The Great Enshittification

On the subject of urban decay, let’s set aside broken windows and talk about broken toilets

I was scrolling over the weekend when this landed on my timeline and, well, sometimes a sign is a sign…

Where this is, I couldn’t say. Anywhere, potentially: Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, New York, Detroit. Take your pick.

What were these ‘experiences’ (note the plural)? With a little imagination, we can conjure up quite a list of manmade horrors beyond our comprehension: from unflushed and overflowing toilets to dirty needles to used condoms to people overdosing to people fornicating.

This sign and others like it are yet another reminder that we are living through the Great Enshittification, part of which is a rising tide of sanitation violations across nations, beckoning a cry for the salvation of our civilization. More than a sign, it’s a diagnosis: the sad state of public conveniences is a signal that the baseline of urban life is fraying.

Slowly and then quickly, the public washroom has devolved from courtesy to liability, with an observable pattern: “no public washroom” signs, more buzz-in entry, more “customers only” policies and more cones to indicate closures while staff await the hazmat crew. When you ask for the code, they size you up. If you look normal and trustworthy, they’ll let you in. You can hardly blame them.

Coffee chains like Starbucks and Tim Hortons deals routinely with extreme cleaning challenges, including hazard-level filth, threats and vandalism. Some Starbucks locations had to install needle-disposal containers and black lighting, which apparently makes it harder to find a vein. The foul state of Tim Hortons washrooms is a running joke on social media, with thousands of complaints of unflushed toilets, lack of basic supplies, lack of running water and even pests. In 2024, a woman filed a lawsuit against a Timmie’s franchise after one of its toilets detached from the wall while she was using it. Issues with Starbucks’ washrooms have been part of an impetus to pack up and leave cities like Seattle and San Francisco.

With the gradual disappearance of indoor options, the great outdoors has become a fallback. Maybe you’ve heard about, or worse, witnessed scattered incidents involving homeless people dropping deuces in gas station parking lots or behind patches of scrub near freeway off-ramps.

In the Toronto neighbourhood of Roncesvalles, a shop owner complained to neighbours how, every morning, she’d arrive at work to the glorious sight of a steaming pile on her doorstep. Determined to catch the dogwalker whose pet had been relieving itself there after hours, she installed CCTV. Spoiler: no dog was involved in the befoulment of the doorway. I’m not sure why picking up human shit is more repulsive than picking up dog shit. I only know it is.

In downtown LA, there once was Cole’s French Dip, a 118-year-old institution. The restaurant managed to survive the Depression, Prohibition and World War II, but couldn’t survive the human feces littering the street outside their front doors. It closed shop in March.

At some point, the anecdotes became data, which Vancouver keeps close tabs on. In 2018, there were 167 complaints of feces on the street. In 2024, it was 17,000. To combat the issue, the city has deployed poop ferries.

San Francisco is a literal human turd minefield, with a dedicated reporting system to track danger spots. During a 2023 televised debate, Florida governor Ron DeSantis found the perfect way to illustrate Gavin Newsom’s shit leadership during his time as the city’s mayor: waving a map indicating all the places you might step in some...

Leadership is precisely the problem. Specifically…

• The policymakers who shuttered asylums without building alternatives, leaving severely mentally ill people to cycle through crises in full public view…

• Progressives who persist with “harm reduction;” IE: free narcotics and paraphernalia in neighbourhoods from Edmonton to Austin…

• Politicians and NGO’s who push mass immigration from countries that are—how to put this delicately?—less queasy about public shitting than our own.

If you’re a resident of Wasaga Beach, north of Toronto, you may be familiar with the infamous “toilet tent,” which is exactly what you think it is. Wasaga Mayor Brian Smith found himself inundated by complaints of large gatherings of Indian migrants making use of this makeshift convenience. So much so, the province got involved. Below is a screenshot, but here’s a clip of Premier Doug Ford asking people nicely not to use the beach as a toilet…

Punishing the offenders is next to impossible. How do you raise the issue of migrant assimilation without accusations of racism? How do you punish a fent-head whose life is punishment enough? Though there’s been at least one notable exception: a homeless man entered a New York restaurant patio, took a crap on one Pride flag and wiped his ass with another. The NYPD investigated the incident as a hate crime.

Like so many unintended consequences of bad public policy, the privileged are largely insulated from the fallout. They hold the keys to executive washrooms and glide effortlessly into the lavender-scented facilities of four-star hotels—the kind with private stalls, marble counters and linen hand towels. It’s ordinary people left to deal with the mess: minimum-wage workers, city maintenance crews, exhausted parents. Somewhere right now, an exasperated mom is standing outside a Walmart washroom waiting to change her baby’s diaper while two homeless guys are inside sink-bathing.

Public shitting and filthy public conveniences are not things we should just get used to. Lee Kuan Yew understood this. One of his first orders of business was cleaning up Singapore’s public facilities, introducing fines for public defecation and failure to flush. These new laws were part and parcel of his transformation of Singapore from a sweltering, chaotic port of squatter settlements, open drains and street hawkers into one of the cleanest, safest and most meticulously ordered cities on Earth.

Meanwhile, in the West, things have been moving in the opposite direction. Historians have their markers of civilizational decline—lead in Roman water, debased currency. When future historians analyze our downfall, they may identify a major key: the sight of a Tim Hortons bathroom.