Update: I misread the article and the total mentioned for remodeling applies to the whole building and not just the bathrooms. However I do believe $13 would not be an incredible sum to spend on bathroom remodeling for the whole building, specially when we are talking government. It will probably be more.
The city of Portland (where else) is now banning urinals in city-owned buildings and spending taxpayer money to remove them. The first urinal-free building is appropriately called The Portland Building, where countless paper-shuffling city bureaucrats congregate to waste oxygen and demand pay raises.
The City of Portland banned urinals in the remodeled Portland Building.
The total remodel will cost taxpayers $195,000,000. A spokeswoman said she did not have a break out on how much the bathroom work cost.
She also said no one from the city was available to talk about banning the urinals.
In an email to employees last February, Chief Administrative Officer Tom Rinehart wrote:
“We will continue to have gender-specific (male and female) multi-stall restrooms that are readily available to any employee that prefers to use one. But, there will be no urinals in any restroom in the building. This will give us the flexibility we need for any future changes in signage. I am convinced that this is the right way to ensure success as your employer, remove arbitrary barriers in our community, and provide leadership that is reflective of our shared values.”
Portland Bans Urinals In Public Buildings – Out of Respect to the City’s “Shared Values”
This is The Portland Building:
According to what I found online, it is 15 stories high and the business of the city of Portland is run from it.
Let’s go back again to that number: $195 million to renew bathrooms so they can be ‘woke” and “reflective of shared values” of the Portland community. That comes to $13 million per floor so men can’t pee standing up.
One of the woes Portland authorities keep complaining about is the extensive Homeless (read addicts) that plague their streets and they keep bitching about lacking money to house. So I went to a commercial Real State website and tried to find out what could I get in the manner of apartment buildings for $13 million:. The first building is this one:
It has apartments of different capacities, but the total of bedrooms is 80. You can put two people per bedroom and house 160 homeless for $7,950,000.
Next we have this excellent opportunity:
All the units have 2 bedrooms which means 40 rooms capable of housing 80 more homeless.
And we close with this charming offering:
14 units with 2 bedrooms each which means can house a total of 56 homeless from the rigors of weather and danger in the streets of Portland.
The total amount to comfortably house 296 homeless on properties that could be owned by the city: $ 12,700,000.
For the money that the City is wasting to knock down the handful of urinals of one lonesome floor in The Portland Building, they could have bought three apartment buildings that could house almost three hundred of the homeless they swear they care so much about.
Madness.
Hat Tip Robert E.
PS: And don’t forget every apartment as a functioning kitchen and bathroom and I imagine some sort of Living room/ Dinning Room area.
That renovation contract is going to make somebody’s brother-in-law very, very happy.
And in the end they’ll not fully integrate the bathrooms anyway because some males are slobs and will pee on the seats.
The people of Portland should go on a tax strike and honestly, this should be investigated by the Fed dot gov. Almost $200 Million in virtue signaling is such a waste of money it boggles the mind. Even for Portland.
The $195M renovation is a lot more than just the toilets. That number takes into account the whole scope of work. A HVAC system, boilers and chillers alone for a building that size could run north of $10M. And that is not for a complete replacement, just a modernization and upgrades. The HVAC controls alone could be two to three million if it requires a measurable amount of re-wiring. And, do not get me started on the cost of furniture. A single floor of cubicles can run north of a million dollars, and that is for the cheap stuff.
However, I do completely agree. If they spent a single cent more than what it would cost to virtue signal in this manner, I would be livid. Renovate the toilets without changing configuration: $1,000,000.00 each. Renovate with the reconfiguration: $1,000,000.01 represents waste and abuse.
Ah, smell the “wokeness” in all its putrid stupidity.
And I bet zero urinals in all that housing! What happens when someone points out that a commerical toilet flushes far more water per use than a simple urinal?
I love this city. I loathe the people that run it.
As they say (or, perhaps, used to say) in Boston, “Wicked pissah!” (Couldn’t resist….)
So, to make sure everything is equal and interchangeable, are they going to remove the tampax dispensers from the ladies’ rooms? If the goal (aim?) is “toilet equality” (making the wait times equal for men and women), it’s still quicker for a man to stand at a commode than it is for a woman to sit or hover.
There are only two things we know to be infinite….
YMMV
No, in order to make it equal, you have to install the tampax/kotex machines in the gents.
The main reason that men’s rooms typically have shorter lines is all a matter of geography. Women and men need to urinate and defecate at approximately equal rates, so the number of men and women using the restroom for a #1 or a #2 over time will always trend towards equal… The thing is that men only need to use a commode for defecating and can use wither a commode or a urinal to urinate.
Urinals require less physical space than a commode.
Ergo, you can put more toilets into a men’s room than a women’s room of equal size.
Ergo, more men can use the restroom simultaneously than women.
Imagine a line of 100 women, using the rest room 4 at a time. There will need to be 25 “turnovers” for them all to get through.
Imagine a line of 100 men, using the restroom 5 at a time. There will only need to be 20 “turnovers” for them all to get through… and that’s just assuming you only fit in one extra toilet!
I ain’t too proud to admit I’ve worked a lot of jobs that had me scrubbing toilets in the course of my life (even jobs where it was far below my job description, if it needed cleaning and no one else was gonna do it, then I would, because dammit I like using a clean toilet.) and in most cases, it seemed like you could have two or three urinals replacing one commode stall.
(Of course, the ultimate in space efficiency is seems to have completely fallen out of style: the urinal trough. You could have fifty or sixty guys in the men’s room at the old Tigers’ Stadium using one of those simultaneously!)
That’s supposed to say “geometry,” not “geography.”
This is why someone needs to invent a WiFi router that won’t let you make posts until after you’ve had your morning coffee.
If you find it, let me know… I sure as heck need one.
Geography works just fine for purposes of this post. I actually think it is almost a better descriptive.
Nope, the etymology of the words has the voice of my old Latin teacher echoing in my head and haunting me. “Geo-” of course refers to the earth, but the “-graphia” suffix refers to descriptive writings about the topic the suffix modifies, whereas the “-metria” suffix refers to measurements of the same.
And yes, I said Latin teacher even though the words are of Greek origin. Old school Catholic nuns, man, they can out “DILLIGAF” a Marine Corps drill sergeant.
I tried to delete my reply…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’d be pissed no pun intended to have a bunch of disgusting women using my bathroom. Any custodian I have ever asked has told me the women’s room is a nightmare by comparison to the men’s room.
Plus now every seat in the bathroom room is going to be pissed on by the assholes who don’t care to lift the seat or the ding dongs who don’t want to touch it so they don’t and all these women who hover and spray. Use your foot people it ain’t hard.
Stupidity in the name of woke, since urinals are the most efficient and least messy way of doing #1 for folks with the right equipment. There are even funnel things for women. As ish points out urinals are space efficient, at events I have seen a porta john with six urinals in the footprint of a handicapped accessible porta john.
Portland used to be sensible, I blame their irrational hatred of mountain bikers for the current administration’s woke derangement, plus Ted Wheeler. Vera Katz would have never signed off on this idiocy
Sadly, Wheeler was probably our least worst option in the last mayoral election. It should say something that the second and third place candidates earned 17% and 12% of the vote, to Wheeler’s 55%… Any politician in this town is going to be a left-wing partisan, but he was the only one that wasn’t full moon-bat.
The city’s last republican mayor, McReady, was in office when Mount Saint Helens blew it’s lid. She only held the job for a year and she only got it because she was appointed to it… and she was more Libertarian than Republican anyway.
The last time this city elected a Republican for mayor, Pres. Truman was still in the White House!
Response to the update…
If the cost dedicated to the toilet rehab is $13M, it is a bit high, IMHO. (Not that I am a construction project estimator, I am not.) That would be almost a million per floor. Assuming a building that size has two sets of toilets per floor, that is close to $500K per restroom. A bit pricey. I can rehab a medium sized restroom for well under $100K if it is part of an overall building rehab.
Besides, the issue here is not what was spent, it is the cost differential between just rehabbing in place, and removing facilities. Unless you have a stall that will fit in the footprint of a urinal, there is zero possibility the rehab/installation costs are equal. In most public buildings I have been in, it would require movement of supply and sewer lines, and quite often, movement of a wall to remove a urinal and replace it with a toilet.
That is the real shenanigans here, and that is what the people of Portland should be getting their brooms together for.
https://southpark.cc.com/clips/103481/shenanigans