User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Texas

Public toilets in Texas, commonly called washrooms, are found at a rate of around three per 100,000 people, one of the lowest rates in the United States. Pay toilets started being introduced in the 1950s, were phased out by the 1980s but began to reappear in some places in the 2010s.

Racial segregationists policies have played a role in public toilet access. In the 1970s and 2010s, there were fears about men accessing women's toilets.

= Public toilets = washroom is one of the most commonly used words for public toilet in the United States. Euphemisms are often used to avoid discussing the purpose of toilets. Words used include toilet, restroom, bathroom, lavatory and john.

A 2021 study found there were three public toilets per 100,000 people, one of the lowest rates in the United States. Houston had 107 public toilets in 2021. Fort Worth had 95 public toilets in 2021.

San Antonio has experimented with pay toilets, including street level European style toilets. The toilets were installed at a cost of around USD$100,000 each and without a public consultation. The goal in installing them was to make it so businesses did not need to have the expense of operating their own public access toilets.

Cintas awards America’s Best Public Restroom. The ten 2020 finalists included the public toilets at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The airport did extensive renovations to deal with conditions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic, including making many things touchless and avoiding crowding. Stalls were also fitted with lights to let people know if they were occupied. The second 2020 finalist included the public toilets at Swift’s Attic in Austin. The toilets are gothic themed.

History
Railway stations began building big terminals in the 1870s, 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. In the South, this included colored people.

Because Prohibition saw an increase in the construction of public toilets to address the new found demand, many municipalities located outside the South built sex-segregated public toilets that were essentially the same construction inside, with the same number of stalls and layout for each. In the South, public toilet facilities tended to have four toilet sections that reinforced racial segregation, one for white women, one for white men, one for colored men and one for colored women.

In 1915, the city of Dallas built an underground public toilet that was racially segregated. There was a push back against building public toilets in Jim Crow states during the period between 1865 and 1960, because it meant that local governments were not just required to build two toilets, one for men and one for women, but four toilets, one each for men and women who were white and who were colored. Racially segregated public toilets were very common in the 1960s.

Houston was one of the largest cities in the United States in 1950, at a time when most major cities operated public 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.

When NASA was designing toilets for the space program in the late 1950s, they had considered throwing solid waste out of the capsules. In the end, they determined this would be diplomatically unacceptable so that plan was not followed through.

The Denison Dam Reservoir at Lake Taexoma successfully applied for an appropriation from the Subcommitte for Appropriations for Civil Functions Administered by the Department of the Army, Certain Agencies of the Department of the Interior, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1959, from the US Congress. They were seeking USD$250,000 for, among other things, improving public toilets.

Texas state legislator Clay Smothers was vehemently opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment that was proposed in 1977 because of its perceived potential to impact public toilets. He said in a rally at the time, “I ask for victory over the perverts of this country. I want the right to segregate my family from these misfits and perverts.”

Starting in the early 2000s, Portland, Oregon began a push to put user-friendly stand-alone public toilets on street corners. They were designed to be vandalism proof. Their designed proved popular, and the toilets were later installed in other cities including Denver, Cincinnati, San Antonio and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The lack of public toilets in the Waller Creek watershed area caused problems in 2012 as homeless people, with no where else to go, engaged in open defecation and public urination which created a smell and raised the risk of E-coli contamination in the local water supply. There were two public toilets in parks in the Waller Creek watershed area of Austin in 2014.

A November 2015 successfully proposed anti-discrimination ordinance called Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) in November 2015 related to public toilet access. The law was proposed by lesbian mayor Annise Parker. It saw 1970 anti-ERA style political ads appear on television, protesting the potential for men to access women's toilets. Texas’ Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said of the legislation at the tie,  “It was about protecting our grandmoms and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters.” Campaign for Houston were also leading the charge in opposing the law, using scare mongering tactics related to transwomen in women's toilets.

State law was proposed in 2016 which would have required transgender people to use the public toilet that corresponded with their sex and not their gender identity.