Ann Arbor — If you’ve visited Ann Arbor in the last year or so, odds are you noticed something curious scattered around downtown: Blue and white cubes, little structures with solar panels on top, planted on the pavement at various locations.
They’re public toilets, known as “Throne Bathrooms,” and they’re shockingly nice. So nice that they are, without a doubt, a victory of American capitalism.
I laughed at first. These toilet obelisks really stand out. They seemed like glorified porta-johns at best, likely havens for drug use at worst. Given the prevalence of homeless people, or “houseless persons” as we’re supposed to call them now in Ann Arbor, I figured they’d be gross.
Most public bathrooms are dismal, let alone bathrooms run by municipalities. When’s the last time you visited a local park and found something other than a disgusting blue plastic porta-potty, or a brick and mortar bathroom with flies buzzing around the inside and no soap in the dispensers?
Those municipal restrooms are usually in relatively remote areas too. Highway rest stops and state parks are often the only places we encounter them these days. Places far away from people, places you’d expect to be easy to maintain.
A public bathroom smack dab in the middle of downtown Ann Arbor? It struck me as one of those bleeding-heart liberal initiatives that sounds great in theory, but fails in execution.
I’ll be the first one to admit it, I was wrong.
Strolling through campus after a few mason jars of sangria at Dominick’s, my journalistic curiosity got the better of me. That, and the sudden urge to urinate that tends to follow a few beverages.
You walk up the metal ramp to the cubic Throne Bathroom and are greeted with a QR code. You need a phone to enter. You scan the QR code, and it directs you to text a number. When you do, the door automatically slides open. There are no handles.
Inside, the bathroom is decorated in an almost Instagrammable millennial kitsch aesthetic. White fixtures, green floral wallpaper, even a well lit mirror. Dua Lipa has a bathroom like this somewhere.
It didn’t look like your usual public restroom—and it was clean, too—how shocking! A clean public restroom. Unheard of in America.
Compared with your usual public facilities, this was the space shuttle of toilets. High tech, with sliding doors, LED signs, and a little red light where you wave your hand at the end to be let out. That is, if you don’t exceed the strict 10-minute time limit.
Signs within the Throne bathroom assured me that, if 10 minutes went by, that door was opening up to the world no matter what I was up to. Hear that, Zoomers? Not the kind of toilet you want to sit and scroll your phone on.
That—and the QR code for entry—likely demand higher standards of behavior from clientele. You could certainly use intravenous drugs in a Throne bathroom, but you better find a vein fast before your 10 minutes are up.
Plus, you need a phone to get in. Throne Labs, the company behind the toilets, collects your phone number with each use. Abuse a Throne bathroom, vandalize it, or leave it disgusting, and you might just find yourself banned.
This gives us a hint at the real reason Throne Bathrooms are leagues ahead of municipal restrooms: private industry! It’s a true and honest victory for capitalism. Throne Labs rents these toilets for a monthly fee, cleaning and administering them in-house.
The City of Ann Arbor pays to rent these toilets, but it doesn’t run them. If it did, you know exactly what would happen—I outlined it pretty clearly above. The incentive structure for underpaid municipal workers to maintain clean public toilets doesn’t exist, so it always falls apart. But a private company, in this case, has figured out how to do it.
A public restroom couldn’t ban customers either, but a private company can. In theory, this maintains a clean and usable restroom for the vast majority of potential users, while keeping out the very few problem individuals who would ruin it for the rest of us.
Ann Arbor’s city administrator touts the Throne toilets as a big win for inclusivity. The left has raised the issue in recent years about the need for more public restroom facilities in our cities. It’s ironic that the only viable solution so far is to outsource the job to private industry.
These cubes are the only solution that’s worked to provide usable public toilets in a city environment. They’re not wired into the grid, they don’t need plumbing or electrical hookup. They’re totally self sufficient.
They stand out like sore thumbs, too. They’re ugly, hyper-modern, and don’t even remotely blend into the civic environment. They’re nicer inside than outside. They’re an excellent start, but much could be done to improve their functional and aesthetic integration into the urban environment.
You would think that cities could simply build and maintain toilet facilities of their own, everyone would use them responsibly, and all would be well.
Historically, they did. Ancient Rome had robust systems of public baths and latrines, and even up to 100 years ago in America most cities had public toilet systems.
They all fell into disgusting states, of course, as public spaces in America declined throughout the 20th century. City governments tore them down or abandoned them, and the few that are left are woeful. You’d rather not even use them, and thus they serve no good.
Perhaps this is a new frontier for urban real-estate development: Private builders constructing public toilets, or integrating them into existing structures and servicing them through contracts with city governments.
There’s no reason to limit things to toilet cubes dropped on the side of the street. This business model could extend to brick and mortar facilities, with contractual accountability as the reason to keep them nice.
The idea of increasing public restroom access is sound. It just needs aesthetic finesse, and a capitalistic incentive structure to succeed. Otherwise, we end up with ornate brick bathrooms with toilets that flood and never have any toilet paper.
There’s an economics lesson in this, too—about why socialism often fails and how capitalist endeavors can mobilize to achieve the outcomes we actually want.
In the end, don’t we all just want a clean toilet?
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
