by You could say that San Francisco’s charming Noe Valley neighborhood has it all.
A thriving commercial corridor filled with restaurants, bookstores, and artisan cafes. There are so many young families that it has the nickname “Stroller Valley.” A plaza with yoga classes and a farmers market.
But what Noe Valley still needs is a toilet.
Fifteen months after city officials were ready to host a party in Noe Valley’s town square to celebrate the funding of a small bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place.
The bathroom project fell apart at the minute taxpayers realized The city was planning an event to celebrate the $1.7 million in state funding that local politicians had secured for the unique 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to buy a single-family home in San Francisco, with several bathrooms.
Even more confusing was the explanation that installing the small bathroom would take two to three years due to the city’s labyrinthine construction and permitting process. City leaders quickly canceled their bathroom party, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California got the funds back.
Late night comedians riddled the city. Residents dubbed the saga “Toiletgate,” and the $1.7 million toilet soon became the “it” costume at local Halloween parties that year.
For many residents, the episode has illustrated why San Francisco often bogs down in inefficiency. If an army of more than 30,000 city employees with a $14 billion annual budget can’t reasonably build a simple bathroom, what hope is there that San Francisco can solve its housing shortage and fentanyl crisis?
“Why isn’t there a bathroom here? I just don’t understand. Nobody does,” Ted Weinstein, a literary agent who lives in Noe Valley and passes by Town Square daily, said recently. “It’s yet another example of the city not being able to.”
Noe Valley residents had been asking for a public bathroom in the town square since it was converted from a parking lot in 2016. The renovation included plumbing for a bathroom, but no actual bathroom because the money ran out. Children enjoying the playground and adults chatting over coffee at bright red tables simply had to hold it.
City officials have tried to explain why $1.7 million was the normal price for a small public restroom: the high cost of everything in San Francisco, including construction materials. Hire an architect to draw up plans. Request community feedback on the design.
Numerous levels of review by commission after commission require the city to pay for staff time. Even the Civic Design Review Committee must determine whether a bathroom is “appropriate for its context in the urban environment.”
The difficulty of building a bathroom in San Francisco has shed light on why many projects face delays and cost overruns. A recent state report found that building homes in San Francisco takes longer and costs more than anywhere else in California. It takes 523 days, on average, for a developer to get initial approval to build homes, and another 605 days to obtain building permits.
And after spending five years and more than $500,000 to custom design trash cans (prototypes cost more than $12,000 each), the city has shelved a plan to put 3,000 of them on street corners because of a budget shortfall.
Mayor London Breed has repeatedly promised to reduce city bureaucracy and make it faster and easier for small business owners to get permission to open, and has backed local and state laws to speed up housing construction. His spokeswoman, Jeff Cretan, pointed to a rapid redevelopment last year of the decrepit United Nations Plaza into a skating rink and a project planned nearby to convert office spaces into housing.
Still, he acknowledged, public projects require a lot of time and money.
“It’s worth changing existing laws around construction projects like bathrooms, which slow things down,” he said.
In the case of the Noe Valley toilet, bad publicity was enough to attract donors looking for good publicity. In November 2022, a month after the uproar began, two toilet industry entrepreneurs agreed to donate a modular bathroom and pay the installation costs, reducing the price by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Chad Kaufman, president of Public Restroom Company, offered to donate a modular toilet to the town square. His friend Vaughn Buckley, CEO of Volumetric Building Companies, agreed to provide free architectural and engineering work to prepare the site. The couple also said they would pay local union workers to install the toilet.
The project seemed to gain traction once the city and Buckley’s company finalized an agreement in April 2023. But it’s been months and there are only weeds and mulch where the toilet was supposed to go.
The discussions appeared to break down last year, according to a Dec. 22 letter from the city’s Parks and Recreation Department to Mr. Buckley.
“Your team did not respond to our repeated attempts to participate,” the letter states. “We are receiving inquiries from citizens, journalists and local legislators about the status of this highly publicized project. “We will have to answer questions.”
One of the sticking points, the letter states, was Mr Buckley’s concern about the high costs of hiring local workers to complete his part of the work. Buckley said this week that the city’s construction costs “remain a challenge” and maintained that the city’s permitting process contributed to the delay. The bathroom has already overcome those obstacles and he said he hopes physical work can begin next month.
But Buckley said the bathroom should be ready for use in April, for less money and sooner than the original deadline. Mr. Kaufman, the one who donated the toilet, also totally agrees.
“My part is done,” he said, noting that the toilet is ready and waiting in the yard of his toilet factory in Minden, Nevada. He said he will pay for traffic control when a truck carrying the wrapped toilet finally reaches its destination. along 24th Street and by a crane that will lift the bathroom into place.
Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco supervisor who represents Noe Valley, said he has been trying to eliminate the web of city regulations that make the projects so expensive and time-consuming. He is crafting a charter amendment to reduce the city’s governing structure, which includes 56 commissions and 74 oversight bodies.
Under city law, for example, the installation of the Noe Valley restroom, even the free one, requires the Parks and Recreation Department to coordinate or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability and Pacific Gas and Electric.
“To unravel everything that needs to be unraveled for the government to function, a lot of people have to focus on that as a very high priority,” Mandelman said. “It’s easy to put that aside as you run from crisis to crisis.”
Meanwhile, Governor Newsom has returned the $1.7 million to San Francisco after city officials promised to use the funds to install two or three public restrooms, not just one.
There has not been much progress in this regard either.
