Teddy Siegel
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Teddy Siegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is John Cochran. He's got a blog called The Grumpy Economist. And he once wrote a post about how when the pay toilets went away, so did the public toilets.
Without that incentive, Nikolak was right. The free public toilets were overrun with people who had to go. Or people abusing drugs or having sex. Cities were changing. In lots of places, they struggled to fund and maintain public places. With no income from the toilets, taking care of them was harder than ever. Cities couldn't deal. Eventually, they closed them or let them fall into disrepair.
The pay toilets may have been flawed, but they served a purpose that no public or private entity has been able to effectively fill since. John says... This is a classic tale of a price control. When the government imposes a price.
This is a price control, I suppose, but they just got rid of all prices. Price control at zero. The price control at zero is exactly what Michael Gessel wanted when he started his fight a half a century ago. When the pay toilets started going away, what did you think would fill in that void?
Over the years, Michael has read critiques that blame his movement for the decline of toilets, even the decline of cities. Do you have any regrets?
So who should be in charge of toilets? And we find our way to a modern version of a good old-fashioned pay toilet. That's after the break. Rick Weinmeier is a public health law professor at Loyola University in Chicago. And because he studies toilets, his friends are constantly sending him photos of the most delightful and the most disgusting stalls around the world.
A public good. In economics, a public good is something that everyone can benefit from. And very importantly, one person benefiting from it doesn't stop another person from benefiting from it as well. Think clean air or lighthouses. Governments typically decide what to treat like a public good. And Rick says he would put public toilets on that list.
The problem is the U.S. government has never fully embraced toilets as a public good. It's just not been a priority.
Toilets fall into this economic and legal netherworld. Where pay toilets are prohibited, the government is preventing the free market from solving the problem. But they also aren't treating it like a public good. They're not providing sufficient bathrooms to the public. And when they do, it can be the stuff of nightmares. Like this bathroom Rick once used in Central Park.
Oh my goodness.
In most places, there are some basic bathroom rights. There are building and plumbing codes requiring certain types of businesses to offer bathrooms. Or if you have a pressing medical need, you can get a card and legally access just about any bathroom. But most people don't know these rights. They don't know how to hold businesses accountable. Someone's going to have to enforce that, right?
Would you call this like a regulatory failure?
And the way, of course, that many of us fill that need is by paying, just not the way we used to.
I've done it.
Is it so bad? Is it so terrible? I think it's not a great idea. One, businesses can pick and choose who they let into their bathroom, and that leaves a lot of room for discrimination. Plus, a lot of businesses just don't want to be a public bathroom provider.
So providing toilets has just fallen into this huge crack where some of our most complicated needs also get stuck, like housing, healthcare, education, somewhere between a market solution and a government one. The pure market solution would be to bring back pay toilets. Have a bougie $10-a-visit boutique pay toilet, Insta-ready with neon, music playing, oons-oons, fresh-cut flowers.
If you're balling on a budget, You get fake flowers and you pay $2. And then there's the no frills, but you just gotta go option. That is 25 cents. But that wouldn't serve people who can't pay at all, like people without homes who arguably need them the most. The pure government solution would mean treating bathrooms like a true public good, something everyone can benefit from together.
But that means convincing taxpayers to foot what can be a hefty bill. San Francisco infamously planned to buy one public toilet for more than a million dollars. So the search is on for the right blend of government and market solutions. tax breaks for businesses that allow the public to go, or tokens instead of quarters for bathroom locks, which would get around the ban on pay toilets.
Meanwhile, in the city of New York, they are no longer banned.
In 2006, the city announced they'd add 20 pay toilets to the 1,000 or so public toilets in the city. They installed seven... And the others have been in storage since. Apparently, they're pretty hard to install and maintain. So does anyone have a quarter? Let me check. I don't think I do. Public toilet influencer and opera singer Teddy Siegel took me to see the very first one they installed.
Showing 41–60 of 63 · page 3 of 4
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