New York is famous for its endless food and drink options, but when nature calls, options for relief are scarce, leaving residents and visitors scrambling for a restroom.
Last month, New York’s long-suffering public restroom landscape suffered another setback when Starbucks announced they would no longer allow non-paying customers to use their facilities, taking away a last resort for full-bladdered New Yorkers with nowhere else to go.
New York City offers approximately 1,100 public restrooms for its 8.3 million residents. Only two are open 24 hours a day. That comes out to roughly eight toilets per 100,000 people. It’s one of the fewest public bathrooms per capita of any major city in the U.S. and pales in comparison to other global cities.
The few public restrooms that do exist are often poorly maintained, difficult to find or inaccessible when needed. The New York City Council’s Oversight and Investigations Division released a report in 2024, which found that 68 out of 102 bathrooms inspected had safety issues: 11% were missing locks on stalls, 10% lacked soap, 13% lacked toilet paper, 23% had unsanitary conditions and 9% were closed during operating hours.
The situation is so dire it has spawned a cluster of apps and maps designed solely to lead people to public toilets.
For those who can rely on alternatives, the shortage of public bathrooms is a frustrating but manageable inconvenience. For others, especially New York City’s homeless population, the lack of accessible, clean restrooms is a more serious issue — one of basic human rights.
“This is a public health problem,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “This is an economic development problem. This is definitely an equity problem.”
The current public restroom crisis has its roots in the 1970s, when budget cuts and rising maintenance costs forced the city to close public facilities across the five boroughs. The responsibility of providing bathroom access fell on local businesses. In the 1980s, the Department of City Planning began offering perks and waivers to real estate developers who provided public restrooms. Despite these incentives, the program yielded minimal results, with only 14 new bathrooms constructed citywide.
In 1990, a group of homeless New Yorkers sued the City of New York and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for failing to provide public bathrooms. The lawsuit led to the development of the Public Toilets Working Group, which managed to install about 10 toilets in Manhattan before contract complications stalled progress.
In 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a $1.4 billion street furniture contract that included funding for 20 automated public toilets. As of 2022, only five had been built.
Eric Adams is the latest mayor to attempt to improve the city’s bathroom access. In mid-2024, Adams launched the “Ur In Luck” initiative, promising to construct 46 new restrooms and renovate 36 existing ones over the next five years. However, the project has been hampered by budget constraints, and critics argue the proposed goal is far too little for a city with the needs of New York.
“As one of the biggest municipalities in the world, we should be able to make more than 82 bathrooms in five years,” said Councilmember Sandy Nurse. “That’s an embarrassing rate of construction.”
As the community most reliant on public bathrooms, homeless individuals are particularly affected by New York’s inadequate coverage. According to one 2019 study, New York City maintained one bathroom per 105 homeless individuals, second lowest only to Los Angeles among ten major U.S. municipalities.
At the same time, criminalization of public urination and defecation is on the rise. In 2024, NYPD summonses for public urination increased by 46%. The crackdown comes amid a broader push to address street cleanliness, but critics argue that punishing individuals for relieving themselves in public without providing adequate alternatives is unfair and counterproductive. With limited options, many people suffering from homelessness have little choice but to break the law.
It can be expensive to construct new facilities, with some estimates suggesting a rate of $3.6 million per restroom. It would be far simpler to expand the availability of private facilities to the public — a measure that’s often suggested as a low-cost solution. Some cities, such as London and Portland, Oregon have implemented “toilet access partnerships,” where businesses open their restrooms to the public in exchange for small subsidies. But homeless people, who face a level of stigmatization that other New Yorkers do not, may not benefit from this solution.
“There are some people who think, ‘Well, if you need a bathroom, you can just go into a restaurant.’ That’s actually not true for everyone,” said Alison Wilkey, the director of government affairs at Coalition for the Homeless. “One, a lot of places require that you make a purchase, and two, there are definitely racial differences in how people are perceived when they walk in and ask for a bathroom.”
The alternative to finding a restroom is to wait, which can result in serious health complications. According to the Free to Pee Campaign, sponsored by the VOCAL-NY Homelessness Union, homeless people record a 300% higher risk of developing a urinary tract infection due to inadequate public toilet options.
Homeless individuals are not the only community disproportionately affected by inadequate bathroom coverage. Delivery workers, cabbies and rideshare drivers frequently struggle to find places to relieve themselves during long shifts. Just this month, the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers union requested emergency placards that would allow drivers to park in unauthorized areas so they could use the bathroom.
Elderly residents and parents with young children often scramble for options as well, while individuals with medical conditions such as Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome are forced to make difficult decisions about venturing out at all.
In the past, impacted individuals have turned to the subways for relief. When the pandemic hit New York City in 2020, the subway system’s 133 public restrooms were closed. Five years later, only 58 have reopened.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine has urged the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to better promote the availability of these facilities. But even when open, subway restrooms suffer from borderline-unusable conditions.
“It is tortuous to have to look for a bathroom, and find you are left between the street or the subway platform. Homeless New Yorkers have taken the lead on this issue, but really it is about quality of life for everyone in New York,” said Nathylin Flowers, a housing activist who has lived in homeless shelters herself.
Public advocacy groups have stepped in where the government has fallen short. One notable effort is the “Got2GoNYC” initiative, created by activist Teddy Siegel, which provides a crowdsourced map of over 2,000 available restroom locations across the city, nearly half of which are privately owned.
But tools like this are a workaround, not a long-term solution. “Bathroom access should be a basic human right, but our local government struggles to see it as such,” Siegel wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “To make sure everyone has a place to go, New York City needs to treat public bathroom access as an infrastructure problem deserving of an immediate, robust response.”
