On a recent sunny Sunday, residents of San Francisco’s Noe Valley regroup to celebrate the opening of the restroom. But not just any toilet. This is the most notorious public toilet in the country.
In 2022, my colleague Heather Knightthen at The San Francisco Chronicle, found that Projected price for the locker: $1.7 million, which Congressman Matt Haney has secured from the state. This is business as usual in San Francisco. Other public restrooms have similar prices. Local officials are planning a celebration. But Knight’s article caused a wave of outrage. Governor Gavin Newsom got the money back. The party was cancelled. Haney denounced the project he undertook: “The costs were crazy. This process is crazy. The amount of time needed is crazy.” He wants answers.
Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the San Francisco Department of Parks and Recreation, responded: letter it is a masterpiece of coiled bureaucratic fury. He told Haney that the department was “very surprised” by the “unexpected allocation” of $1.7 million for the Noe bathroom. “To date,” Ginsburg wrote, “we have not received any questions from you regarding the estimate.”
But Ginsburg was more than happy to walk Haney through the numbers and describe how Haney, as a former member of San Francisco’s powerful Board of Supervisors and current member of the state Legislature, is responsible about them. “As you will see, the process is really long and expensive,” he notes. “It is also the result of years of political choices and is exacerbated by skyrocketing costs.”
There is the planning and design phase, which entails taking the design of the public restroom to “engaged stakeholders” and improving it based on their feedback. That usually takes three to six months. The Department of Public Works can then invite bids from outside contractors. That took six months. Construction takes an additional four to six months, depending on whether prefabricated or site-built toilets are used. Restrooms also require approval from the Department of Public Works, Department of Planning, Department of Building Inspection, Arts Commission, Public Utilities Commission, Mayor’s Office on Disabilities and PG&E, local electricity authority.
“I share your frustration and concern about the time and expense involved in the public works process,” Ginsburg wrote. “As an elected official, I hope you will support policy changes at the state and local level to make it easier to move small projects like this one.”
He offers some suggestions: Building codes could be rewritten to make it easier to purchase and install prefabricated structures (“Under the terms of the project labor agreement approved by the Board of Supervisors”) approved during his tenure, we were restricted from using modules off-site). construction for any project using bond capital in excess of $1 million,” he notes sourly). The Supervisory Board can eliminate multi-agency approvals for small projects. It can streamline the bidding process. It may lift the boycott it has implemented in doing business with 30 other states based on their laws on reproductive rights, voting rights, and LGBTQ rights.
Now the press and the public are watching. It turns out Ginsburg was right: Different choices can be made, and those choices can save money. City now estimate that the Noe toilet only costs about $200,000. Somehow this is still crazier. If San Francisco can install public restrooms for $200,000, why not normal?
In this case, low prices will be misleading. Vaughan Buckley, chief executive officer of Pennsylvania Volumetric Construction, saw an opportunity to reduce high construction costs across the country and how modular structures could cut those costs. He enlisted his friend Chad Kaufman, executive director of the Public Restroom Company of Nevada, to donate a modular toilet, and Buckley provided the engineering and labor to install it. .
Even so, the timeline is still sad. The restroom — costing about $120,000 — is already built. The installation process – which Buckley estimates cost about $140,000 – took a week and a half. The back and forth over procurement, logistics, permitting — not to mention whether San Francisco would accept a donation from Nevada, one of the boycotted states — took about a year. “It wouldn’t take a year to have a toilet already built in the ground,” Buckley told me.
Maybe San Francisco is changing. Last April, the Supervisory Board voted from the 7th to the 4th to abolish the boycott of states with tough policies. “It falls short of what we wanted to achieve,” Supervisor Rafael Mandelman admitted.
The Mayor of London resembles propose reforms to ensure incidents like the Noe toilet never happen again. In my eyes, they are humble. Breed would allow city agencies to band together when purchasing construction services and goods for projects under $5 million and eliminate Arts Commission review for projects under $1 million dollars. The mayor’s office says even this set of reforms would take two years to implement. “These things take time,” said her spokesman, Jeff Cretan. speak Annals. If coordinating multiple agencies and interest groups is expensive and time-consuming when building a single toilet, imagine what it would be like to try to limit their power.
But it’s not just San Francisco. Buckley, the modular construction CEO, told me he jumped on the Noe bathroom mess because he thought it was a striking “metaphor” for a common problem. “It’s really easy to throw mud at SF and say it’s an outlier,” he said. “But these same challenges happen across the country for very similar reasons, and they don’t have the time.”
The problem, he said, is that “regulation is often the result of punishment. It’s there to prevent something bad from happening, not to make something good happen. To me, this isn’t a discussion about SF or Rec and Parks, who I think are doing a great job. They are not alone in the challenges they face.”
I asked him, if these problems recur in cities and states, is there a solution that can solve them? “People can obstruct meaningless legislation and strike it down for that reason.”
We think of adding regulation as what liberals do and removing regulation as what conservatives do. But what regulation often does is strip power and autonomy from government employees, who could do a much better job if they were allowed to make decisions based on goals rather than process.
I still find myself thinking about the most unusual part of Ginsburg’s letter. He included a bold, italicized line to make it clear that the problem was even worse than the public thought, even worse than Haney suggested: “The cost of building our toilets I am consistent with inflationary pressures on all public works projects in San Francisco.” He doesn’t want to build this way. He wasn’t given a choice. This moment is a rare opportunity to change that, and if Breed’s proposed reforms are anything to judge by, it won’t change much.
But many other cities have similar problems. In places with healthy media, we even know about them. For example: If any New Yorkers are feeling complacent about San Francisco’s woes, allow me to direct your attention to five small — and rather ugly — public restrooms that sell for $185,000 each and that city estimate It can cost more than $5 million to install.
