Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go? Writing for Bloomberg CityLab (limited free articles – archive link), Elizabeth Yuko examines the history, social, political, and economic factors that have influenced the waxing and waning of public toilet spaces in the United States and their current rarity today – a lack thrown into sharp relief during a worldwide pandemic.
“The lack of public restrooms in the U.S. hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2011, a United Nations-appointed special rapporteur who was sent to the U.S. to assess the “human right of clean drinking water and sanitation” was shocked by the lack of public toilets in one of the richest economies in the world.”