San Francisco is building one public toilet, to be completed in 2025 at a cost of $1.7 million, and politicians there today held a press conference about it. The process that led to this pricey potty is a pretty good summary of everything wrong with San Francisco’s regulatory environment, the function of which is to make it nearly impossible to build anything.
A statement about the project from the city said that “while this isn’t the cheapest way to build, it reflects San Francisco’s values.”
In a way, this makes sense. San Francisco does not value toilets, as is evidenced by its public-pooping problem, unique in its scale among American cities. (There’s a website dedicated to tracking the city’s excremental incidents on a continuously updated map.) And it does not value the construction of anything if environmentalists don’t hold veto power over it, if bureaucrats don’t micromanage the design of it, and if politicians don’t get to hold a press conference about it — even if it’s just a glorified port-a-john in a public park.