By Erica C. Barnett
Anyone who has walked through Seattle’s densest neighborhoods—First Hill, downtown, Capitol Hill—knows that it’s damn near impossible to find a public restroom outside libraries, parks, and tourist-heavy areas like Seattle Center and Pike Place Market. Past efforts to add public restrooms have ended poorly; in 2008, after spending around $5 million on installation, cleaning, and maintenance, the city tore down five freestandimg restrooms installed just four years earlier downtown and on Broadway in Capitol Hill.
During the pandemic, Seattle actually locked existing public restrooms and replaced them with port-a-potties, euphemistically referred to as “comfort stations.” Plans to install something as minimal as freestanding sinks for handwashing got ground up in the gears of concern-trolling masquerading as public process: How will the city maintain them? How can we keep homeless people from ruining them? Won’t people be at risk of tripping if there’s a hose on the sidewalk?
Given that history, it’s tempting to assume that the latest proposal for public restrooms, from a D.C.-based company called Throne Labs, will also run headlong into the Seattle process. But so far, the company’s proposal—a total of 11 freestanding restrooms across the region, each at cost of around $100,000 a year—is moving forward without too much friction. (Really straining—sorry!!—to avoid toilet analogies here). The Pioneer Square Preservation Board recently approved Throne’s proposal to add two of its restrooms in the historic district—a surprising turn from a board whose members recently debated allowing bike parking because it would require ahistorical flex posts and paint on the ground. The vinyl-clad loos have to be wrapped in images of trees, but won’t have to mimic historic bricks, an idea that was proposed and rejected.
The toilets—smaller than a trailer, but bigger than a Port-a-Potty—use a pump system called a vacuum macerator that pulls waste upward and allows water to flow down into toilets and sinks, allowing them to have running water without expensive plumbing. A bigger innovation (or downside, if you prefer your toilets low-tech and accessible right this second) is that the new restrooms only be accessible via an app, a QR code, text message, or an entry card. The first three options allow Throne to keep track of user ratings and to pinpoint which users are causing damage or overstaying the restrooms’ ten-minute limit, while the fourth is intended to make the restrooms accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a working phone.
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The proposed toilets, which will be installed through a contract with the Seattle Department of Transportation, are “not a perfect solution, but right now, if you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the day, there’s nothing for anyone unless you go to spend money in a business,” said Lisa Howard, executive director of the Alliance for Pioneer Square. “The other advantage of the pilot is that they’re looking at things that didn’t work out for X, Y, or Z reasons” in the past, Howard said.
Throne is working on several other contracts with local transportation agencies, including King County Metro, whose spokesman confirmed that it will be replacing two existing portable restrooms at the Burien Transit Center and the Aurora Village Transit Center in Shoreline at an estimated cost of $270,000 a year.
Jessica Heinzelman, who co-founded Throne Labs along with Fletcher Wilson and Ben Clark, said Throne toilets have succeeded in places where other types of mobile restrooms have failed because they “create accountability”—if someone trashes a restroom or smokes in it, for instance, the company can generally pinpoint their identity using sensors in the unit or from negative user reviews immediately after that person left.
“What we learned as we started talking to folks in the public space is, even when there are restrooms, if it’s getting vandalized, or if there’s shit smeared all over the wall, they just shut it down, and they don’t necessarily have the operational capacity to deal with that, and so people kind of stop counting on them,” Heinzelman said. “So [the question was], How do you offer publicly available private space and keep it nice and mitigate against misuse [by] the 1 percent of users that fuck up bathrooms for the other 99 percent?”
SDOT public space manager Joel Miller acknowledged that this kind of “accountability” could deprive some users of restroom access. “If somebody is repeatedly damaging the unit so it is going offline and other people can’t use it, that user would eventually lose access,” Miller said. “It’s not the perfect solution, that we have someone that might need access lose access, but it’s better than everybody losing access because the unit repeatedly goes offline.”
Heinzelman said that even in “high-risk” locations like MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where lots of homeless people hang out and live, fewer than 1 percent of users end up getting banned.
“I think partially it’s because if you give people the dignity and respect of having a nice space where they have enough room to change clothes, they have running water, and they can wash their their face, they want to keep it.” Heinzelman said. She confirmed that Throne hasn’t had any discussions about card distribution with local homeless service providers, but said they plan to do so once they’ve finalized their contracts. (PubliCola contacted several local service providers and only one had heard about the restrooms).
SDOT’s Miller says the city hopes to get the restrooms up and running in Pioneer Square before the World Cup games in June. One of the two restrooms will be located outside the stadiums at First Ave S and S. Charles Street; the other will be at Second Ave. S and S. Washington St.—about a block away from PubliCola’s office.
Both Heinzelman and Miller said the restrooms have to appeal to the general public, not just unsheltered people with fewer options. “We’re talking about it as a homeless issue, and we felt like the homeless absolutely need it, but you have a sustainability problem” if the restrooms are seen as a homeless service, Henzelman said. “When budgets are slashed, what gets cut? It’s the services for the people that don’t vote or can’t advocate for themselves. [We want to] create a service that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to fund because they are personally benefiting from it, but that also enables all members of society to use it.”
last fall, I saw a presentation from LA Metro on Throne. It was positive. SDOT staff was in attendance. https://thesource.metro.net/our-popular-throne-restroom-program-has-expanded/
It’s amazing how much a world stage deadline motivates government and business to find solutions.
“A bigger innovation (or downside, if you prefer your toilets low-tech and accessible right this second) is that the new restrooms only be accessible via an app, a QR code, text message, or an entry card.”
Huge downside — it’s a restroom for fancy people only. The homeless will still have no options but the alleys and sidewalks.
Read more carefully. “[Company co-founder Jessica Heinzelman] confirmed that Throne hasn’t had any discussions about card distribution with local homeless service providers, but said they plan to do so once they’ve finalized their contracts. (PubliCola contacted several local service providers and only one had heard about the restrooms).” They’re rolling it out about as clumsily as possible, but they do have a plan.
Thank Heaven. Finally good news about downtown. When I started a thread about downtown parks in my blog, one reason was that I thought a surge of restrooms was coming, too many for vandals to shut down quickly, too many to become a single point of failure the way the sculpture park’s restrooms did way back when. Freeway Park was bragging about using Convention Center money to fix and re-open the restrooms it still has, _and_ add more; the Bush Hotel next to Hing Hay Park was promising some; and so was what is now Waterfront Park. *Years* later, only the last-named has come about. You’d think in any of Tanya Woo’s runs for City Council, she’d have hurried the Bush Hotel along, but no, and I sure don’t know what Freeway Park is delaying for.
So if this set actually happens by this summer, it’ll be breaking all records, and really shaming our inept city.
This is going to end just as poorly for the exact same reasons as the first go around. They will give access cards to homeless people, or they will steal them, or they will break into them, either way, this is another epic waste of tax payer dollars, when the solution is to arrest and remove the homeless drug addicts that are ruining the city. But you progressive s man, you just give money away then forget it did not work.
Works both ways:
You conservative man give all this money to the cops, but we still have crime. You just give money away then forget it did not work.
As a former resident of Pioneer Sq. in the early oughts, the biggest waste problem we had was college kids emptying the bars and peeing on our stoop. That said, the lack of toilet has been and will continue to be a big negative for Seattle. I hope their approach to accountability and banning the 1% of shitty humans works.
I still think we should imitate the rest of the world where a bathroom attendant is common in public restrooms, like the ones closed and hidden underground at 1st & Yesler iirc.
The underground restrooms had pergolas to advertise them. There was one at the park Pioneer Square – the one you mentioned, 1909-1958 – and another at Westlake Square, at the intersection of 6th Ave, Stewart and Westlake, 1917-1964. Those are the dates of the restrooms; the parks, and one pergola, are still there. I’m amazed Seattle’s park system could once afford attendants. Don Sherwood’s history files are my source on these.
Other downtown park restrooms thrown away include those in Freeway Park (1976-2002, still standing), Denny Park (1894-c1951, replaced by a staff parking lot), and four of the previous high-tech toilets (2006-2008, Occidental Square, Victor Steinbrueck Park, Hing Hay Park, and the waterfront next to the Aquarium). Don Sherwood’s history files are not my source on these, except for Denny Park.
Interested parties might want to watch Wim Winders’ “Perfect Days” from a couple of years ago…the protagonist is a toilet cleaner in Tokyo but when you see the state of the art there, you will wonder how far behind we really are. I just learned that Seattle has 1.6 million parking spaces for 800,000 people and less than 500,000 dwellings…how many public toilets should Seattle have to match the comfort and convenience extended to motorists?
Japan is a place where citizens actually respect public places? I do like the movie “Perfect Days” by the way. Seattle has a homeless drug addict problem. This population has zero respect for public spaces. Parks full of garbage and used needles. School playgrounds, public libraries, public restrooms are just places to get high in and destroy.
And here’s the story never told by Publicola. Nobody wants to deal with these destructive assholes. There are hundreds of unfilled jobs working with the homeless population in Seattle and these are not easy jobs. Caseworkers get burnt out in a year or two and leave. I doubt you can hire anybody to clean a large number of public bathrooms in Seattle. The job would be so fucking gross. After sweeping up used condoms and syringes and mopping up every sort of human fluid for a couple of weeks, anybody in their right mind would apply at Dick’s and flip burgers.
This is reason that Seattle doesn’t have public restrooms.
That is *a* reason why there are no public conveniences but that’s to be expected from a libertarian city. As for the burnout of caseworkers, that is to be expected if there are few to no positive outcomes from the work they do. There is no housing solution for the clients they work with so the wheel of futility breaks them over time. Consider what comes first…the drugs and/or other addictive behaviors or being forced into the street? Do people lose their jobs and housing over a drug addiction or do they find drugs as a solace from their situation? Economic decisions often have a moral component and the decisions being made to keep unhoused people where they are says a lot about Seattle’s moral compass.
What a bunch of tedious nonsense, tacomee. Yeah sure, I look out my window here in Seattle and all I see are used condoms and needles and blah blah blah. You need to get out of your echo chamber and come back to reality. Your political fantasy about the state of Seattle helps nobody. Besides, you don’t have to worry about public toilets in Seattle because clearly you don’t come here.