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YEAR END EDITION DECEMBER 26, 2019
Note: The PSAI is committed to bringing Members industry news. It creates original content and it
aggregates news that appears in other sources. Unless otherwise stated in organizational documents or in
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other sources.
Portable Toilets on City Streets
A California reporter, writing for the New York
Times, addressed a Sonoma reader's question
about the lack of portable toilets on city streets.
She pointed to a 2017 report from the City of
Los Angeles that found there were just nine
public toilets for 1,964 residents on Skid Row.
That works out to one toilet for every 218
people. The United Nations standard for refugee
camps mandates a ratio of one toilet for every
20 people.
To address the public health hazard of
inadequate sanitation, the cities of San Francisco
and Los Angeles have begun increasing the
number of public toilets available in homeless areas. The key seems to be making sure that paid attendants
maintain the facilities. This is not an inexpensive or permanent solution. The author notes that a single Pit Stop
site with hand-washing station and attendant (seen above) costs nearly $340,000 per year. The cost for a unit
of subsidized affordable housing in California,
by contrast, is about $450,000.
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