After decades of complaints about a lack of public bathrooms in New York City, as well as the thousands of summonses for public urination, the City Council enacted a bill Thursday that aimed to double the number of public restrooms in the city by 2035.
Though waiting in a long line for a public toilet is a common experience for most New Yorkers, the bill was conceived with a specific focus on the plight of delivery workers, homeless people, street vendors and other vulnerable groups who often can’t afford to buy a $5 coffee to use a private business’s facilities.
New York has far fewer bathrooms, as a percentage of its population, than many other cities around the world. There are just 1,066 public toilets available for the city’s 8.2 million residents, according to the bill’s sponsor, Councilwoman Sandy Nurse. That’s one facility for every 7,800 people.
The new law, known as the Bathroom Bill, would increase the number of public restrooms in New York to 2,120 in 10 years.
Adolfo Abreu, the director of housing campaigns for Vocal-NY, said that increasing public bathroom access was an important issue that his organization had been pushing for years. He was “ecstatic” about the Council’s vote, he said.
Ms. Nurse said the law would satisfy a “universal need” in the city while helping to address inequalities imposed on vulnerable populations.
Homeless people “were planning their entire day around where they would be able to access the bathroom,” Ms. Nurse said, adding that she’d hear “horror stories” about how people were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves or else “relieve themselves in very public settings.”
Over 1,400 criminal summonses and 8,000 civil summonses were issued in 2024 alone, according to Ms. Nurse’s office. And those tickets disproportionately affected people of color, the office said.
Many homeless people try to deal with the lack of public restrooms by simply not drinking water, Mr. Abreu said, but that approach can cause health problems, including urinary tract infections. Having access to public bathrooms, he said, was a “matter of survival.”
New Yorkers are often forced to rely on private bathrooms when they’re out and about, but those lavatories come with a price: Most businesses require people to buy something before they can use the toilet.
Mohamed Attia grappled with that issue constantly while working as a street vendor in Manhattan between 2009 and 2018. He said he usually had to spend $20 on a sandwich at a fancy restaurant or $3 to buy a bottle of water he did not need just so he could relieve himself.
Mr. Attia’s experience is not uncommon. A 2021 survey by the Immigration Research Initiative found that some 63 percent of street vendors did not have access to public bathrooms.
“Given the affordability issues in the city, many can’t afford to buy a cup of coffee or make a purchase at a business in order to use a bathroom,” said Alison Wilkey, director of governmental affairs and strategic campaigns at the Coalition for the Homeless.
Under the new law, city agencies working to expand the network of public bathrooms have to consider neighborhood foot-traffic levels, street density and the equitable distribution of the facilities in underserved communities. The city is also required to develop a plan to establish more gender-neutral restrooms and to produce a digital map of all public bathrooms.
Tax dollars will fund the project, but the city will have to come up with ideas on cutting costs and streamlining installations every four years.
Sarah Kaufman, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University, said that although the bill was a step in the right direction, she wondered how the cleanliness and safety of the bathrooms would be maintained.
Ms. Kaufman pointed to an automatic public toilet at Madison Square Park in Manhattan, which is self-cleaning and charges users a small fee, as a helpful innovation. (There are four other automatic toilets spread across the city.) Paying a nominal fee to use public restrooms is common in other cities around the world, she noted, and those fees would go toward helping maintain the facilities.
New York still has plenty to do when it comes to restroom access, Ms. Kaufman said, but the Bathroom Bill is “truly necessary for the livability of the city.”
Councilwoman Nurse, who first proposed the bill in 2023, said that the city was initially reluctant to spend millions on bathrooms that would take years to install.
But the law was given new life, she said, after demand for public restrooms grew and innovations in modular design made them cheaper to produce and faster to assemble.
“Everybody needs to go,” Ms. Nurse said, adding: “We need to account for that in our planning processes, rather than emphasizing tickets and summonses.”
Shayla Colon is a reporter covering New York City and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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