After officials expressed outrage over
the $1.7 million price tag
and extended timeline for one San Francisco public toilet, building experts around the country have plunged into the debate over how the city can deliver a cheaper, faster alternative.
Now, two men who run prefabricated building companies lifted the lid Wednesday on a potential solution to San Francisco’s overpriced toilet travails: a modular bathroom they say they’ll give to the Noe Valley Town Square for free and that can be installed using local union labor.
The only catch is San Francisco officials must agree to a streamlined approval process considering the city’s own plan for installing a handcrafted $1.7 million bathroom was expected to take a gut-busting
two to three years to permit and build. After this column detailed the startling cost of just one toilet in 150 square feet of space, Gov. Gavin Newsom froze state funds tagged for the project and demanded a cheaper solution.
Chad Kaufman, president of
Public Restroom Company, and Vaughan Buckley, CEO of
Volumetric Building Companies, are in San Francisco for a building conference this week at Moscone Center. On Wednesday morning, they detailed their bathroom offer at the conference, just the latest twist in the story of
one little toilet that’s exploded around the world.
Trevor Noah talked about it on “The Daily Show,”
international newspapers picked up the toilet tale
and numerous enterprising San Franciscans
dressed as the $1.7 million toilet for Halloween
— because nothing’s scarier than city bureaucrats wasting time and taxpayer money.
“All of my friends have been sending me the Chronicle story,” Kaufman told me Tuesday. “My email blew up in two days.”
So he came up with a crafty idea. He has a modular bathroom — with one toilet in a lockable stall and a small space outside with a sink — that he displayed in the spring at the California Park and Recreation Society Conference and Expo in Sacramento. He sells that model for $135,000, but will give the display bathroom to the Noe Valley Town Square for free, and Buckley will offer free architecture and engineering support to ready the site. The city could hire local laborers to install it.
Not bespoke and not $1.7 million: This modular bathroom is offered to San Francisco free for the Noe Valley Town Square.
Courtesy Public Restroom Company“I want to donate a restroom to help the people of Noe Valley get this accomplished sooner rather than later,” Kaufman said, nodding to the city’s estimate that its exorbitant loo wouldn’t be ready for use until 2025. “Our installation would take three days.”
Tamara Aparton, spokesperson for the city’s Recreation and Park Department, confirmed that Buckley emailed the department Tuesday morning with the offer. She said the department has responded and hopes to meet with the men this week.
“We are happy to explore this offer,” she told me, noting that a vetting and permitting process would still be required.
Kaufman sold seven similar modular bathrooms to the city of Los Angeles for about the same total price as the $1.7 million Noe Valley toilet, and has also sold prefabricated toilets to cities in Northern California including Tracy, San Bruno, East Palo Alto and Redwood City.
Sounds like a win-win, but this being red-tape-wrapped San Francisco, nothing’s ever easy. The city might have to ask for special dispensation to accept the free bathroom because the states in which the two companies are headquartered — Nevada and Pennsylvania — are among
the 30 the city has declared off-limits for travel and business
due to their stances on abortion rights, voting rights or LGBTQ rights. The city is considering changing those rules because it raises prices and doesn’t seem to have an effect on other states’ laws.
Meanwhile, John Bauters, the mayor of Emeryville, says he, too, has a far cheaper toilet solution that works just fine:
the Portland Loo, a prefabricated bathroom designed by the city of Portland, Ore., and now purchased by scores of cities around the country including Sacramento; Santa Rosa; Monterey; San Diego; Austin, Texas; Miami; and Cincinnati.
Yes, shockingly, other cities have figured out the commode conundrum.
“It goes back to grade school. There’s a book called, ‘Everybody Poops,’” Bauters pointed out. “Do you want them to poop on your sidewalk or do you want them to poop in a facility? It’s not rocket science.”
Conveniently, San Francisco, notoriously short on public toilets, has not flushed Oregon down its contracting drain as it has those 30 other states and could presumably purchase Portland Loos.
Bauters, who’s revered by Bay Area urbanists
who want more housing, more bike lanes, more car-free streets and more common sense, said his city spent $99,000 to purchase a Portland Loo for the Joseph Emery Skatepark and $41,000 more to install it.
John Bauters, the mayor of Emeryville says he has a far cheaper toilet solution that works fine:
the Portland Loo, a pre-fabricated bathroom designed by the city of Portland, Oregon and now purchased by scores of cities. Bauters is shown in an Oct. 1, 2019 file photo.
He praised its stainless steel surface that’s resistant to graffiti and vandalism, and the fact that it’s easy to clean with a connected hose. Its bottom section has vents, which make it easy to see how many people are inside and whether they’re using the toilet appropriately, he added. Bauters said it’s used a lot, and the city hasn’t received complaints about it.
Another Portland Loo will be installed in a new 10-acre Emeryville neighborhood that will feature 500 units of housing, a park, a dog park, a playground and an organic garden, Bauters said, noting that the development’s three-year construction timeline is about the same as the Noe Valley toilet.
“You’ll have one bathroom, and we’ll have a 10-acre neighborhood,” Bauters said. “San Francisco can be a world-class city, but it has to get out of its own way sometimes.”
He said surveying San Francisco’s budget breakdown for the now-notorious Noe Valley bathroom raised big questions for him — including its $300,000 in architecture fees to design one little bathroom, which could be enough to pay for two Portland Loos.
I asked a handful of professional architects and engineers to look at the city’s budget breakdowns for the Noe Valley Town Square toilet, as well as similar small bathrooms built by Rec and Park, one in Alamo Square and another in McLaren Park. All three projects had about the same construction costs, and no one I asked thought those cost estimates made sense.
Justin Watkins, who has worked as an assistant superintendent and project engineer on construction projects in San Francisco in the past, said the fact that the breakdowns were so similar was a red flag.
“That says this is very simple city budgeting, and if something’s been approved at this price before, it’s likely to get approved again,” said Watkins, who now works for 1build, which makes software to make it easier to estimate construction costs.
He said the budgets appeared to include “a ton of mark-ups,” including the Noe Valley toilet’s line item of $175,000 for project management by the Recreation and Park Department and $150,000 in project management by the Department of Public Works.
“Now you have two city officials overseeing the same single toilet for what’s effectively their annual salaries,” he said. “One manager can run multiple projects. It’s rather unnecessary.”
Aparton, the Rec and Park spokesperson, said the city provides a team comprising an architect, a landscape architect, a mechanical engineer, a electrical engineer, a structural engineer and a geotechnical engineer — and that none of their salaries or benefits come out of the general fund. Instead, they’re paid by individual projects.
Assemblymember Matt Haney, who secured the $1.7 million in state funds for the toilet before Newsom put them on hold to see if the city can proffer a cheaper plan, said he wants an audit of the city’s contracting processes, because this one little toilet has provided a window into how broken they are.
He said the city needs to stop dismissing proven answers — like the Portland Loo or
Big Belly trash cans
— in an effort
to create its own bespoke answers, which often take way too much time and money.
“Hopefully, one crappy bathroom can save San Francisco by convincing them to get off the pot and get to work,” he said with a laugh.
Leslie Crawford, co-founder of the Town Square, said the international attention has been a jolt to little Noe Valley, but she’s confident the toilet tale will end well.
“We might, out of all this, come up with something that’s better, cheaper, faster and reasonable!” she said.
In San Francisco? Now that would be quite the twist ending.
Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
