The city of San Diego recently closed 13 public restrooms in Mission Bay, near some of San Diego’s most beloved beach areas. Due to public outrage, the restrooms will reopen this Friday. This is great news. A day at the beach will no longer include a scavenger hunt for restrooms. Those of us with overactive bladders, enlarged prostates, or mobility restrictions will have more options to meet our basic bodily needs. But this issue is far from solved. Other parts of our city still urgently need increased public restroom access.
We are researchers with the Project for Sanitation Justice (PSJ) at San Diego State University. Our team is composed of SDSU students, faculty, and community members who believe that access to restrooms is a human right, a public health imperative, and a prerequisite to full participation in society. We maintain a map of public restrooms across San Diego County. We identify areas of our region that lack sufficient public restroom access for their population demands. We call these areas “sanitation deserts.” But in order to do this analysis, we need to have accurate information on where public restrooms exist and are open. This is a harder task than one might expect, especially in a city like San Diego that chronically refuses to take this issue seriously.
Our team started independently mapping restrooms in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when city officials closed public facilities like restrooms and then were slow to re-open them, impacting essential workers like delivery and rideshare drivers as well as people experiencing homelessness. We discovered that of the 18 cities within San Diego County, only half provided public information regarding where public restrooms exist within each municipality. Some cities, like San Diego, provide information, but it is inaccurate.
As San Diegans, we should know that access to toilets and handwashing facilities is a matter of life and death – a mishandled hepatitis A outbreak in 2017-2018 killed 20 people and sickened nearly 600; a shigella outbreak in 2021 sickened nearly 50; unspecified gastrointestinal illness sickened staff and residents at a Safe Sleeping site. Our region’s leaders keep claiming they’ve learned the lesson that public restroom access keeps our community healthy. Apparently they have not. In downtown San Diego, public restroom access has significantly decreased from just three years ago.
Five separate San Diego County Grand Juries, in reports issued in 2004, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2023, documented these concerns and made specific recommendations for addressing the issue. The most recent Grand Jury report in 2023 and the city’s response to the report agreed at the time that in the downtown area, 15 public restrooms were available 24/7. These facilities were a mix of permanent (built) restrooms and porta-potties. PSJ field research indicates that number of 24/7 restrooms in downtown is now one.
The funding for porta-potties and handwashing stations that were brought in during the uptick in hep A cases in 2023 was partially cut last year, and eliminated entirely in this year’s budget. The next to last permanent 24/7 public restroom – located at Civic Center on 3rd at C – was a casualty of last year’s budget cuts. It is now open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., daily. The last 24/7 permanent public restroom in downtown is located at the St Vincent de Paul shelter at 15th and Imperial.
During daytime hours, restrooms can be accessed by the public at the Central Public Library, the 12th & Imperial Transit Center, and the Neil Good Day Center – until it closes at the end of the year. Restrooms advertised by the city as being open at The Legend and at Faultline Park have been closed for many years and locked as a matter of policy, respectively.
Downtown is a sanitation desert – it lacks the basic water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure to support its residents and visitors. Closing public restrooms doesn’t stop people from needing to use them. It doesn’t stop people from being human. This is true whether the people are tourists and beach goers in Mission Bay, or people who live and work in Downtown San Diego. It is true whether people are experiencing homelessness or real estate moguls.
Tracking public restroom access accurately matters, and our team will continue to do so until our local leaders take this issue seriously. In the coming months, our team will be inviting the San Diego community to join our mapping team as citizen scientists. Join us. Visit public restrooms in your neighborhood and help us track their basic features and operating hours. Help us ensure our web map is as accurate as possible. Show our San Diego leaders that our community cares about our access to public restrooms, public health, and human dignity – even if they don’t.
Megan Welsh Carroll, PhD, MSW, is a professor of Public Administration and Criminal Justice at San Diego State University. She lives in El Cerrito Heights.
Anna Mewkill, MS, recently completed her master’s degree in Geography at San Diego State University. She lives in North Park.
Yashvi Sanam studies Quantitative Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She lives in Poway.