The exciting innovations from Zohran Mamdani just keep on coming. The groceries and the buses aren’t free, but there will be free bathrooms.
And by ‘free’, that means taxpayers will be paying $200,000 per toilet.
Mamdani is committing $4 million to expand public bathroom access across the five boroughs, he announced Saturday.
Within Mamdani’s first 100 days in office, the city’s Economic Development Corporation will seek bids to “install public bathrooms at a lower cost and on a faster timeline than existing public bathroom installations,” the mayor’s office said.
As part of a pilot program, 20-30 high-quality modular bathrooms will be installed across the city. Part of the mayor’s franchise agreement for the modular bathrooms is to have them be self-cleaning and have maintenance conducted twice a day.
So that’s between $133,000 to $200,000 per toilet. Talk about flushing money down the toilet.
And that’s just the pilot program.
Is this going to work? Of course not. The reason there are few usable public toilets is because they tend to be used by the drug addled vagrants that politicians and the media fancifully described as the ‘homeless’.
That means private bathrooms available to the public are disappearing and the public ones tend to be rendered unusable by anyone except the homeless.
New York City libs have given up even claiming that the public bathrooms are meant for anyone other than mentally ill vagrants, with some DSAers insisting that not having public bathrooms or public urination ‘criminalizes homelessness’.
The city did use to have pay toilets. That at least forces those using them to put some skin in the game. Those however were banned. And the alternative is that there are no usable toilets. But every so often, New York City spends millions in the futile hope of building public toilets that will last for more than 5 minutes and cost less than a house in a rural area.
Once that option gets exhausted, the Mamdani operation is going to back to the preferred lefty policy of forcing restaurants to open their bathrooms to mentally ill junkie vagrants. And then they’ll be as unusable as the other bathrooms in the city. And people will stop going to the $200 steak house when not only is the bathroom unusable, but there’s a line of addicts who smell like death warmed over waiting in line.
