option. That is 25 cents. But that wouldn't serve people who can't pay at all, like people without homes who arguably need them the most. The pure government solution would mean treating bathrooms like a true public good, something everyone can benefit from together.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
But that means convincing taxpayers to foot what can be a hefty bill. San Francisco infamously planned to buy one public toilet for more than a million dollars. So the search is on for the right blend of government and market solutions. tax breaks for businesses that allow the public to go, or tokens instead of quarters for bathroom locks, which would get around the ban on pay toilets.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Meanwhile, in the city of New York, they are no longer banned.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
In 2006, the city announced they'd add 20 pay toilets to the 1,000 or so public toilets in the city. They installed seven... And the others have been in storage since. Apparently, they're pretty hard to install and maintain. So does anyone have a quarter? Let me check. I don't think I do. Public toilet influencer and opera singer Teddy Siegel took me to see the very first one they installed.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Everyone just keeps nodding no, no, no. Now, Teddy isn't just a public toilet influencer. She is also a professional opera singer. Is there a toilet song?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
So this is it. This is it. One stall. off of Madison Square Park. A rectangular metal pod with what looks like an elevator control panel next to a sealed door.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And the occupied sign stays red for longer than 15 minutes. So maybe it's out of order? If you're new to Planet Money, there is more to us than just toilets. We also talk about trade deficits, tariffs and the egg shortage. New shows drop every Wednesday and every Friday.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Marianne McCune and it was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Sina Lafredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Big thank you to Rob Unterborn. I'm Erica Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And so in the middle of Manhattan, flanked by skyscrapers, while cars and people whiz by, she starts to sing.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris out here in these streets using crowdsourced maps just to find a place to go. Why is this a system we have? There could be a very simple free market solution to all this. We could pay to use a bathroom. Why can't we? Today on the show, we hardly have any public toilets in the US, but we used to, and we also used to have thousands of paid toilets.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This is the story of how they both went away. That is a satisfying flushing sound. It is.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
All right. No on the nail salon. You try a smoke shop. I'll try anywhere. I don't care. This is Teddy Siegel. And if you're out in New York City, Teddy's got your back. Are you a public toilet influencer?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
When I set out to understand why it is so hard to find a proper place to pee, I discovered two surprising reasons. Michael and Ira. Two brothers who grew up in Dayton, Ohio in the 1950s and 60s. What kind of kid were you? Were you like a mini beat poet?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This is the younger brother, Michael Gessel. He and Ira had this one pet peeve. Pay toilets.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Pay toilets? Like a pay phone? Think a bathroom, but with a lock on the door. You'd put in a dime and get to use the bathroom. And when Michael was growing up, they were all over the place.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Cities and businesses, they would lease locks from private companies so they could profit off of people's need to go. Newspapers sometimes published how much money the pay toilets made. Like at the San Francisco airport, they brought a net profit of $48,456 in one year, in 1960s money.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And these pay toilets have a fascinating, history. First, when cities started becoming crowded in the late 1800s with industrialization, immigration, there was this problem. Rich people had plumbing, but most other people did not. They just went outside. It was unsightly and diseases could spread.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
So cities started putting in free toilets, like in some places, little standalone brick buildings with signs that said comfort station. And pretty quickly, an idea for a new market emerged. In 1893, at the World's Fair in Chicago, pay toilets made their splashy debut. These toilets were an upgrade, Toilet 2.0. These paid toilets had luxuries like attendants and soap and towels.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And almost immediately, actually at the World's Fair, there was an uproar. These paid toilets were a lot nicer than the free toilets. But also... there were complaints about equity. Like, why were there haves and have-nots when it came to toilets? Well, the pay toilets took hold anyway. So by the 1960s, when Michael was a kid, there were about 50,000 pay toilets. They were the norm.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
She's being humble. Teddy's created this crowdsourced, publicly accessible Google map.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This was the era of civil rights, women's rights, rebellion against the status quo. Michael's rebellion was against pay toilets.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
There were still free public toilets, too. And men had the option of urinals, also free. But basically, you had these two tiers of toilets, nice ones you paid for or dumpier free ones. And in 1968, when Michael was 14 and Ira was 17, they decided they wanted to do something about it. They made their big plans on New Year's Eve.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Of all the places you can just walk into and use the bathroom.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Ira got his op-ed published in a school newspaper, and it caught the attention of other kids. Ira and Michael and some friends eventually started a club, the Committee to End Paid Toilets in America. Septia, you know, like septic. They published a newsletter called the Free Toilet Paper. They had a logo, a clenched fist clutching chains and rising out of a toilet.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
They wrote songs like the Talkin' Toilet Blues and the Ballad of the Pay Toilet. How did the Ballad of the Pay Toilet go? Can you sing it for me?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Churches, bookstores, hotels. Barnes and Noble is like close-ish that way. It started in New York and now includes the U.S. and a bunch of other countries. It's called Got2Go.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
They put out this resistance guide, ways to get around the locks on the pay toilets. There was the sacrificial lamb where you paid and held the door open for others. The American crawl where you slipped under the door. The club stopped feeling like just an outlet.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
There's an expression about that, right? Isn't it like piss or get off the pot?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Michael and his friends plan protests, boycotts, pressure campaigns. And this was coming soon after people pushed for racial desegregation in all kinds of facilities, including bathrooms. Bathroom equity was on people's minds in lots of ways. There were other small groups like Michael's, like FLUSH, Flush, Free Latrines Unlimited for Suffering Humanity.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Also around this time, feminists were pissed about the pay toilets. If urinals were free, why did pay toilets cost a dime? In 1969, there was a Down with Pay Potties protest. a huge crowd of people marched to the California state capitol with a brass band, waving signs that read, put up or flush up, and we don't give a dime.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
At the center of it all was then-California State Assembly member March Fong Yu.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
She is wearing a pink suit, black pumps. She has her hair teased in this perfect arc around her head. And she's speaking next to a toilet encircled by a locked chain.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And then she takes a sledgehammer to that toilet.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Pretty soon, newspapers started writing about Michael's Club.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
It all started a few years ago when she was new to the city. She was out shopping and needed to go, but no store would let her use their bathroom. Finally, she went to a McDonald's and they told her she had to buy something to use their bathroom.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
After a few years, Michael and his friends all went off to college and started club chapters in different cities. And in 1973, they decided to hold a press conference in Chicago where they spoke of biological function and discrimination and the indignity of pay toilets. By that time, there were already local officials in Chicago pushing to ban them. Some even came to Michael's event.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And soon after, the mayor banned pay toilets in public places in Chicago.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
We kept on going. Michael's movement went the 70s version of viral. Over the next few years, legislators in many states started banning pay toilets. Now, the pay toilet companies obviously hated this. So did businesses like Greyhound. They didn't want to offer free toilets that they would have to clean and maintain and stock. So they sued. They fought it.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
The biggest toilet lock company was called Nickel Lock. And in their lawsuit, they predicted what economists call an unintended consequence. They wrote that getting rid of pay toilets would actually encourage the deterioration and closing of the free toilets. But they couldn't stop it. At the height of paid toilets, when Michael was in high school, there were about 50,000 of them.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
By 1980, there were just about none. And just as Nickel Lock predicted, the public toilets started going away too.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This is John Cochran. He's got a blog called The Grumpy Economist. And he once wrote a post about how when the pay toilets went away, so did the public toilets.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Without that incentive, Nikolak was right. The free public toilets were overrun with people who had to go. Or people abusing drugs or having sex. Cities were changing. In lots of places, they struggled to fund and maintain public places. With no income from the toilets, taking care of them was harder than ever. Cities couldn't deal. Eventually, they closed them or let them fall into disrepair.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
The pay toilets may have been flawed, but they served a purpose that no public or private entity has been able to effectively fill since. John says... This is a classic tale of a price control. When the government imposes a price.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
This is a price control, I suppose, but they just got rid of all prices. Price control at zero. The price control at zero is exactly what Michael Gessel wanted when he started his fight a half a century ago. When the pay toilets started going away, what did you think would fill in that void?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
And when she did, the bathroom was just there, open, accessible to anyone. Like, she didn't actually have to buy anything. So she went outside and made a TikTok. Guilt-free places to pee in NYC. McDonald's. Then she made another.
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
Over the years, Michael has read critiques that blame his movement for the decline of toilets, even the decline of cities. Do you have any regrets?
Planet Money
Why it's so hard to find a public toilet
So who should be in charge of toilets? And we find our way to a modern version of a good old-fashioned pay toilet. That's after the break. Rick Weinmeier is a public health law professor at Loyola University in Chicago. And because he studies toilets, his friends are constantly sending him photos of the most delightful and the most disgusting stalls around the world.