Jason Winshell/SF Public Press

The public restroom near City Hall gets plenty of use. During business hours the units are havens of drugs and prostitution, and often filthy.

Prostitution and drug use aren’t what San Francisco bargained for 14 years ago when it allowed a private company to install public restrooms across the city. But among the 25 freestanding units, several have been routinely closed for a week or more because they were regularly hijacked by junkies and sex workers.

Even when used by legitimate patrons, the toilets have been hard to keep up to modern sanitary standards. Most of the so-called “self-cleaning” toilets are now so filthy that even after automatic cleanings, they require one to five manual scrub-downs each day.

How messy are we talking about? One indication: Homeless people in the Tenderloin say they are so repulsed by the conditions inside that they avoid using the bathrooms, preferring to relieve themselves on adjacent sidewalks, alleyways and bushes.

“They’re disgusting!” volunteered Jim Rokas, a homeless carpenter who sells the Street Sheet newspaper, as he pointed angrily at the gold lettering above the forest green bathroom pod at City Hall that reads “TOILET.”

“We call these ‘hoe-tels,’” he said.“H-O-E-T-E-L. People use these for sex, shooting up, everything!”

Drugs are commonplace in the units, as they serve as convenient, private spaces that cannot be unlocked from the outside — ideal for getting a quick fix. In more than a dozen visits to four public restrooms over the last month, a Public Press reporter found two where hypodermic needles were strewn across the floor.

There are also clear signs of prostitution at a bathroom just beyond the balcony of Mayor Ed Lee’s office — even during business hours. At the self-cleaning facility in Civic Center Plaza, just steps from City Hall, the automatic door stayed open just long enough for one man to come out and another to go in, while a woman who remained inside entertained each for up to half an hour. (Rules posted on the bathroom limit occupancy to one adult at a time, with a 20-minute maximum.)

The toilets were installed in San Francisco by the New York-based advertising company JCDecaux, starting in 1996. Maintaining hundreds of public restrooms in Paris and London, the company spent $250,000 on installation for each facility here. JCDecaux recoups the investment by selling ad space on the outsides of the bathrooms, as well as on more than 100 kiosks throughout the city. The city receives a cut of the profits — $507,000 just in the last year, according to Department of Public Works Spokeswoman Gloria Chan.

“It’s a money-generating program for the city, and a service provided at low cost,” said Francois Nion, JCDecaux’s executive vice president.

But the network of city toilets isn’t as clean as city officials had first promised. What was intended to be a service for poor residents without access to basic hygiene, as well as a relief for tourists, has become a health hazard for undaunted patrons and the staff who clean and maintain them.

Robot janitors not enough

The facilities are designed to clean themselves during a 55-second automatic cycle in which a cleaning solution is sprayed on all inside surfaces. But the bathrooms weren’t designed for the job of cleaning up after drug users who leave needles and the other paraphernalia behind, or those who disable the doors by wedging them shut from the inside. The loads of garbage and human waste that end up everywhere often remain, soaked with detergent, until a human janitor bags them.

Public Works spokeswoman Chan insisted that the city was not responsible for the maintenance, cleanliness or safety of the facilities. Rather, it is written into the city’s 20-year contract with JCDecaux that the company must keep the facilities in a “clean, graffiti-free, safe, and first-class condition” by providing “the necessary personnel to assure the maintenance of Automatic Public Toilets.”

As a result the facilities, which frequently go in and out of service because of mechanical trouble, trash or police activity, are shuttered by the city. For residents of low-income, high-density neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin, that means the closure of the only bathrooms available to the public at night.