By Casey Mosbacher, SCS Intern
San Diego’s lack of accessible public restrooms represents a failure to meet the most basic human needs, undermining public health, dignity, and equity while perpetuating cycles of homelessness and discrimination.
When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the most vital step toward achieving self-fulfillment is meeting physiological needs. When individuals in the broader San Diego community are already lacking housing, how much is it to ask that their other physiological needs and basic human rights are not stripped away as well? The availability of hygiene products, access to water, and access to a restroom is the least San Diego can do for its residents. A sanitization crisis has plagued San Diego for a long time; however, this is not a localized issue. Public bathrooms are constantly being restricted with codes in restaurants or closed down in parks due to the unhoused population, despite the glaring fact that they are the ones most in need of these resources.
America has never had a solid system for public restrooms or a strong drive to improve sanitization for the unhoused or for individuals without working bathrooms. Bathroom access restrictions increased when COVID hit, but many of those restrictions remained even after everything else reopened. Over time, the frequency of business bathrooms requiring codes and keys has grown dramatically, inadvertently making public sanitization scarce and classist. People of lower socioeconomic status do not have the means to buy something in order to use the restroom. Additionally, in testimony by Kate Coventry, Deputy Director of Legislative Strategy, at the DC Council Budget Oversight Roundtable on the Department of General Services, she found that “they allowed a white woman who appeared housed to use the restroom but not a Black man who appeared possibly homeless”. This suggests that bathroom discrimination and the sanitary crisis are often rooted in subconscious bias and profiling.
In the U.S., there are an estimated ~8 public restrooms per 100,000 residents, one of the lowest densities worldwide, according to Cynthia Griffin from Invisible People. It is a sad and undeniable fact that society and local governments alike act as though ignoring the issue will make the need go away, yet it only exacerbates the problem. Even public, city-owned restrooms, such as those in parks, are under-resourced, neglected, subject to unpredictable closure, and often not clean.
The crisis is no less severe in San Diego. Harvard estimates that the ratio of public bathrooms to unhoused individuals is 1 to 27. Beyond that, San Diego has experienced multiple outbreaks due to feces exposure among the unhoused population. In 2017, a Hepatitis A outbreak overtook the city, sickening 528 people and killing 20, and more recently, there has been a Shigella outbreak. Public restrooms may seem costly, but implementing upstream initiatives helps prevent other expenses, such as cleaning feces and urine from the streets and responding to disease and infection outbreaks. In “San Diego Still Can’t Solve Its Public Restroom Problem” by Bella Ross, local government officials in San Diego argue that their priority is getting the unhoused population into stable housing and generally off the streets, rather than investing in public restrooms. While this end-goal is completely necessary, it leaves hundreds of individuals at a standstill, habitually struggling to find autonomy, dignity, safety, and hygiene, as the city searches for unbuilt buildings and short-term solutions. On a larger scale, new groups of people will continue to fall into homelessness, need resources, and face the same issues; homelessness cannot be eradicated like a disease.
The inaccessibility of public restrooms is yet another cycle that keeps unhoused community members shut out and profiled. Restaurants and other businesses often refuse service to people who “look homeless”, but access to restrooms is the very solution to the negative associations society holds toward the unhoused population. In the same vein, people judge and gawk at urine or feces in alleys or bushes, even though the restrictions in place are what steer people toward that behavior. Public perception of the unhoused is deeply contradictory: people criticize them for being dirty, yet deny them access to places to clean themselves; they ask why they do not “just find a restroom,” while nearly every restroom is locked behind a code or key. While using the street as a restroom is deemed unthinkable, stable access to bathrooms is equally unthinkable in current systems.
As stated by Kathryn Anthony, a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois’s School of Architecture, “The public restroom for pedestrians is just as important as the public rest stop on an interstate highway, and we need to think about them that way.” There is no debate that relieving oneself is a human right and that doing so in privacy should be guaranteed. In order to prevent discomfort, promote safety, reduce illness, and more, restrooms should be public. Without the autonomy and dignity to use the bathroom, how can we expect motivation, drive, and the ability to get off the streets?
Individuals cannot reasonably be expected to achieve stability, security, or self-improvement without basic needs. By denying restroom access, San Diego is effectively blocking the very foundation required for people to move forward, trapping them at the lowest rung of survival rather than enabling progress.
By bringing this issue to the forefront of public discourse, San Diego can increase public restroom availability within businesses, add porta-potties in areas with high unhoused populations, and keep park restrooms clean and usable. With these changes, the city may even see a decrease in expenses while increasing hygiene and livability for unhoused individuals and neighborhoods alike.
The City of San Diego and its local officials must take immediate responsibility by prioritizing permanent, well-maintained public restrooms as essential infrastructure, not optional. This includes allocating funding, partnering with local businesses, extending restroom hours in parks, and committing to maintenance rather than closure. Addressing sanitation is not a distraction from solving homelessness; it is a prerequisite. Until San Diego guarantees access to basic human needs, any effort to promote public health, dignity, or long-term housing stability will remain incomplete.
References
Carroll, M. W., O’Donnell, R., Rios, A., Kodituwakku, L., Zampa, G., Swayne, M. R., Felner, J. K., & Calzo, J. P. (2024). There is no place to go in “America’s Finest City”: Basic sanitation deprivation is punishment in San Diego, California, USA. Punishment & Society, 27(1), 24–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745241246650
Coventry, K. (2023, August 21). Public Restrooms are Fundamental to Human Dignity and Health. DC Fiscal Policy Institute. https://www.dcfpi.org/all/public-restrooms-are-fundamental-to-human-dignity-and-health/
Furuyama, W., Dmochowski, R., & Sebesta, E. (2025). Under‐Investigated and underestimated: Disparities in toilet and sanitation insecurity in a sample of United States adults. Neurourology and Urodynamics, 44(7), 1432–1438. https://doi.org/10.1002/nau.70109
Griffith, C. (2025, November 25). The hidden crisis of bathroom access for homeless people. Invisible People. https://invisiblepeople.tv/the-hidden-crisis-of-bathroom-access-for-homeless-people/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Maroko, A. R., Hopper, K., Gruer, C., Jaffe, M., Zhen, E., & Sommer, M. (2021). Public restrooms, periods, and people experiencing homelessness: An assessment of public toilets in high needs areas of Manhattan, New York. PLoS ONE, 16(6), e0252946. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252946
Ross, B., & Ross, B. (2022, March 16). San Diego still can’t solve its public restroom problem. Voice of San Diego. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2021/11/23/san-diego-still-cant-solve-its-public-restroom-problem/
Unhoused people’s right to public bathrooms. (2020, April 1). https://journals.law.harvard.edu/crcl/shortage-of-public-bathrooms-creates-unacceptable-risks-for-unhoused-people/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Webadmin, & Webadmin. (2023, October 24). The paradox of public bathrooms for houseless people. Blanchet House. https://blanchethouse.org/the-paradox-of-public-bathrooms-for-houselesss/