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Originally Posted by n0nsensical
Anyone else noticing a pattern here...San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, no public restrooms. Other people seem surprised at this, but as someone who has, like fredweena, struggled to find one in San Francisco, I can tell you this isn't unusual. Maybe there are a lot of junkies around here. Maybe they were tourists.  You wouldn't catch me paying to use a toilet either way. |
Not exactly tourists, but... San Francisco and Santa Cruz are destinations. Places where people go, especially young people and drifters (young and otherwise), in search of some mythical cool counterculture that will envelope them in an amazing experience that doesn't require _them_ to do anything. I used to have a website about Santa Cruz, and I'd field questions from anybody about the town. And I got a lot of "I hear Santa Cruz is soooo cool and laid back. This summer, if I showed up with my surfboard, is there some way I could connect with somebody who'd let me sleep on their couch _for free?_" People like this take thoughtless and rough advantage of any resource they can.... including restrooms.
Both towns also have a rather backhanded, liberal/libertarian policy towards street people. They aren't run out of town, they're simply... ignored. As they play out their sometimes mental-illness-inspired fantasies on the street, or simply blow their minds away with whatever they can hustle up. That we step around them on the street without saying anything is supposedly liberal and tolerant. I haven't quite worked out the morality behind that one yet... At any rate, free-floating not-quite-domesticated young people and street/homeless people (or just plain addicts) with problems are big factors behind restroom closures, in both places.
That doesn't explain dull and prosperous San Jose, of course. If there are a lot of rude young people in the Santa Clara Valley, it's probably because Mumsy and Dadsy together are pulling down about $200K working at Adobe and HP and were too busy to give the young things anything but a comfortable, vacant, life and an unearned sense of entitlement which translates into arrogance when dealing with the service industry.