Bathrooms....in Santa Cruz??!!

Santa Cruz seeks public bathroom solutions while its homeless population crosses its legs



SANTA CRUZ >> When Michael “Dreamcatcher” Ohre walks into one of downtown Santa Cruz’s public restrooms, the artist has taken to announcing his arrival.

“I have to wait all the time for someone to wake up or pull the needle out,” said Ohre, sitting on a curb next to the Locust Street Parking Garage. “About 50 percent of the time I walk in there and someone’s using (drugs). So, when I enter the garage, I yell, ‘Get out of my bathroom.’”

For those without a home, regular place of work or enough disposable income to casually spend money at a retail establishment, finding a public bathroom in Santa Cruz and beyond is something of an art. Therein lies a vicious circle: People living on the streets become highly dependent on access to public bathrooms, which are often closed for repair or delayed in opening on a given day. Those without access are then faced with the option of doing their private business in public, many keeping empty plastic bottles handy for quick relief. When human waste is left in more public areas — in front of downtown businesses, along sidewalks and the San Lorenzo River levee, in back alleys — the incidents often cause a domino effect of repercussions and more stringent rules, rather than solutions, local homeless advocates say.

The homeless are not Santa Cruz’s only population that seeks regular access to clean, safe facilities when one of humanity’s most basic needs arise.

Santa Cruz resident Linda Cover, who volunteers in local outdoor cleanup efforts, including weekly San Lorenzo River levee-focused efforts, takes particular issue with the state of the city’s only 24-hour port-a-potty, at Laurel and Front streets.

Last week, while passing the stall, a peek inside showed Cover graffiti-scrawled walls, scorched and melted plastic and piles of toilet paper strewn inside and out. Cover said she considers herself a “pro-toilet” person who hopes to see more public facilities available, rather than less. The Laurel and Front port-a-potty, however, Cover believes was “meant to fail.”

“It was begrudgingly put in. It’s a port-a-potty, as opposed to something that could be halfway decent, like the ones at the Boardwalk,” Cover said. “And they allowed that sheer quantity of graffiti to pile up in there. That did not happen overnight.”

The outdoor facility, first installed around January 2014, is owned by a private company the city contracts to clean for $100 per day per unit, five times a week, according to city Public Works Director Mark Dettle. Comparatively, the city’s parking garage bathrooms are cleaned every two hours by city Public Works staff. The bathrooms’ annual costs include $25,000 on vandalism repairs, $84,000 on staffing and supplies, he said.

About a year ago, the city added two additional downtown public port-a-potties, at Cedar and Union streets parking area and the Lincoln Street parking lot, both open overnight from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., when the garage bathrooms are closed.

The new port-a-potties came last year during a larger Santa Cruz City Council discussion on how to address the needs of the public in the most effective way. Some proponents of the bathrooms have pointed to a need to offer some dignity to the poverty stricken, while others say the city needs to address issues of public defecation.

In the past year, public restrooms at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor and Santa Cruz City Hall have been put under lock and key due to vandalism and plumbing-related concerns. The City Hall courtyard was posted with restrictive use rules in May, in part due to costs and exposure to public urination and defecation, city officials said at the time. Santa Cruz Public Libraries Downtown branch staff report regular difficulties with bathroom patrons.

A pilot program in recent years to keep parking garage facilities open 24 hours was shuttered by the city Public Works Department due to rising costs for security, repairs and staff safety concerns. The additional port-a-potty sites also were initiated last year as a pilot program, set to reviewed in six months to a year.

During the council’s most recent May and June budget talks, city funding was set aside for a bundled list of homeless solution-oriented projects, including establishing more public restrooms and showers. The council’s ad-hoc Homeless Coordinating Committee report rates establishment of the new facilities as having a “very high” human and social impact.

“Enables individuals to safety maintain basic hygiene and human needs and dispels stigma associated with visual uncleanliness,” the city report states. “Improves overall public health for entire community.”

The city’s 8-year-old Visitor Restroom Program, which pays downtown businesses a $400-a-month stipend to keep their restrooms available to the general public, has been whittled down from three to one business over the years.

Bookshop Santa Cruz on Pacific Avenue is the last business standing, though more businesses are welcome to take part, said Julie Hendee, city development manager. The effort, said Bookshop’s Casey Coonerty Protti, costs the business about $40,000 to $50,000 a year in maintenance, supplies and repairs. Coonerty Protti said the majority of the public is very respectful of their restrooms, and even offers to contribute financial donations to offset the store’s costs. Some issues arise, however, with people washing up, stuffing objects in the toilets, graffiti, drug use and other vandalism, she said.

Coonerty Protti, who serves on the city’s Downtown Commission, said her father Neal Coonerty, a former Santa Cruz mayor and county supervisor, decided years ago that public bathroom access was a basic necessity for downtown visitors. Public bathrooms also make good business sense, she said.

“There was this one moment where he (Coonerty) was at another business and somebody asked to use the bathroom for that business and that person said, ‘No, we don’t have bathrooms. You need to go across the street to Bookshop Santa Cruz,” Coonerty Protti said. “So, he started using the phrase, ‘If it takes a full bladder to get somebody into Bookshop Santa Cruz, I’ll take it.’ As a business, you spend tons of marketing dollars trying to figure out, how do you get people to want to come into your store, and they do because they want to use your bathroom. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for business.”

Former Visitor Restroom Program participants Pizza My Heart and Cafe Gratitude phased out over the years, the former after a remodel, the latter due to “major vandalism,” Hendee said.

Ohre, who lives on Santa Cruz’s streets, said that at times the various public bathroom closures can seem coordinated or even malicious.

“If we just had a bathroom attendant like they do in other places — they have a bathroom attendant at City Hall. They have an attendant at the library all day that it’s open — it gets sabotaged, but not as much,” Ohre said of the port-a-potties. “At least twice a month there’s something that has to be fixed in all of these bathrooms, even the port-a-potties. I don’t know what it is.”

Homelessness issues advocate Brent Adams has taken the state of Santa Cruz’s public bathrooms to heart. He launched a Facebook page dedicated to the “Downtown Santa Cruz Bathroom Task Force,” recruiting a team of volunteers that at one point included former Councilman Micah Posner, to create their own cleaning shifts for the port-a-potty at Laurel and Front streets. After the city upped its cleaning contract agreement with the bathroom’s vendor, Adams has continued regularly posting photographs, sometimes of human waste spread around the downtown, other times of the inside of the bathrooms.

As a volunteer, Cover said she believes whatever the reason that Santa Cruz’s public bathrooms face damage issues, “you can’t operate on a knee-jerk response.”

“There are cities throughout the world that honor that basic human need. You do need to address that,” Cover said. “If it requires cleaning up, which it does, you just need to do it. It’s part of the fact that we’re a tourist town and you can’t just say, well, I give up, there’s all these issues and needles or whatever. You just need to continue to clean this up.”

Even where Santa Cruz does offer clean, functioning public bathrooms, there are limitations on their success, said Santa Cruz’s Food Not Bombs founder Keith McHenry. Those who are homeless and carrying all of their possessions need a “buddy” when they go to the bathroom, to watch that their possessions do not get stolen, especially if they are traveling by bicycle — which are banned from inside the parking garage bathrooms, he said.

“A lot of people are just saying, why are they going to the bathroom outside,” McHenry said. “It’s because they can’t get in.”

The Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency raised the alarm about increasing reports of Hepatitis A infections throughout the county, with a particular focus on the homeless community. In addition to conducting community vaccination clinics and upping their outreach efforts, county officials urged the public to wash their hands frequently, especially after using the bathroom and before handling food.

McHenry said access to clean water for washing up is difficult in the homeless community. Food Not Bombs, which holds weekly free meal distributions, has purchased a mobile hand washing station in recent weeks to complement hand sanitizer and food preparation gloves already on hand, McHenry said.

“I understand the ongoing dilemma, the houseless do not have the privacy of a personal place to take care of private needs so some will improvise to meet their needs, and unfortunately private behavior (like bathing or using drugs) is not acceptable in a public location and creates problems for other users of the facility,” Dettle, the Public Works director, said of restrictions on use of public bathrooms with running water.

The City of Santa Cruz has been hiding health and sanitation records regarding public bathrooms from the "Give a Sh*t Campaign" for over a year. Lack of public bathrooms could be a cause of action for a lawsuit by consumer advocate attorneys on the basis of a public health hazard. Assemblymember Mark Stones' office is being forced to investigate what state laws the County of Santa Cruz has the mandate to enforce about availability of clean, sanitary, ADA accessible restrooms. Port-a-potties are not such.

Do you know of ANYWHERE in the US where public bathrooms and public washrooms are available?
Around the clock? Year round? << see, I just knocked out the public campgrounds -- where there MIGHT be some someplace that are still no fee, though I doubt it >>

Like many things in our society, this lack hits the poor and homeless hardest. But we who are not poor have to keep track of what businesses will let you use the bathrooms when you aren't actually a customer, and those are rarely open 7x24.

I rather suspect that I would be VERY hard pressed to locate a place to p*ss say within a 25 mile radius late at night << I think it'd be THAT far to the nearest 24 hr gas station >> This isn't a Santa Cruz thing, it's everywhere in the US.

Housed people are not denied sanitary, ADA compliant toilets. The poor and homeless are forced to urinate and poop outdoors, while others are not. This is causing a public health crisis. If the City of Santa Cruz doesn't mitigate it, then they should be sued in federal court until they change their wicked ways.

I was saying that this wasn't a Santa Cruz problem (specifically). I was saying that PUBLIC sanitary an washing facilities were not being provided to anybody.

I was NOT saying that "housed people" did not have such facilities they could use WHEN AT HOME or that this did not constitute and advantage over the homeless. They also have a warm, dry place to sleep when at home.

But I was saying that this advantage is far less when they are not at home. At those times they suffer the same disadvantage from the GENERAL lack of public sanitary facilities. As older people, who need to use facilities more often than young folks, we too often have to make do << for example, many highways, even where there are rest areas with facilities, often only open during the day, locked at night. A great nuisance when we are on a trip >> In other words, just like the homeless, have to keep track of where there might be something open to use (in areas with which we are familiar --- but on new ground, can feel just as helpless).

This society is CRAZY. Pretends people don't have to P*ss and cr*p.

Why did the Sentinel gloss over this? We have a public health crisis! The City must be sued by an aggressive consumer law firm if it doesn't pony up safe, clean, sanitary, ADA compliant bathrooms ASAP.

https://patch.com/california/santacruz/hepatitis-outbreak-santa-cruz-co-linked-socal-strain-killed-4

[Image: A message to the Santa Cruz shitty council]

San Francisco for a start. Self-cleaning, timed units like they have all over Europe. My understanding is the city of Santa Cruz was offered them FOR FREE years ago but declined because the units pay for themselves with advertising on the exterior.

I'm sure there are other cities in the US where these units are in use, but honestly, go look it up for yourself. You didn't even do the most basic search for an answer to your question, and it LOOKS LIKE you never read news because there were quite a few articles in regional newspapers about the SF bathrooms.

Also, Google and the other tech companies 'contribution' to the Bay Area Houseless are a fleet of portable sanitation stations. Buses containing showers etc. Meanwhile Santa Cruz PROSTITUTES itself to the tech crowd and asks nothing other than they pay EXORBITANT rents and leases for their presence here, crowding out and making it un-affordable for local businesses and residents.

"Take, for instance, San Francisco’s self-cleaning outdoor bathrooms. They’ve been plagued with maintenance problems since they were installed in 1995. Some don’t work and others have odors that are rumored to rival that of a week-dead buffalo.

Then there’s Seattle’s disastrous deployment of automatic lavatories. The city would have been better feeding the $5 million it paid for them down the swirling gullet of a Starbucks commode. The design of the john allowed anybody to lock the door and turn it into their own private fiefdom.

With trash piling up on the floor, the self-cleaning mechanisms became useless. By the end of their run, in 2008, even drug addicts had stopped using Seattle’s toilets. They eventually wound up at bargain-level prices on eBay."

For the residents of Portland, Ore., taking a whiz in a public toilet is not just a matter of necessity. It’s an act of civic pride.

That’s because the city is home to the Portland Loo, a unique, patented outdoor bathroom that inspires such worship in its fanbase you’d think that Steve Jobs himself had designed it. This adoration comes despite the fact that the 24-hour loo was built to be as inhospitable as possible. This toilet does not want to be loved, but in Portland, it is No. 1 (and, presumably, sometimes No. 2 as well).

So the Portland Loo includes a variety of bells and whistles meant to keep in check the most degenerate of bathroom users:

• No running water inside: "Some people, if they’re homeless, use a sink to wash their laundry," says DiBenedetto. So there’s no sink, just a spigot on the outside that pours cold water.

• No mirror: People tend to smash mirrors. Perhaps even more frequently if there’s no running water within reach.

• Bars at the top and bottom of the structure: It may make the water closet look like a cage for a gorilla, but these apertures have critical importance. Cops can peep in near the ground to make sure there’s no more than one set of feet inside. The openings also help sound flow freely, letting pedestrians hear the grunts and splashes of the person inside and the person inside hear the footsteps and conversation of pedestrians. Nobody wants to stick around such a toilet for long.

• A graffiti-proof coating: No one will be tagging this latrine.

• Walls and doors made from heavy-gauge stainless steel: “It’s built with the idea that somebody could take a bat to it,” DiBenedetto says. “And if they did damage it, we could replace that part.”

Read more.... https://www.citylab.com/design/2012/01/why-portlands-public-toilets-succeeded-where-others-failed/1020/

...and what seems to be the problem is the city. Not the units.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/It-s-time-to-raise-a-stink-over-public-toilets-2393868.php

I can draw a corollary to Santa Cruz here. I had a locker at the No-Longer-Homeless-Services center 'back in the day' when the center actually performed SOMEWHAT of a useful function by providing storage so one could look for a job without all hat stuff on your back, and you know? Except for the initial month for 5 dollars no one ever tried to collect. Often no one even KNEW who was supposed to collect the funds, and in general the HSC itself set the locker program up to FAIL intentionally.

Oh, and the author of that SFGate article is wrong when he says "Paris doesn't smell like this."

It DOES. Pissing in the bushes is a time honored tradition in France.

At night on Skid Row, nearly 2,000 homeless people share just nine toilets

A new report outlines an ‘awful’ lack of bathroom facilities, affecting the health and dignity of residents at the sprawling LA homeless encampment

Megan Neidhart, a homeless woman, outside the bathroom. The situation contravenes UN standards for long-term refugee camps, which specify one toilet for 20 people at most.

Friday 30 June 2017 03.01 EDT
Last modified on Friday 14 July 2017 12.48 EDT

The toilets are located in stalls without doors, and bathroom tissue is only available from an attendant seated outside.

However unprepossessing, these nine cisterns in a sprawling complex on Los Angeles’ Skid Row are the only ones available at night to approximately 1,800 people sleeping on the surrounding streets, according to a new report out Thursday.

The authors say that this contravenes a standard laid out by the United Nations for long-term refugee camps, which specifies one toilet for 20 people at the most. Los Angeles is therefore meeting only about 10% of the need.

“It is perhaps the most basic human right that each of us be able to complete the most basic of human functions in a clean and safe space,” suggests the study, which was produced by Los Angeles Central Providers Collaborative, an alliance of major organizations working on Skid Row, as well as other experts. Judging by the smell that permeates the neighborhood, such spaces are in short supply.

“It’s really hard to explain in words how awful and how much of a public health crisis this is,” said Stephany Campos, the executive administrator of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles and a contributor to the report.

“We should not let any human being experience that kind of embarrassment or indignity or shame of having to utilize a sidewalk for a restroom, let alone live in the filth,” said Andy Bales, head of the Union Rescue Mission, a major services provider.

Bales speaks from experience – his right foot and part of his shin were amputated last year after becoming infected, which his doctor linked to the conditions in which he worked. “I lost my leg because I got E coli and staph and strep from the sidewalk because of feces being present.”

The Los Angeles mayor’s office does not contest the findings of the report, and in 2012, a survey by the county’s public health department found that there were “small piles of feces and/or urine on the sidewalks and grass areas” of eight of the 10 blocks they examined, as well as accumulated human excreta in two storm drains. It indicated there was an increased risk of meningitis, tuberculosis, diarrheal disease and many other illnesses. Currently the city performs regular street cleanings.

Skid Row’s hygiene problems could hardly be more pressing. In the latest count, Los Angeles County saw a 23% increase in the number of homeless people, to 57,794. “Our infrastructure hasn’t caught up,” said Alisa Orduna, homelessness policy director in the mayor’s office. “This is the No 1 issue that residents talk about.”
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The report says there is an immediate need for 100 portable toilets available 24 hours a day, and also advocates for staffed, mobile toilet kiosks. Orduna said the city was budgeting an extra $500,000 of funding for such mobile solutions, and is investing in permanent bathrooms in two parks, though they will be closed at night.

During the day, there may be as many as 43 available toilets, but the authors say that because the population of Skid Row swells after sunrise, this is still well below the UN standard.

A reporter visited the nine night-time toilets, located on the grounds of a major homelessness services provider called the Midnight Mission, at 1am on Thursday. An emergency was under way: a man was lying on the ground in a corner, his head cradled by another man as he convulsed with what staff thought was an epileptic or drug-induced fit. Medics in a wailing fire truck arrived to help him up.

Through the night, there was a steady stream of visitors, who entered past a guard into a courtyard where dozens of people slept on the floor in the open air. They walked up to a worker named Antwan Williams, who was sat behind an upturned cardboard box and handed out small bundles of bathroom tissue.

The men’s toilet was clean but unadorned. When the restrooms were opened, “they had paper towel dispensers and tissue dispensers and mirrors, everything nice,” said Marcus Butler, head of security at the mission. But they were quickly destroyed; “some homeless people” – a minority, he stressed – “are just angry, and some days are just bad days.”

Men sat on toilets, visible to anyone passing through the restroom. Butler called out greetings to them, or asked how they were. He has sometimes found people who have overdosed in the stalls, a needle still stuck in their arms, which suggests the advantages of not having doors.

“These bathrooms are a blessing,” said Megan Neidhart, 25, as she left the women’s restroom some time past 3am. When she can’t make it here, her options are grim: she explained how she has used used buckets and plastic bags. “It sucks sometimes – I’ve spilled the bag of pee in the tent.”

Observers acknowledge that the mission is trying to do a difficult job in tough conditions. “I think I can speak on behalf of anyone who is providing public bathrooms on Skid Row that if we had an unlimited budget this is not how we would provide them,” said the mission’s chief, G Michael Arnold.

To produce the toilet report, researchers sought to pin down the number of lavatories in the area as precisely as possible, and nine teams of “auditors” made 86 visits to public toilets at different times of the day.
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There are five automated public toilets provided by the city, but the auditors found that on average, at any one time four were out of service, and the one that functioned most frequently was also the furthest away from the heart of Skid Row. In any event, these toilets seemed to be powered down at night.

Among all the toilets – including portable toilets in parks and those made available by homeless service providers – some “were so soiled with fecal matter and debris that auditors reported that they did not feel safe using them”. They described the implications for disabled people: the wheels of their wheelchairs pick up excreta, which they then must touch. Stall dividers were sometimes absent, and the report did not count such toilets as useable. (There are actually 10 toilets available at the Midnight Mission, but the auditors excluded one from the tally because it was particularly exposed and felt unsafe to use.)

Inequality shapes access to restrooms. Auditors found that it was easier for white people who did not look homeless to gain permission to use locked toilets than it was for people of color or those who appeared to be living outside. Menstrual products are unavailable in many places.

One auditor, longtime Skid Row resident Suzette Shaw, was struck by a telling disparity – the comparatively large number of portable toilets available on film sets in and around downtown Los Angeles.

FOR PHOTOS AND COMMENTS GO TO https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/30/la-skid-row-homeless-toilet-access-report