California Stopped San Francisco’s $1.7 Million Rest room. The Metropolis Cannot Construct One thing Cheaper.

In October 2022, San Francisco Raised eyebrows when the city budgeted $1.7 million for a single public restroom in the city's Noe Valley neighborhood. According to city officials, the high price was due to high construction prices in San Francisco as well as remaining supply chain issues.

But shortly afterwards the state intervened, which scrapped the planned bathroom after outrage spread over the high cost to taxpayers. Fifteen months later, there is still no place to pee in the public square where the toilet was originally planned – and it doesn't look like there will be one any time soon.

“Why isn’t there a toilet here? I just don't understand her. Nobody has them,” said a resident told The New York Times last week. “It’s another example of the city not being able to do it.”

San Francisco has the most expensive Construction costs worldwide – and that is hardly surprising. To build a public toilet in Noe Valley, a place that already had the plumbing necessary to install a toilet, developers had to overcome a dizzying number of regulatory requirements. This includes obtaining approval from the Arts Commission's Civic Design Review Committee, passing review under the California Environmental Quality Act, and approval from the city's Rec and Park Commission and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. As if that wasn't enough, the project would also be subject to a “community feedback” phase.

Even after receiving approval, the city would not be free to simply find the cheapest acceptable bathroom — likely a prefabricated option — and connect it to city plumbing. According to a year 2022 San Francisco Chronicle Article, Prefab bathrooms violate the city's public works agreement. In addition to the cost, the city would also have to use union labor to build the bathroom.

While the $1.7 million price tag was rightly criticized, if the project had been allowed to move forward, the budget might not have been set too high. The regulatory burden in San Francisco for new construction—even something as simple as a single-stall bathroom—is just so high.

Even the San Francisco government has acknowledged that the Noe Valley bathroom fiasco was a sign that the city is over-regulated. “It is worth changing the current laws around construction projects such as toilets that slow things down,” said a spokesman for Mayor London Breed Just.

However, this is far from the first time that local governments have allocated absurdly large sums of money to fund public toilets. In 2017 New York City spent 2 million dollars in a public park toilet. And last year, Philadelphia caused controversy when it announced it would spend $1.8 million on six modular buildings Portland loo bathrooms over the next five years — a model that cities across the country have spent millions on in recent years.