Where did all the public bathrooms go?

Let's be real: the tech bros in Silicon Valley are busy "disrupting" everything from taxis to housing, but they can't figure out how to give a homeless person a place to take a dump without calling the cops. This piece from JSTOR Daily is a much-needed slap in the face to the "smart city" crowd who think a mobile app is a substitute for a concrete slab with running water. The history here is a classic "open source vs. closed source" tragedy. In the 19th century, public sanitation was treated like a public good—a shared library for your bowels. Then we let the car-centric urban planners and the "broken windows" policing ideology take over, and suddenly the public toilet became a security threat. We privatized the commons, and now the only "open source" code in our cities is the graffiti on the ATM vestibules where people are forced to do their business. This isn't just about convenience; it's about who gets to exist in public space. When you remove the restroom, you remove the right to stay. It's a zoning law against being poor, a sanitary excuse for gentrification. The article rightly points out that this disproportionately hits women, the elderly, and the unhoused. We've built a world where the only free toilet is the one you have to buy a $7 artisanal sandwich to access. That's not progress; that's a paywall on humanity. The fix isn't harder. It's just politically unpopular because it means admitting that public infrastructure is the ultimate open-source project—funded by all, accessible to all, maintained by all. Until we stop treating a public toilet like a liability and start treating it like the basic node in the urban network that it is, we're just building a city that's closed source for the bottom 50%. Read the full story over at [JSTOR Daily](https://daily.jstor.org/where-did-all-the-public-bathrooms-go/) and see why the "shithole" countries are laughing at our inability to handle our own waste.