L.A. invested millions in public bathrooms. Why are they closed?
Editor’s note: LA Metro emailed AfroLA on April 3 with new information: The agency had installed a semi-permanent Throne bathroom trailer on March 24, the day after the initial story was published. The Throne is located at the much less frequented north entrance to the Pershing Square station, a block away from the shuttered permanent bathroom included in our reporting. Updated April 9, 2026 2:30 p.m.
Everyone can agree: There are not enough public bathrooms in L.A. for the city’s nearly 3.9 million people. At the end of June, the city will end funding for 14 freestanding permanent public bathrooms. Most of the these restrooms have been closed since last year with no plan to re-open them. Four of the bathrooms, all located in Skid Row, are open thanks to stop-gap discretionary funding from City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado. But funding for the four bathrooms is set to expire March 31.
“Mayor Bass is fighting for Skid Row bathrooms, because everyone deserves access to basic necessities,” the mayor’s office said in a statement, citing her background as a former nurse and physician’s assistant. A spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether there is a plan to keep the four bathrooms open or where the funding could come from.
There are roughly 3,400 people experiencing homelessness on Skid Row, according to county data. Finding a safe place to go to the bathroom is already a challenge. Cuts to homelessness funds at the state level will undoubtedly make the situation worse. The city of L.A. is on the hook to create 12,915 new shelter beds or permanent housing units for unhoused Angelenos by June 2027. That means that other bathrooms and showers could be cut in order to fund housing services.
The four bathrooms are open — for now.
The evidence is intuitive and undeniable: more bathrooms means less shit on the street. But when bathrooms are viewed as a service for unhoused people, it can spark political resistance to adding more bathrooms.
“Closing them would strip our most vulnerable residents of the most basic needs: a safe place to go to the restroom, to wash hands, and to access clean drinking water,” Councilmember Jurado said in an emailed statement. “This isn’t just a budget cut. It’s a public health crisis.”
Two of the four bathroom include hydration stations — a critical need as the city faces a deadly heat wave. The public bathroom crisis is not limited to Skid Row.
On March 24, more than a year after the permanent bathroom at Pershing Square station was shut down, Metro placed a Throne at the much less frequented north entrance to the station, a block away from the shuttered bathroom at 4th and Hill. The new Throne is not adjacent to Pershing Square, but instead closer to tourism hot spots like Grand Central Market and Angels Flight Railway.
Rather than look for a long-term solution, city officials are turning to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The agency is rolling out semi-permanent “Throne” bathroom trailers around the city and county at Metro stations.
But advocates worry that without a commitment from city officials to meet people’s basic human needs by providing permanent bathrooms, there’s a public health crisis unfolding with no end in sight.
The Vermont/Santa Monica bathroom covered in graffiti after funding to maintain permanent bathrooms was cut as of July 2025. (Maylin Tu/AfroLA)
L.A. once had a plan for 150 free bathrooms
In the late 1990s, city officials wanted to criminalize public urination. In order to effectively prosecute this act as a crime, the city signed a contract with street furniture company JCDecaux to install and maintain 150 self-cleaning permanent bathrooms in the public-right-of-way.
The plan at the time was these bathrooms would be installed, cleaned and maintained at no cost to the city. The only cost incurred would be any amount over $50,000 connect each unit to utilities. In exchange, JCDecaux would make millions from advertising on bus shelters and kiosks, a percentage of which it would pay to the city every year. Bus shelters would fund bathrooms. This arrangement was a win for a cash-strapped municipality.
But L.A.’s public bathroom hopes were soon dashed — 150 bathrooms became just 15. City officials made the process for installing a single bus shelter onerous — a 16-step process requiring approval from eight different departments and the city councilmember. As dictated by the contract, JCDecaux only had to provide the minimum number of bathrooms.
One of the 15 bathrooms was later removed due to construction, leaving the city with 14. The majority of the bathrooms were placed in Skid Row, with others in South Central, El Sereno, Northridge, Van Nuys, Boyle Heights, Hollywood and North Hollywood. The installation process lasted years due to bureaucratic delays and conflict between different city departments, with the first bathroom opening at 5th and San Julian in 2004 and the last at 6th and Gladys in 2010.
L.A.’s free bathroom program was far from ideal, but tying bathrooms to bus shelter advertising revenue meant that the city didn’t have to cover maintenance costs, which can run $100,000 per bathroom per year.
As the 20-year bathroom contract neared an end in 2020, times had changed. Bus shelters were no longer seen as just a revenue generating vehicle for restrooms, but as a key component of transportation equity critical to shield bus riders from the sun in a warming climate. While the original contract was primarily meant to fund bathrooms, the new contract focused on shade and comfort for bus riders. When StreetsLA, the bureau in charge of the program, drafted a new Request for Proposals for a bus shelter contract, bathrooms were not mandatory.
Instead, the city chose to replace the 14 freestanding bathrooms with prefab units and establish its own public bathroom program, with a funding source to be determined.
In 2022, JCDecaux removed its proprietary self-cleaning bathrooms, and the city spent an estimated $4.5 million to replace them with new prefab models. StreetsLA did not respond to a question about how much replacing all 14 units ultimately cost.
Officials at StreetsLA have been trying to hand off the bathroom program to another department since the program began just a few years ago, saying that other departments like L.A. Sanitation would be better suited to manage the program.
It didn’t take long for the new bathrooms to shut down. As the city of L.A. faced a $1 billion deficit, StreetsLA did not include bathroom maintenance in its budget memo for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
Removing the source of funding for maintenance may have doomed L.A.’s nascent public bathroom program. But according to advocates, the real issue is the lack of political commitment to bathrooms as public health infrastructure.
Is L.A. headed for another public health crisis?
In 2017, former mayor Eric Garcetti spearheaded the opening of the Refresh Spot, a hygiene center in Skid Row with bathrooms and showers after a Hepatitis A outbreak hit California’s unhoused population, killing 20 people in San Diego County. In May 2025, the L.A. County Department of Public Health declared another outbreak of the disease, which is more likely to spread when people don’t have access to bathrooms or a place to wash their hands.
This year, L.A. also cut a longstanding shower program that primarily operated in Skid Row.
“I very much worry that folks are going to have to get sick again before we pay attention to this issue again.”
— Megan Welsh Carroll, director of the Project for Sanitation Justice
The city of L.A. is not alone in cutting hygiene programs. In San Diego — ground zero of 2017’s Hepatitis A outbreak — city officials are also shutting down bathrooms due to budget woes. And in San Francisco, the city slashed locations of a popular bathroom attendant program called Pit Stop nearly in half, from 30 to 16. Echoing L.A., attendants for some of the remaining Pit Stop locations are funded by JCDecaux through bus shelter advertising revenue. JCDecaux operates 24 self-cleaning toilets at no cost to the city and also provides about $2.5 million for Pit Stop attendants that the city chooses how to allocate.
Megan Welsh Carroll, professor and director of the Project for Sanitation Justice at San Diego State University, believes it might take another outbreak or global pandemic to tip the scales in favor of investing in bathrooms and showers for unhoused people.
“In San Diego, we have a history of outbreaks of preventable diseases tied to lack of access to sanitation, and I very much worry that folks are going to have to get sick again before we pay attention to this issue,” she said. Welsh Carroll and her colleagues released a report in 2024 on baseline standards for water, sanitation and hygiene services for unhoused California residents.
Megan Welsh Carroll, professor at San Diego State University and founding director of The Project for Sanitation Justice.
In 2020, L.A. added hundreds of porta potties to the streets at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, but the city failed to adequately maintain them, according to an L.A. Taco investigative series reported by Lexis-Olivier Ray. As of October, only 40 units remained, according to a list obtained from the Board of Public Works.
As cities face budget crises and cut hygiene programs In California, they also face pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom to crack down on homeless encampments, who has even threatened to withhold state homelessness funding. This will only make things worse, according to Welsh Carroll.
“Criminalization tends to push people even further away from public sanitation resources, thus creating potential public health and environmental crises,” she said, adding that lack of access to basic hygiene has cumulative effects, not only on public health but on the social fabric of a city.
“I am very concerned about a noticeable reduction in empathy towards our unhoused neighbors over the last few years,” said Welsh Carroll.
As public policy pushes people to the fringes, negative public sentiment can reinforce the perception of unhoused people as a type of social blight.
“We don’t like it when folks smell or are angry or all these things. And I would be pretty pissed off if I didn’t have a restroom to use. If I hadn’t been able to take a decent shower in a month, I would also smell bad and be in a bad mood,” she added.
L.A. Metro steps up
Everyone has to go to the restroom, but cities often view toilets as primarily a resource for unhoused people. That’s a problem.
“It’s just not sustainable, and it’s gross,” said Jessica Heinzelman, co-founder of Throne Labs, which provides bathroom trailers for cities and transit agencies. “You end up with the bare minimum that nobody’s really happy about.”
With all but the four bathrooms in Skid Row currently closed, city officials are turning to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority to fill the gap. Metro is rolling out “smart” standalone bathroom trailers with Heinzelman’s company — called Thrones — as part of its push to improve the rider experience, aiming to reach 64 units by 2028, just in time for the Summer Olympics hosted by Los Angeles. Throne uses some high tech features to monitor bathroom cleanliness and discourage loitering, but the bathrooms are cleaned by Throne employees.
New Throne bathroom trailer at Historic Broadway Station in Downtown L.A. (Maylin Tu/AfroLA)
Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, who represents Eastern San Fernando Valley residents, asked Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins in September to fund maintenance for the permanent bathroom at North Hollywood Station to the tune of $138,000 per month. Metro responded by placing a Throne there instead.
“While Metro understands the need to reduce expenditures given the City’s current financial situation, the decision to withdraw funding for your restroom program without prior coordination to backstop this important amenity was unfortunate,” Wiggins said in a September email.
To access a Throne, customers must text a number from their phone or use the Throne app. After every use, customers are prompted to rate the cleanliness of the bathroom. Requiring a phone number to access a Throne adds a layer of accountability, allowing the company to track and even ban problem users.
But advocates worry that Thrones are not accessible to everyone, including unhoused people who might not have a phone. In a 2024 interview, Throne said it gives out key cards as an alternative way to access their bathrooms. However, when AfroLA followed up last year to ask how many customers use key cards, Throne declined to provide a number.
“[W]e don’t track card distribution — we don’t want to know who is unhoused or phoneless,” Heinzelman said in an email.
AfroLA could not confirm that access cards are still available, and Heinzelman did not respond to follow-up questions.
“It just shows the prioritization of tourism and capital over the residents of Los Angeles.”
— Alevtina Sideleva, organizer with NOlympics LA
Metro’s contract with Throne ends in 2028, coinciding with the Summer Games hosted by Los Angeles. Advocates question whether the city is banking on Throne as a temporary solution to an ongoing need.
“It’s supposed to be for the public, and that means all members of the public, not just folks who are housed, not just folks that are tourists and are coming through,” said Alevtina Sideleva, an organizer with NOlympics LA. “It just shows the prioritization of tourism and capital over the residents of Los Angeles.”
How much does it cost to operate a public bathroom in L.A.? Roughly $100,000 a year per bathroom, according to Throne, JCDecaux and numbers from the Bureau of Street Services.
The evidence is intuitive and undeniable: more bathrooms means less shit on the street. But when bathrooms are viewed as a service for unhoused people, it can spark political resistance to adding more bathrooms.
What about crime?
The city of L.A. has a long-standing pattern of adding bathrooms only to either remove them or restrict access, blaming crime, drug use or other unwanted behavior.
Take the bathroom at Pershing Square in Downtown L.A., for example. It was once the most popular bathroom in L.A.’s public bathroom program, with an average of 163 uses per day from 2019 to 2022. This location was so popular that in 2023, the Bureau of Street Services requested that the Pit Stop bathroom attendant hours be expanded from 12 to 24 hours a day — a request that the City Administrative Officer’s office never granted. The bathroom was shut down in March 2025, before budget cuts hit, due to alleged criminal activity.
The Pershing Square station has some of the highest ridership numbers in Metro’s system. The nearby bathroom had very high usage rates, before it was closed and surrounded by fencing. Pershing Square business owners are opposed to the bathroom, and have filed complaints. (Maylin Tu/AfroLA)
According to emails obtained by AfroLA, the bathroom was the subject of numerous complaints by at least one downtown business owner.
“We are reaching out to you for help to address the criminal activity occurring at 5th and Hill and the additional issues the unsupervised public bathroom at this location is causing. The bathroom is a magnet,” wrote Joseph Cahill, director of business operations for JMF Development. His company manages the Pershing Square Building, home to pricey downtown restaurants Perch LA and Mrs. Fish.
That battle between downtown business owners and bathroom advocates goes back decades, with city officials and the LAPD shutting down bathrooms overnight or removing them altogether.
Complaints about crime, are not unique to L.A. Cities have viewed closing bathrooms as a way to make homeless people “disappear,” according to Bryant Simon, bathroom scholar and history professor at Temple University.
“The first reaction to the homeless problem in the 1980s when it sparks is to close public bathrooms,” he said in a lecture at Carleton College last year.
Internal emails obtained by AfroLA show that staff from the Bureau of Street Services reached out to Metro to find an alternative. The reasons are unclear why Metro has not placed a Throne at Pershing Square. In a call last year, Metro spokesperson Maya Pogoda offered to set up an interview with Stephen Tu, deputy executive officer for station experience. But she backtracked in a series of emails, alluding to the fact that AfroLA reporter Maylin Tu had already spoken to the official about Throne for a story published in March 2025.
“While the station meets the criteria we believe would make it a good candidate for a Throne restroom, we are focused on a package of improvements to the station before finalizing any decisions about the addition of a Throne restroom to Pershing Square,” Pogoda said in an email.
Pershing Square Station has one of the highest ridership numbers within the LA Metro system with nearly 5,000 weekday boardings. Metro has placed Thrones at other stations like Redondo Beach (846 weekday boardings) and Mariachi Plaza (548 weekday boardings).
The Pershing Square bathroom is still closed off, adding pressure to bathrooms on adjacent streets and nearby Skid Row.
Francois Nion, executive vice president at JCDecaux.
Social problems at public bathrooms are no surprise, said JCDecaux Executive Vice President Francois Nion, who has managed the public bathrooms in L.A. for 20 years. He points to Paris — home of the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and 435 bathrooms on city sidewalks operated by his company.
“You got graffiti, you’ve got people trying to camp inside. You got drug, prostitution. We see that everywhere around the world,” Nion said.
In L.A., Metro has had a Throne at Westlake/MacArthur Park Station since October 2023, proof that public bathrooms can work in tough locations.
“Are you committed to tackle it one-by-one, or are you just giving up and say, ‘Oh no, it’s too difficult, too expensive and who needs bathrooms?’” Nion asked.
Throne could be a temporary stopgap while L.A. figures out a long-term solution. Unfortunately, the city appears to be punting the issue to Metro. In a video posted to Instagram last fall, Councilmember Nazarian said the North Hollywood Station “didn’t have a working public restroom.” He didn’t clarify that the bathroom does work, but it is only fenced off due to budget cuts.
Jillian Burgos, community organizer.
“I would love for us to come up with a permanent solution,” said Jillian Burgos, a community and housing advocate who lives in Nazarian’s district. “It seems like such a waste to have that infrastructure there and it not being used.”
On a December afternoon, the closed brick-and-mortar bathroom at North Hollywood was covered in graffiti and reeked of urine (Throne bathrooms are closed overnight). The fencing is more symbolic than functional — the unit itself is easily accessible by walking around the fence. The permanent bathroom at Santa Monica/Vermont was also covered in graffiti with the fence cutting into the public-right-of-way, leaving only a few feet for people to pass. After decades of L.A. putting bathrooms on the street only to remove them, brick-and-mortar infrastructure costing millions of dollars has become what anti-homeless activists have repeatedly accused public bathrooms of being: Blight.
As the city of L.A. continues to face a budget crisis, advocates say that cuts to hygiene services reflect the city’s values.
“Public restrooms are a part of community care. It’s a part of public safety that we have clean, safe restrooms that we can use,” said Burgos. “This is just showing that we’re not investing in people or investing into our community.”