In places where these things were problems with public restrooms, they remain problems without public restrooms.
The 10%'ers are still doing their dastardly things. The remaining 90% of society still has the same messes to clean up (or to willfully ignore).
Nothing has been improved in this process.
The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision
So yes the 10% fuck it up for everyone unless cracked down on.
Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.
But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.
Cleaning up bodily fluids, which likely come from drug users, is a whole other thing.
It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.
>How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.
But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that.
Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.
I think you might be giving away the class you were raised in if you think it’s infeasible to pay people to clean toilets.
As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them.
But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.
Because they are underfunded often.
The problem was not eliminated. If anything, the effects were amplified.
It just moved the poop mess and dirty needles from one defined space back to everywhere else. In this way, they're easier to accidentally encounter while out-and-about, and yet simultaneously harder to intentionally find and clean up.
I think this kind of result has strong resemblance to what is colloquially known as a footgun.
It filters out that bottom 10% that can't coherently speak or present themselves to pass a vibe check in asking for bathroom access.
Things did improve for those with standards, at the cost of having to deal with the bathroom equivalent of barbed wire topped walls around your home compound. That IS better than walking in on the bottom 10% or the disasters they create, but only slightly.
Collectively, squeezing the bottom out by denying them access building by building, block by block has helped turn parts of cities around. It's not that different than locking up your food high in the air when camping so animals don't get into it - they don't come around and stop coming around if they are.
It certainly had some limitating factor. Until late 2010-early 2020s, public displays of gay sex were considered improper rather than brave, injecting drugs in public was a matter for the police, and shitting on the streets was considered a nuisance that could be avoided by the shitter having self-agency and choosing to shit elsewhere.
People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.
Grow up.
In terms of "the tragedy of the commons", that outside incentive is usually public shaming in smaller communities, or rules and laws in larger and more anonymous communities. If you look at shared resources across history and cultures, you usually find communities enforce very strong outside incentives against spoiling the commons instead of just relying on the kindness of strangers.
It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose.
That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “laissez faire” and let everyone do whatever they want, and expect the common to be preserved. The only way to protect the common is to take some sort of collective action; pass a law that limits how much an individual can take from the common, or set a quota and allow people to bid, etc.
The collective action doesn’t even always have to be a legislative action; you could create a taboo around using too much of a common, or use social shaming to get people to only use their share.
The point is that you have to take SOME collective action to prevent the tragedy.
It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.
The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow.
The taxes I pay support way more than just the bottom quintile. I'm actually in the UK but I guess you're in the US, so here's a rough breakdown based on this infographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni....
Much the biggest chunk of US federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.
The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.
In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.
The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.
It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.
In reality, about 2% or even less.
We could live in paradise if we just removed them from society. Put them in a box.
Virtually all offices I've worked in, the bathrooms have been less than ideally used by colleagues. The people you'd class as 'commons' may not be having public sex, shooting up drugs, but many can be dirty and/or selfish. And this is in an office where cleaners regularly clean the facilities (I'd hazard more frequently than public toilets are cleaned). There's always be pee on the floor, pee on the seat, etc etc.
One by one, they were all burned down. Homeless people seem to be really good at destroying stuff. My apartment building is taking on new low income tenants and the rate of fires - with sprinkler activation - is boggling. The public park I walk by often is losing a little bit more greenery to homeless fires every few months, but I’m still saddened by the loss of a large, beautiful tree - torched by a camper.
The problem isn’t removing public resources, it’s keeping them in working order against a persistent opponent.
Portland's county allocates $9m annually. LA's county allocates $4b annually. Should it be 2x that? 20x? 200x before any positive change occurs?
"Mental health" is a non-answer designed to shift accountability and agency from individuals into everyone else vis a vis whatever system is expected to provide this vague "support", despite the failed track record of these systems to improve anything but their employees' and contractors' pockets.