Standing outside a Santa Barbara Starbucks at 6:47 a.m., I watch a man in a sun-faded jacket pause before the glass door.

His face reflects back at him, a moment of self-inspection: straighten the collar, brush down the backpack straps, fix the expression to appear “safe.”

The barista glances up, meeting his eyes. An almost imperceptible shake of the head.

The man doesn’t even reach for the handle. He turns away, searching for another place to relieve a simple, deeply human need.

This small drama holds enormous consequences. Public restrooms are, as Harvey Molotch— my professor at UC Santa Barbara — taught me, far more than plumbing.

They are civic infrastructure, social institutions woven into the urban fabric, setting terms for who belongs, who lingers, who circulates.

They are a hidden architecture of citizenship, enabling or denying people the freedom to inhabit public space.

And they are powerfully exclusionary, particularly for unhoused residents of Santa Barbara, who navigate a daily gauntlet of gatekeepers, suspicious glances, and “restrooms for customers only” signs.

Molotch, in his groundbreaking volume Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, showed how gender inequities saturate bathroom design.

He called restrooms “fundamental supports for dignity,” a baseline for participation in civic life.

If you cannot relieve yourself safely and privately, you cannot fully belong to public space.

That argument has sharpened in my own work, focused on homelessness. The people I see each day — outside East Beach, the Santa Barbara County Courthouse or the Santa Barbara Public Library — navigate an urban landscape deeply hostile to their most basic bodily needs.

Santa Barbara boasts several public restrooms: along the beach (Cabrillo Pavilion, East Beach, Stearns Wharf entrance, Stearns Wharf itself, Leadbetter Beach), on State Street near Marshalls, at the public library, courthouse, county Administration Building and most city parks (including the now-closed for renovations Dwight Murphy Field across from the Santa Barbara Zoo).

Yet even these “public” facilities are rationed by time and social status.

Parks restrooms close at dusk, leaving unhoused people with no overnight options. The library’s facilities are patrolled by security officers who monitor how long users remain inside.

These rules seem rational to those with keys to private bathrooms. But to someone living rough, these limitations amount to spatial banishment — a declaration that they don’t deserve to linger, wash or exist in shared urban space.

Molotch argued that bathrooms are not neutral technical objects but political spaces. They mark the difference between inclusion and expulsion, comfort and humiliation.

When businesses post “restrooms for customers only,” they effectively privatize a public necessity, transforming a basic biological function into pay-to-pee arrangements.

Unhoused people must buy access to the public realm, though they have the least means to do so.

My “bathroom ethnography” over the last year has revealed extraordinary strategizing this situation forces on people.

One man near Stearns Wharf explained how he memorized staff shifts at local cafés, timing restroom requests to catch sympathetic workers rather than managers who always refused him.

A woman who sleeps near Alameda Park described adjusting her appearance each morning before seeking a toilet, applying lipstick and combing her hair to pass as housed.

These strategies resemble what Molotch, in his collaborations with sociologist Mitch Duneier on “interactional vandalism,” described: a delicate dance of norms, appearances, and unspoken scripts regulating public encounters.

The price of a wrong move is denial, ejection, or worse.

Then there’s what I call the “hygiene paradox.” Unhoused people are routinely excluded from public facilities because they appear dirty, but their lack of access to those facilities prevents them from keeping clean.

It’s cruel circularity, weaponizing the effects of homelessness against the homeless themselves.

I’ve heard a security guard outside the library say, “We can’t let people in here who smell like that.”

But where else could they wash?

In Molotch’s broader urban sociology — his “growth machine” thesis — cities prioritize profit over people, constantly reshaping themselves to suit developers, tourism and upscale consumption.

Bathrooms are no exception. Santa Barbara wants to brand itself as an international destination: wine, beaches, luxury. There’s no room in that image for visible poverty.

Restricting bathroom access functions quietly but effectively to push unhoused people out of the central city, rendering them mobile, uncomfortable and ultimately invisible.

If we see public restrooms as essential urban infrastructure, then their denial to certain groups amounts to structural violence.

It robs people of what Molotch calls “the conditions of urban citizenship.” You cannot fully be a citizen of a city if you cannot use a toilet there.

Yet we have designed our public restrooms, policed their doors, and restricted their hours specifically to keep homeless people out.

That is a scandal as profound as any headline-making budget shortfall or housing policy failure. Because it unfolds in small, unspoken ways: a glance, a locked door, a posted sign, a turned-away shoulder.

These micro-exclusions pile up, forcing the city’s poorest residents to endure humiliations most of us never consider.

Molotch insisted that toilets deserve sociological attention because they structure the possibilities of public life itself.

For unhoused people, public restrooms are a lifeline. Denying them access means denying them a minimal threshold of dignity, privacy and bodily integrity.

It’s a direct assault on their humanity.

What might an alternative look like?

We could invest in 24-hour public restrooms designed with the unhoused in mind — sturdy, easy to maintain, staffed with attendants trained to treat all users with respect.

We could treat hygiene as a public health obligation rather than personal luxury. We could challenge “customers only” logic, recognizing that bodily needs don’t obey commercial rhythms.

And we could face honestly how restroom policing ties to other forms of exclusion — from housing to food to shelter — that define life on Santa Barbara’s margins.

The restroom is a stand-in for the city itself. It reveals, behind closed stall doors, what kind of urban community we want to build.

Will we treat the right to relieve one’s body as a public good? Or will we keep using bathrooms as tools of social control, humiliating and expelling those who have nowhere else to go?

Harvey Molotch taught me to see restrooms not as trivial but as morally consequential. What happens in the bathroom — or doesn’t happen, for those shut out — is a window onto a city’s deepest commitments.

Santa Barbara can keep denying the unhoused their place in that picture, or it can open the door.