User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in California

Public toilets in California are found at a rate of thirteen per 100,000 people. Laws were created around sex-segregation of public toilets in 1889. Later, more public toilets were built to improve health conditions. Public pay toilets were introduced by the 1950s, but were all but removed by the 1980s as they were viewed as sexist. Public toilets were heavily impacted by the covid-19 pandemic. Different localities in the state have different histories and densities of public toilets.

Public toilets
A 2021 study found there were thirteen public toilets per 100,000 people. Public toilets are often located in semi-private public accommodations like hotels, stores, restaurants and coffee shops instead of being street level municipal maintained facilities.

Cintas awards America’s Best Public Restroom. The ten 2020 finalists included the public toilets at The Guild Hotel in San Diego. It uses a blend of historic and modern elements.

Language
abdicate was 1970s era slang in San Francisco meaning, "to leave a public toilet following the arrival of the police." Enthroned meant, "sitting on a public toilet and cruising for sexual partners." Since 1994, bio-break has meant taking a toilet break. This word was introduced across the English speaking world as a result of the Internet. Euphemisms are often used to avoid discussing the purpose of toilets. Words used include toilet, restroom, bathroom, lavatory and john.

History
A statue was created in California was amended in 1889, requiring sex separation of toilets.

Railway stations began building big terminals in the 187s, 1880s and 1890s. One of their features were big public toilet facilities. Train station designer Walter G. Berg said in his 1893 that public toilet facilities should be used to keep undesirable elements out.

A lot of tenement housing in the early 1900s lacks toilet provisions. The Progressive Era saw reformists make a major push to address public hygiene. As part of this push, they sought to improve the toilet and sanitation in tenement housing in cities across the United States.

The 1950 Statues of California said, "Every person who loiters about any school or public place at or ear which school children attend, or who loiters in or about public toilets in public parks, is a vagrant, and is punishable by a fine of not exceeding five hundred dollars ($50) or by imprisonment in the country jail for not exceeding six months, or by both such fine and imprisonment."

Allentown, Atlanta, Detroit, Jackson, Lansing, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and San Francisco all began construction of public toilets in response to the passage of the 18th amendment and the resulting closure of public toilets in saloons.

Because of changes in attitudes and the country going in a more conservative direction, starting in the 1920s, public health officials began to advocate less for public toilets and improved sanitation as this was seen as primarily helping the less affluent. At the same time, these same public health officials were also often advocating for less privacy in public toilets, seeing it as counterproductive in their battle try to fight and track sexually transmitted diseases, especially among poor people and people of color. While maintaining privacy in public toilets had been a goal prior to that, it ceased to be by then.

The Works Progress Administration during the 1930s tried to increase access to public toilets across the United States. Their focus though tended to be on building such facilities in national parks and other civic areas, not at improving access in urban environments. In the end, they constructed 2,911,323 outhouses, which they officially called sanitary privies. Colloquially, they were referred to as Roosevelt rooms.

By the 1940s, many municipal governments in the United States found themselves in charge of running and maintaining local public transportation networks and the public toilet network that came with them. These toilets had historically had maintenance issues, problems with vandalism and other issues. To try to keep their budgets in check, many cities closed public toilets associated with their public transit networks. They were assisted in doing this by affluent people being less willing to pay to use these facilities, especially as they increasingly had toilets in their homes.

Most cities operated public toilets in the 1950s and 1960s were pay toilets. The fee to access these toilets was around a nickel or a dime, with the money earned being invested back into toilet maintenance and upkeep. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, public pay toilets were viewed by feminist activists as sexist because public urinals were free but public sit style toilets were not. The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, more commonly known as CEPTIA, tried to change this by getting municipals on public pay toilets. Their first success was in Chicago in 1973. This was then followed by municipal and state wide success in a strong of additional states including Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Wyoming. By 1980, coin-operated toilets had almost disappeared from the public landscape.

Most public toilets in public transit stations closed during the 1960s and 1970s as a means of trying to reinforce class privilege.

The 1962 case Bielicki v. Superior Court in the California courts found that stalls had to offer maximum levels of privacy for people to consider public toilets as places with an expectation of privacy. In that case, the stalls had no doors.

The Supreme Court denied certiorari in People v. Hensel related to police surveillance of public toilets in 1965. Smayda v. United States was a case at the 9th Circuit Court in 1965 related to police survelliance of public toilets. The police in a town in California, with assistance from the manager, observed three stalls in a men's toilets at Yosemite National Park. The stalls had doors that were 18 inches above the floor and the doors did not have latches. As a result, there was a minimal expectation of privacy. The police set up their surveillance on Saturday night after 11pm for a number of consecutive weekends where they photographed a number of male individuals engaging in homosexual activity, photographed them and then and charged them with violating the Assimilative Crimes Act. At court, a defendant tried to claim an expectation of privacy to suppress evidence. This was denied by the district court. The Court of Appeals also looked at that claim, deciding that the defendant had waived a right to privacy, that search was not unreasonable given the Fourth Amendment as police had cause to suspect a crime was going to take place, and that public toilets are not defined as a "house" so the police did not need to execute a search warrant. One of the judges dissented saying the police, by cutting holes in the ceiling, has an intrusion and the court in other circumstances had not found this type of activity a unreasonable search. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in Smayda v. United States in 1965, ultimately one of three cases that year which the court would deny certiorari.

California had an anti-public toilet loitering statue whose purpose was to prevent sexual activity from taking place in public toilets, which was viewed as "lewd and lascivious". This was eventually challenged at the California Supreme Court. Part of a California Supreme Court ruling in Pryor v. Municipal Court in 1979 related to cruising said that the public had a legitimate concern about what happened in public view by non-consenting people.

A 1987 survey of secondary school students from California, Michigan, the District of Columbia and San Francisco found a by location range  41.8% to 64.8% knew that AIDS was not transmitted by using public toilets.

Many public toilets were closed in the early 2000s as part of security measures following the 9/11 terrorist attack.

1,777 homeless people in the Skid Row of Los Angeles had access to only nine public toilets with nighttime hours in 2017. At the time, the United Nation sanitation guidelines said that for that rate of homeless people, there should have been eighty public toilets.

Women's toilets
Starting in the 1920s, middle and upper-class women living in cities stopped using public toilets, and instead shifted to toilets in facilities like hotels, theaters, train stations and department stores. While these toilets were free to use, the cultural expectation was that they would be exclusively used by clients or people who had purchased tickets. This helped ensure that these facilities were not accessible to working class women.

Because women were less likely than men to use public toilets in the 1910s and 1920s, many towns and cities made women's comfort stations smaller than men's toilets. Women's toilets also often had shorter hours because women at that time felt less comfortable being out on the streets at night.

As the 1920s waned and fears around lack of public toilets began to lessen as Prohibition became more the norm, the demand from citizens for more public toilets reduced as people grew used to making do and using private community toilets at places like hotels, restaurants, theaters and department stores instead. Women had also been very interested in this topic as part of their activism inside the Suffrage movement. As that goal was achieved, these groups often also lost interest in issues around public toilet access.

Then Governor Ronald Reagan criticized the 1973 Equal Rights Amendment, saying it could “degrade and defeminize women by forcing them to mingle with men in close, intimate quarters.”  He was referring to public toilet access.

The 1987  Restroom Equity Act said new public accommodation with toilet facilities needed to include more toilets for women, in an effort to compensate for the lack of women's toilets compared to men.

Governor Jerry Brown signed a law on September 29, 2016 saying all single occupancy toilets in public accommodation and government buildings had to be labeled as "all gender". The changes were required to be completed by March 2017.

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón was criticized in January 2022 after the case of then 26-year-old Hannah Tubbs, which involved just shy of 18 years by two weeks transwoman Tubbs assaulting a 10-year-old girl in the public toilet of a Denny's, saw the prosecutor suggest a sentence of a few months in a juvenile detention facility.

Accessible toilets
Disability activists protested outside the Health, Education, and Welfare  in San Francisco for twenty-five days in the 1970s, demanding more be done to support their rights to access public spaces. This included demands around public toilet access. They were supported by unions, Bay  Area  countercultural  groups and  Oakland’s  Black Panthers.

The Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990. Among other things, it talked about public toilet design.

Berkley
The public toilets at Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley closed during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fairfax
The AARP has given grants of over USD$70,000 to cities and towns including Biddeford in Maine, Delaware County in Ohio, Boulder County in Colorado and Fairfax in California to make their public toilets more accommodating to older members of their community by making them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Los Angeles
Los Angeles had 189 public toilets in 2021.

Los Angeles was one of the largest cities in the United States in 1950. Most cities operated public toilets in the 1950s and 1960s were pay toilets. The fee to access these toilets was around a nickel or a dime, with the money earned being invested back into toilet maintenance and upkeep. By 1980, coin-operated toilets had almost disappeared from the public landscape.

Hispanic women in Los Angeles were more likely in 1990 to believe that HIV could be contracted from public toilets than white women, at 60% to 53%.

The Los Angeles County Jail frequently punished women by restricting access to menstrual products. They also often lacked access to toilet facilities to change menstrual products.

Oakland
Oakland had 128 public toilets in 2021.

Sacramento
A protest was held at the California State Capitol in Sacramento on April 26, 1969 against pay public toilets. The toilets were viewed by protestors as sexist because public urinals were free but public sit style toilets were not. Assemblywoman March Fong Eu took a sledgehammer to a toilet during the protest.

San Diego
Starting in the 2010s, San Diego started installing toilets near its public beaches. Their public toilet investment though did not extend to downtown, where such facilities continue to be lacking.

In the period between 2017 and 2018, there were several outbreaks of Hepatitis A Virus (HAV) in the United States that were driven largely by a result of homeless people and rough sleepers not having access to proper sanitary facilities, often a result of a lack of public toilets and resulting in open defecation. In this period, 600 people in San Diego were diagnosed with having HAV of which 20 ultimately died of HAV.

San Diego had 179 public toilets in 2021.

San Francisco
San Francisco has some street level pay toilets.

A lot of tenement housing in the early 1900s lacks toilet provisions. San Francisco Mayor George R. Mascone said in 1976 of the newly elected District Attorney Joseph Freitas Jr.'s planned policy to decrease prosecution of prostitution, "If they spend their time eliminating violence crime, they'll have little time to worry about bordellos and peeking into the public toilets."

In the early 2000s, San Francisco started building new self-cleaning public toilets. The most common place to engage in open defecation in San Francisco in 201 was between two parked cars. There were stand alone public toilets in San Francisco in 2019. San Francisco had 228 public toilets in 2021.

San Jose
San Jose had 204 public toilets in 2021.