User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Michigan

Public toilets in Michigan are found at a rate of eleven per 100,000 people. They have been part of battles related to addressing public health issues, to class class discrimination and related to institutional sexism.

Public toilets
A 2021 study found there were eleven 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.

History
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.

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. A lot of tenement housing in the early 1900s lacks toilet provisions. Detroit was one of the biggest cities by population in the United States in 1900.

In the 1900s and 1910s, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Toledo, Worcester, Salt Lake City, Providence, Binghamton, Hartford, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Portland and the District of Columbia all built underground public toilets, most located in the city center in the local business district. The prestige of building underground public comfort stations was so high that some towns and cities who were unable to afford underground public toilets opted for none instead. By 1921, the city of Detroit said that the operating costs of underground public toilets was around USD$15,000 each. Some of this was a result of problems with sewer lines, wastewater and leakage.

As the Prohibition effort began to take more shape in the 1910s, large cities in the Northeast and Midwest had women's groups advocating for the creation of large numbers of comfort stations as a way of discouraging men from entering drinking establishments in search of public toilets. This was successful in many places in getting cities to build comfort stations, but the volume of new public toilets built was rarely enough to meet public needs. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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 city 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. Detroit was one of the largest cities in the United States in 1950. 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.

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.

A case was brought by the Michigan ACLU against a prison related to the restriction of menstrual products and private toilet access by incarcerated women. After one woman in the case asked for additional menstrual products, the guard yelled at her, telling her she better not bleed on the floor.

Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming sued the Obama administration in July 2016 over the administration's requirement that children be allowed to use school toilets based on their gender identity instead of their sex.