The City Council is not holding it in and wants to ensure that New Yorkers do not have to, either.
Council members and advocates with the “Free to Pee” coalition rallied outside City Hall on Thursday to support two bills that aim to address the longstanding shortage of public restrooms throughout the five boroughs ahead of a public hearing on the legislation.
One bill seeks to expand the number of public lavatories in the Big Apple by requiring the city to make 45 bathrooms in some of its municipal buildings accessible to the public during business hours. The other would mandate that the city develop a long-term planning process for building one public bathroom for every 2,000 city residents by 2035.
City Council Member Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn), the prime sponsor of the bathroom planning bill, said the legislation is desperately needed because there is currently only one public restroom for about every 7,500 New Yorkers and only two in the entire city that are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She added that New Yorkers should not have to buy something from a private business just to use their bathroom or risk paying a ticket for relieving themselves in public.
“In a city of millions and millions of people who have a variety of different needs, it makes being in public space, being in public life, very difficult for many people,” Nurse said during the rally. “It shouldn’t matter if you have $5 on you to buy a coffee. It shouldn’t matter that you might not present yourself in a way to a private business that allows them to allow you to use the bathroom. You should be able to access, in public, when you are out and about, a public toilet.”
With fewer public toilets available, more New Yorkers who just can’t wait any longer are breaking the law to find relief.
Nurse noted that the NYPD issued 9,904 criminal and civil summonses for public urination over the last fiscal year — a dramatic 46% increase from the year prior.
“We cannot be criminalizing people for a human function that every single person has,” Nurse said.
The lack of public restrooms disproportionately impacts vulnerable New Yorkers like homeless people and those with disabilities, the pols and advocates said.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who has been outspoken on the city’s lack of bathroom access, called the legislation to make restrooms in city buildings open to the public a “quick win that we can score.”
“We have a great bill now that would just open up public bathrooms that we’ve already built in public buildings, that are in use today but are not designated as open to the public and very few people know they exist,” Levine said.
The council’s push for the two bills comes a couple of weeks after it released a report finding that two-thirds of the 102 public restrooms they surveyed either had unsanitary conditions or were locked during operating hours.
It also comes on top of other efforts to boost the number of public restrooms accross the city. Those include a council bill that would require the city to finish building 151 new public bathrooms that it pledged to build in 2022 and a plan from Mayor Eric Adams to build 46 new public lavatories and renovate another 36.
