Late December, Nicollet Mall was replete with people, along with clusters of portable toilets scattered throughout. 

Those portapotties were there to support those attending Holidazzle, the annual holiday celebration organized by the Minneapolis Downtown Council. 

Outside of Holidazzle, however, facilities for people to relieve themselves are few and far between. The Minneapolis Downtown Council hopes to change that by increasing the amount of available bathrooms by 20% in the next two years. They don’t know exactly how they will do so, but plan to convene a series of meetings this year to strategize. 

The Downtown Minneapolis approach

There are a few places you can go downtown when nature calls, mostly in publicly-owned buildings such as the Minneapolis Central Library and City Hall. Privately owned restrooms available to the public include those at the Downtown Improvement District offices at Sixth Street and Nicollet Mall, as well as the Target. 

Many more restrooms in privately owned buildings are a hassle for people like Seany Thephachane to use. Thephachane is a courier who sometimes makes deliveries downtown. “Most of the time, I gotta go inside a building to look for one. Sometimes, it’s like, ‘you gotta use a key card to get in.’ I have not tried asking, I just kind of skip it because I don’t have time to ask,” Thephachane said as he hung out at Holidazzle with friends. 

Other businesses have restricted access to their restrooms in recent years. One business told KARE 11 that it did not want to open their restrooms to the public because some people ended up camping in them or doing drugs. And Target in recent years closed its gender-specific, multi-stall restrooms; people needing to use a restroom must line up for a single-stall by the registers and wait for a staff member to enter a code. 

Meanwhile, none of the publicly available restrooms are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District (DID), a subsidiary of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, tried to deploy overnight bathrooms twice in the past several years. During the fair weather months, DID hosts Warehouse District Live on N. First Avenue between N. Fifth and N. Sixth streets. From early evening on Friday and Saturday to 3 a.m. the following mornings, they have portable toilets available, as well as karaoke, inflatable ball toss and food trucks. 

Before Warehouse District Live, in 2019, DID deployed 24/7 restrooms in the form of portable toilets throughout downtown as part of their 100 Restrooms Project. The program was suspended when the pandemic began. 

Ben Shardlow, chief of staff for DID and the Minneapolis Downtown Council, said the 100 Restrooms Project had challenges with people abusing the portable toilets. “There were people who barricaded themselves inside the restrooms, so no one else could use the facility, for days at a time. Shardlow said in a phone interview, adding that people also were “aggressively unclean” in them. 

For Jay Matthews, who is unhoused, access to a restroom is important to be able to maintain his hygiene. “If we’re trying to prevent disease and we’re trying to prevent being sick, you want people to be able to use the bathroom in places they can dispose of this stuff without making everybody sick. No one is gonna hire you if you smell like s***. Just cause you (sic) homeless, you shouldn’t have to look like it all the time,” Matthews said as he participated in a panel convened by Central Lutheran Church on a recent Thursday morning. Matthews added that he knows people who have been cited for sex-related offenses for urinating in public. 

At the same panel, Michelle P, who declined to provide the spelling of her last name, wants to ensure restrooms for women are only used by women. She cites one experience where she complained to security at a public building  that men were present in the women’s restroom. 

DID’s Shardlow said the Downtown Council is talking with partners and convening implementation committees to address the lack of restrooms downtown in an effort to hit the 20% goal in the next two years. “There isn’t a lot of detail behind it. There’s a whole lot more work that needs to follow to actually move the needle and get better public restroom access downtown,” Shardlow said. 

How have other cities made restrooms available in their downtowns? 

Minneapolis is far from the only city with a public restroom challenge. Winnipeg took a shot at addressing it, first by deploying temporary toilets, then building a permanent restroom facility, called Amoowigamig, in 2022 using shipping containers. The cost to deploy both was funded by just around 900,000 Canadian dollars in grants from Canadian organizations. 

Like public toilets in other cities, Winnipeg’s temporary restrooms were vandalized. “Folks have taken away the toilet seat or the toilet paper dispenser, the urinal, anything that was removable was removed, and in some cases, the washrooms were completely lost to fire,” said Chris Brens, manager for community development at the city of Winnipeg. 

To combat vandalism, the city considered staffing Amoowigamig, which means “public washroom” in Ojibwe, with security guards. After gathering community feedback, Brens said they ultimately decided to staff the restroom with peer support workers, who have lived experiences being unhoused and are retained through Indigenous-led social service organization Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata. 

The peer support workers connect unhoused users to harm reduction supplies, including clean needles and pipes, condoms, Narcan, feminine products, as well as permanent housing. Peer support workers are at Amoowigamig 16 hours a day, costing the city of Winnipeg 270,000 Canadian dollars in 2024. 

Meanwhile, California cities San Francisco, Palo Alto and San Jose all have public self-cleaning toilets furnished by French advertising firm JCDecaux, all of which are free to use and some of which are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

San Francisco began experimenting with the self-cleaning restrooms, which were reported to be the first of their kind in the world, in the early 1990s to combat street feces. In 1998, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors amended an agreement with JCDecaux to erect 25 restrooms on sidewalks and at parks. Users can use the restrooms for up to 20 minutes before the door automatically opens on them. The restrooms are also equipped with a button that dials 911 when pressed twice, as well as an emergency lever to open the door to exit. 

The self-cleaning facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose are rented from JCDecaux. San Francisco’s toilets are paid for through advertising, with the city receiving a small cut. 

The toilets aren’t perfect, and some break down. One unit near the city’s Ferry Building remains out of order after first responders used the “jaws of life” to rescue someone from it in November. 

In the past, the facilities have had a reputation for fostering drug use, sex work and shelter. In 2014, the city’s public works department hired attendants to supervise some self-cleaning toilets up to 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Some toilet users say people use the restrooms less often for drugs, sex and shelter with the presence of attendants. 

Not everyone appreciates them, though. Junior Rodriguez, who draws cartoons and is unhoused, said he sometimes needs to use a restroom for longer than 20 minutes. “Sometimes you feel like taking a little longer because you ate something,” Rodriguez said after emerging from an unattended self-cleaning restroom near the city’s Ferry Building. 

In 2020 the Board of Supervisors tried to kill the restroom contract, which had been renewed the year prior, in the wake of a corruption scandal that rocked the city’s public works department and landed its former director in federal prison. A representative from a rival advertising company testified at a Board of Supervisors meeting that they offered the city’s public works department more restrooms and money, only for the department to cancel the request for proposals and rewrite how proposals were evaluated. 

How should Minneapolis proceed?

Ward 3 City Council member Michael Rainville believes DID should work with businesses to open their restrooms to the general public. “They’re already there. When these retail-type buildings were built, they included public restrooms, but over time they just haven’t made them accessible to the public,” Rainville said. 

Matthews wants those retail restrooms open and attended to by unhoused people like himself. “I’ll take that job. I’ll take some money. I’ll sit there and make sure, hey, man (makes a knocking gesture), wellness check. Um, you OK in there? No drug use up in here. They’re making all this money raising the prices on food and everything, you pay another person minimum wage or something to go in there,” Matthews said. 

Street Voices For Change offered to monitor Target’s downtown Minneapolis store restrooms to keep them open but could never work out a deal. 

“Every time we as Street Voices organized to meet with somebody to have this conversation, they change the decision maker. And they just kept moving around the decision maker so that we could never then organize and strategize and get our questions answered,” said the Reverend Melissa Pohlman, pastor for Community Ministries at Central Lutheran Church. Target did not respond to requests to discuss the single-stall restroom or attempts to partner with Street Voices For Change on monitoring the downtown store’s restroom. 

Outside of retail spaces, Rainville adds he is open to studying building restrooms on city streets so long as the city can address costs and security issues, which he defines as people misbehaving and infringing “upon the rights of people who are behaving themselves.”

Council member Katie Cashman, who represents much of downtown and Loring Park, believes DID should work with the city to establish more public restrooms, citing the Peavey Plaza restroom trailer as an example. “The Peavey Plaza seasonal restroom trailer is a great example of a successful public restroom amenity that serves tourists walking from the Convention Center to Nicollet Mall, as well as downtown residents who are just out and about running errands,” Cashman said. 

Jairus Sullivan recounted how convenient it was when Holidazzle was happening, because its presence came with portable toilets. “That was awesome. Just roll down Nicollet and pop into a port-a-potty,” Sullivan said at the same panel Matthews participated in. Sullivan believes more portable toilets downtown would effectively address the lack of restrooms. 

Meanwhile, Jay4 Vang said while attending Holidazzle that downtown restrooms should not be portable. “Who wants to sit on a cold porta potty? Having indoor bathrooms would be ideal. Me personally, I wouldn’t want to go into a cold porta potty,” Vang said while hanging out with friends at Holidazzle. 

Hopkins resident Jenna Benson would feel safe using a public restroom with glass that changes opacity depending on whether or not it is occupied. “They’re clear when there’s no one in there, and then I go in, they turn a color so no one can see it,” Benson said at Holidazzle. “I feel like one of those bathrooms would really be inviting; I want to see what I’m going into and not get trapped into, like a gross situation.” Such restrooms exist in Japan.

Maple Grove resident Austin Doan, who was visiting Holidazzle with two siblings, suggests the restrooms should only be accessible with codes or an app. “Because if it’s just unlocked, then people will probably ruin it. It’s not safe for people to use it,” Doan said. 

Meanwhile, Bryan Doan, who uses they/them pronouns and is one of Austin’s siblings, suggested people share bathroom codes with one another on social media. “I live in New York, and they have these grassroots efforts where people just go on Twitter and they give bathroom codes,” Bryan said.

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