NYC Plans to Expand Public Restrooms. Will it Benefit Homeless New Yorkers?

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While city officials cited the importance of restrooms for all residents of the city, highlighting the needs of young children and older New Yorkers, homeless people also rely heavily on public bathrooms, but face particular difficulty in accessing them, experts and advocates say.

Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.

Mayor Eric Adams launching the new “Ur In Luck,” plan to expand public restrooms on Monday in Manhattan.

Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement this week to expand public restrooms across the city is a step in the right direction, but still not enough to meet the need, experts and advocates say.

Under the new Ur in Luck initiative, the city will build 46 new public restrooms and renovate 36 existing ones within the next five years. In addition, the city will site 14 new locations for automatic public toilets within two years. A Google Maps feature is already available for use, where people can use their phones to locate public restrooms operated by various agencies throughout the city.

“If you’re a New Yorker, finding available restrooms is a real challenge, and particularly if you have children, it brings about an additional challenge,” the mayor said during a press conference on Monday.

While city officials cited the importance of restrooms for all residents of the city, highlighting the needs of young children and older New Yorkers, homeless people also rely heavily on public bathrooms, but face particular difficulty in accessing them, experts and advocates say.

For instance, very few restrooms in the entire city are open around the clock. A representative from the Parks Department, which will be managing the new restrooms built under the Ur in Luck initiative, confirmed that the facilities will be open for standard park operating hours, leaving homeless people with few options for relief during late nights or early mornings.

Meanwhile, public library branches—key hubs for both housed and unhoused New Yorkers to access services, escape the elements or use the restroom—are facing reduced hours thanks to budget cuts. The city does operate eight drop-in centers for unsheltered residents, which are open 24 hours a day and offer bathrooms, showers and other resources.

Alison Wilkey, the director of government affairs at Coalition for the Homeless, spoke to City Limits about the need for a more comprehensive restroom plan, one that would include expanded hours of operation, an improved ratio of bathrooms to residents and accessible bathrooms for people with disabilities.

“There are some people who think, ‘Well, if you need a bathroom, you can just go into a restaurant.’ That’s actually not true for everyone,” said Wilkey. “One, a lot of places require that you make a purchase, and two, there are definitely racial differences in how people are perceived when they walk in and ask for a bathroom.”

In 2023, the NYPD issued over 9,300 summonses for urinating in public. Access to toilet facilities is not only a quality of life matter, it’s also a public health concern: people who are unhoused have a 300 percent increased risk of developing a urinary tract infection, due to their limited access to restrooms, according to the “Free to Pee” campaign launched by homelessness advocates to increase bathroom access. 

NYC Council/Emil Cohen

A 2018 rally calling for more bathrooms across the city.

“It’s great that we are building more bathrooms, but bathrooms take time to build,” Wilkey noted. “The city could take an additional step right now to make more bathrooms available by opening up bathrooms in government buildings.”

Wilkey’s suggestion is proposed in a bill by Councilmember Rita Joseph, which presents a more immediate solution by allowing the public use of restrooms in municipal buildings. Another bill by Councilmember Sandy Nurse addresses the need for a longer term, strategic plan for equitable bathroom access in the city.

In an interview with City Limits, Nurse said the amount of proposed new toilets in the mayor’s plan was a “sad number.” It misses the mark for the adequate number of bathrooms for public spaces used by other large U.S. cities, according to research compiled by the Urban Design Forum. While New York currently has about one bathroom per 7,700 residents, Nurse’s bill aims to increase the ratio to one for every 2,000 residents by the year 2035.

“As one of the biggest municipalities in the world, we should be able to make more than 82 bathrooms in five years,” Nurse said. “That’s an embarrassing rate of construction, especially when there are more flexible options that I think would allow the city to hit a larger goal faster.”

One unique bathroom option recently introduced in Nurse’s district, at Bushwick’s Irving Square Park, is the Portland Loo, the first of its kind in Brooklyn. Named after its city of origin, The Portland Loo is a compact structure that boasts cost efficiency, easy cleaning and 24/7 accessibility.

Housing advocates at VOCAL-NY raised another solution policymakers could consider: opening more bathrooms within the subway system. Out of 472 MTA subway stations, 133 restrooms were operational prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 58 are currently open, albeit from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., according to published reports.  

Althea Matthews, 65, is a leader in the Homelessness Union of VOCAL-NY and previously worked on its “Free to Pee” campaign. 

“There’s a lot of homeless people on the subway that need to be able to use the bathroom,” Matthews said. “When they are unable to, they get a ticket because they have to release themselves.”

Matthews has been involved in housing rights activism since 2015. She experienced three years of homelessness in 2019 before moving into her home in January 2023. She stressed the importance of accessible bathrooms for the homeless, as a way to both prevent health complications and avoid criminal charges and fines for public urination.

“This issue is vital to ensure that we’re reducing interactions people have with our criminal justice system,” said Adolfo Abreu, the director of housing campaigns at VOCAL-NY. “It also gets us to think more dynamically about what services and care homeless New Yorkers require.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Anastasia@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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Kids are upstaging their political parents — by acting like kids

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By ASHRAF KHALIL (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — For one shining moment this week, the country’s ongoing political crises were swept away by the comedic power of one cherubic and wildly exuberant 6-year-old.

Rep. John Rose, R-Tenn., was giving an impassioned defense of former President Donald Trump when his young son Guy went into action. As C-Span recorded the moment, Guy mugged for the camera, stuck his tongue out, rolled his eyes and generally seemed to be having a blast. The nation reacted with a burst of pure bipartisan giddiness. Even Sen. Mitch McConnell’s press secretary joined in the fun.

Guy’s moment in the spotlight is the latest example of political kids upstaging their parents and bringing a moment of levity to the official workings of government. It’s also a solid case study on the sheer unifying power of humor.

“It reminds us that we’re all humans, we all have children. And maybe these things we’re fighting about aren’t all that important,” said Caleb Warren, co-director of the University of Colorado’s Humor Research Lab and a marketing professor at the University of Arizona. “And for him to be doing that during one of these hyperpolitical speeches, that’s what makes it special … If he was just making those faces in the classroom, it wouldn’t have been the same.”

That incongruity between behavior and environment is key, according to Tamara Sharifov, a licensed clinical social worker based in San Diego who uses humor in therapy sessions, mediation and conflict resolution. Sharifov recently spoke on a panel in Washington about the healing power of humor.

“Comedy allows a shift in perspective and a softening. It allows for an increase in empathy and a calmer environment,” she said. “It’s very healing. It breaks through rigidity.”

A day after his House antics, Guy was at it again, rolling on the White House lawn during the annual congressional picnic.

He now joins a long and proud line of political kids gaining attention for publicly acting like kids. Perhaps his purest spiritual predecessor is young Andrew Giuliani mugging his way through his father Rudy’s 1994 mayoral inauguration — a performance so iconic that it merited a Saturday Night Live parody.

“This is my Guy!!!,” Andrew Giuliani tweeted Tuesday, linking to the C-Span clip.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ irrepressible son Jack, then 4 years old, gained attention for his enthusiastic dancing during the 2005 ceremony when former President Obama was introducing Roberts as a Supreme Court nominee. And an infamous Oval Office photo features the young son of a Secret Service agent face-planting into a couch as his parents chat in the background.

Sometimes the kiddie cuteness is slightly engineered — as when the White House made an event out of Take Our Kids to Work Day with kids acting as Secret Service agents and reporters.

And sometimes the attention isn’t always positive. In 2014, Sasha and Malia Obama acted very much like a pair of bored, eye-rolling teenagers as their father spoke during an admittedly boring Thanksgiving turkey pardoning press conference. A Republican congressional staffer publicly blasted the pair for their lack of decorum and quickly resigned under pressure.

As for the newest member of this elite club, young Guy Rose has already achieved a notable form of bipartisanship in these fractured times. Father and son appeared together on CNN and Fox News, and the youngster’s comedic confidence seemed to gain momentum over time.

When asked to describe his father’s job, Guy told Fox News his dad “does boring stuff.”

And when Rep. Rose started to give a very political answer about how interesting it is to meet and learn from his constituents, Guy — with a stage whisper and epic comedic timing — said, “He’s not telling the truth!”

Rep. Rose has taken all the fuss in good spirits — especially considering that he was in the middle of giving a fairly angry speech that basically nobody listened to.

“Guy has been a source of joy in our family since we brought him home from the hospital six years ago,” Rose told The Associated Press. “I certainly had no idea he was making those faces behind me while I was delivering remarks, but in hindsight, I’m glad he did. I think we all needed that laugh.”

US-built pier in Gaza is reconnected after repairs, and aid will flow soon, US Central Command says

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By LOLITA C. BALDOR and TARA COPP (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military-built pier designed to carry badly needed aid into Gaza by boat has been reconnected to the beach in the besieged territory after a section broke apart in storms and rough seas, and food and other supplies will begin to flow soon, U.S. Central Command announced Friday.

The section that connects to the beach in Gaza, the causeway, was rebuilt nearly two weeks after heavy storms damaged it and abruptly halted what had already been a troubled delivery route.

“Earlier this morning in Gaza, U.S. forces successfully attached the temporary pier to the Gaza beach,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters by phone Friday. “We expect to resume delivery of humanitarian assistance from the sea in the coming days.”

Cooper said operations at the reconnected pier will be ramped up soon with a goal to get 1 million pounds (450,000 kilograms) of food and other supplies moving through the pier into Gaza every two days.

The pier was only operational for a week before a storm broke it apart, and had initially struggled to reach delivery goals. Weather was a factor, and early efforts to get aid from the pier into Gaza were disrupted as civilians desperate for food stormed the trucks that aid agencies were using to transport the food to the warehouses for distribution.

However before it broke apart the pier had been gradually increasing aid movement each day. Cooper said Friday that the lessons learned from that initial week of operations made him confident higher levels of aid throughout could be attained now.

A large section of the causeway broke apart May 25 as heavy winds and high seas hit the area, and four Army vessels operating there went aground, injuring three service members, including one who remains in critical condition. The damage was the latest stumbling block in what has been a persistent struggle to get food to starving Palestinians during the nearly 8-month-old Israel-Hamas war.

The maritime route for a limited time had been an additional way to help get more aid into Gaza because the Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah has made it difficult, if not impossible at times, to get anything through land routes that are far more productive. Israel’s Rafah military operations and military strikes in northern Gaza had also temporarily halted U.S. airdrops of food.

Cooper said Friday the U.S. also expects to resume those airdrops in the coming days.

President Joe Biden’s administration has said from the start that the pier wasn’t meant to be a total solution and that any amount of aid helps.

After the May 25 storm damage to the causeway, large sections were disconnected and moved to the Israeli port for repairs. In addition, two of the U.S. Army boats that went aground during the same bad weather near Ashkelon in Israel have been freed.

Two other Army boats two beached onto the Gaza shoreline took on a lot of water and sand and the Israeli Navy has been helping with the repairs, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said.

Biden, a Democrat, announced his plan for the U.S. military to build a pier during his State of the Union address in early March, and the military said it would take about 60 days to get it installed and operational. The initial cost was estimated at $320 million, but Singh said earlier this week that the price had dropped to $230 million, due to contributions from Britain and because the cost of contracting trucks and other equipment was less than expected.

It took a bit longer than the planned two months for installation, with the first trucks carrying aid for the Gaza Strip rolling down the pier on May 17. Just a day later, crowds overran a convoy of trucks as they headed into Gaza, stripping the cargo from 11 of the 16 vehicles before they reached a U.N. warehouse.

The next day, as officials altered the travel routes of the convoys, aid finally began reaching people in need. More than 1,100 tons (1,000 metric tons) of aid were delivered before the causeway broke apart in the storm, Pentagon officials said.

___

U.S. adds 272,000 jobs in May, unemployment rises to 4%

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America’s employers added a strong 272,000 jobs in May, accelerating from April and a sign that companies are still confident enough in the economy to keep hiring despite persistently high interest rates.

Last month’s sizable job gain suggests that the economy is still growing steadily, propelled by consumer spending on travel, entertainment and other services.

U.S. airports, for example, reported near-record traffic over the Memorial Day weekend. A healthy job market typically drives consumer spending, the economy’s principal fuel. Though some recent signs had raised concerns about economic weakness, May’s jobs report should help assuage those fears.

Even so, Friday’s report from the government included some signs of a potential slowdown. The unemployment rate, for example, edged up for a second straight month, to a still-low 4%, from 3.9%, ending a 27-month streak of unemployment below 4%. That streak had matched the longest such run since the late 1960s.

President Joe Biden pointed to Friday’s jobs report as a sign of the economy’s robust health under his administration. He also charged that congressional Republicans would worsen inflation by cutting health care subsidies and widening the deficit through tax cuts.

The presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has focused his criticism of Biden’s economic policies on the surge in inflation, which polls show still weighs heavily in voters’ assessment of the economy. At a rally in Phoenix on Thursday, he blamed illegal immigration for contributing to higher prices.

Economists say the mixed signals from Friday’s report — a surge in jobs alongside a slight rise in unemployment — are likely a sign that the job market is normalizing after years of distortions related to the pandemic. After the brutal pandemic recession, when unemployment rocketed to nearly 15%, hiring soared in 2022 and 2023 as the economy quickly recovered. Wages, before adjusting for inflation, also jumped as businesses desperately sought to fill jobs.

“Employment growth is continuing at a solid pace, but there are ample signs that the heat in the labor market over the past few years largely has been removed,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo.

The number of open jobs, while still elevated, has fallen to a three-year low, the government said this week. Fewer workers are quitting their jobs, after quits had soared after the pandemic. Many employers say it’s become easier to find workers to fill their open jobs.

Wages rise

But after months of cooling, growth in hourly paychecks accelerated last month, a welcome gain for workers, but one that could contribute to stickier inflation.

Hourly wages rose 4.1% from a year ago, faster than the rate of inflation and more quickly than in April. Some companies may raise their prices to offset their higher wage costs.

The Federal Reserve’s inflation fighters would like to see the economy cool a bit as they consider when to begin cutting their benchmark rate. The Fed sharply raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023 after the vigorous recovery from the pandemic recession ignited the worst inflation in 40 years.

Friday’s report will likely underscore Fed officials’ intention to delay any cuts to their benchmark interest rate while they monitor inflation and economic data.

Most economists expect no Fed rate reductions before September at the earliest. Once the cuts do begin, lower rates on many consumer and business loans, including for mortgages and autos, should follow.

Though Chair Jerome Powell has said he expects inflation to continue to ease, he has stressed that the Fed’s policymakers need “greater confidence” that inflation will fall back to their 2% target before they would reduce borrowing costs. Annual inflation has declined to 2.7% by the Fed’s preferred measure, from a peak above 7% in 2022.

“This report is going to complicate the Fed’s job,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist for ZipRecruiter. “No one’s getting those very clear signals that they were hoping for that a rate cut is appropriate in July or September.”

Last month’s hiring occurred broadly across most of the economy. But job gains were particularly robust in health care, which added 84,000, and restaurants, hotels, and entertainment providers, which gained 42,000.

Governments, particularly local governments, added 43,000 positions. Professional and business services, which includes managers, architects and information technology, grew by 33,000.

One potential sign of weakness in the May employment report was a drop in the proportion of Americans who either have a job or are looking for one; it fell from 62.7% to 62.5%. Most of that drop occurred among people 55 and over, many of whom are baby boomers who are retiring.

A surge in immigration in the past three years has boosted the size of the U.S. workforce and has been a key driver of the healthy pace of job growth. Economists have said it isn’t clear whether the government’s jobs report is picking up all those gains, particularly among unauthorized immigrants.

The economy expanded at just a 1.3% annual rate in the first three months of this year, the government said last week, a sharp pullback from the 3.4% pace in last year’s final quarter. Much of the slowdown, though, reflected reduced stockpiling by businesses and other volatile factors, while consumer and business spending made clear that demand remained solid.

In April, though, consumer spending, adjusted for inflation, declined. That raised concern among economists that elevated inflation and interest rates are increasingly pressuring some consumers, particularly younger and lower-income households.

A key reason why the economy is still producing solid net job growth is that layoffs remain at historic lows. Just 1.5 million people lost jobs in April. That’s the lowest monthly figure on record — outside of the peak pandemic period — in data going back 24 years. After struggling to fill jobs for several years, most employers are reluctant to lay off workers.

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