Loo-dicrous: San Franciscans flushed with anger over $1.7m public toilet

Controversy is swirling around a proposed public lavatory in San Francisco after a city newspaper exposed the project’s eye-watering price tag of $1.7m.

That sum would have covered a 150-sq-ft restroom with just one toilet. The pricey plans were moving ahead until the San Francisco Chronicle lifted the lid on how much taxpayer money would go down the drain, prompting backlash and ridicule.

Even California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has weighed in, saying that “A single, small bathroom should not cost $1.7m.”

“The state will hold funding until San Francisco delivers a plan to use this public money more efficiently. If they cannot, we will go back to the legislature to revoke this appropriation,” a spokesperson told the Chronicle.

The public toilet, intended for a town square in the Noe Valley neighborhood, would be a boon for a city that has too few. Visitors to the park have been requesting a toilet for years, the Chronicle’s Heather Knight notes.

But the costs involved have sparked an uproar, even from the state official who obtained the funding. Adding to the frustrations: the project isn’t expected to be completed until 2025. “I’m glad that Noe Valley will at some point get a bathroom, but it shouldn’t cost this much and it shouldn’t take this long, and I’m angry about it,” the Democratic state assemblymember Matt Haney told the Chronicle.

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He said the city’s recreation and parks department had told him the figure and he hadn’t initially questioned it amid local demand for a place to go. “They told me $1.7m, and I got $1.7m,” he said. “I didn’t have the option of bringing home less of the bacon when it comes to building a toilet. A half a toilet or a toilet-maybe-someday is not much use to anyone.”

Still, he said, that kind of money should pay for seven bathrooms. Indeed, an executive with a trade group based in Virginia told Knight that Los Angeles had recently seen that many facilities installed for the same price using modular construction, in which sections of a building are created elsewhere and transported to their eventual home. (The San Francisco recreation and parks department lists the cost of a prefabricated version of the restroom as $1,216,800, according to a price breakdown provided to the Guardian.)

So, how can one toilet cost so much? The construction itself comes in at $1.05m, with the rest going to tasks such as architecture ($300,000), project management ($175,000) and surveying ($40,000), according to the breakdown.

Such a cost isn’t so unusual in San Francisco, a city grappling with vast income inequality and one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US. Two other similar bathrooms in the city cost $1.6m and $1.7m respectively. It’s the world’s most expensive city to build in, with the recreation and parks department pointing to the many departments that must approve construction as one factor. On top of that, the cost of “materials and skilled labor” are up 23.2% since the pandemic began, according to a letter to Haney from Phil Ginsburg, the recreation and parks department’s general manager, that the department shared with the Guardian.

“In New York City, stand-alone park restrooms can now cost between $3m and $5m,” the letter continues. “Our restroom building costs are consistent with the inflationary pressures on all San Francisco public works projects.”

Indeed, toilets aren’t the only items in the city threatening to give new meaning to the word “waste”. San Francisco is also in the throes of a trash can conundrum as it seeks to put new bins on the streets, with prototypes costing as much as $20,900. The Guardian tried them out – and was not hugely impressed.