For the past two months, I have been living at a park near my house. Not actually living there, but sometimes spending a six-hour day there when both my kids have baseball games. Were this just a baseball field, I’d probably have to pack various meals and then hurry back home or a nearby store to use the bathroom. But luckily, this is one of the few “complete” public parks in Philadelphia.

On weeknights and weekends, there’s a snack bar full of all the delicious synthetic crap kids love — Doritos, hot dogs, Gatorade, and Dubble Bubble gum — and public bathrooms. And so hundreds of families do what I do — spend hours upon hours there. My kids often get to the field early to watch their friends’ games and stay late to play catch. The fact that the famed Philadelphia Museum of Art is just off to the right and the city skyline is in the background feels almost too much, too good for a world that’s so utterly screwed at the moment.

But is a complete park too much to ask for these days?

Philadelphia was designed in 1682 with five public squares, evenly spaced to give some kind of equitable access to green space. Today, only one of the five has food offerings and a public bathroom on the premises.

Many of our signature new public spaces — such as the Rail Park or Race Street Pier — do not have bathrooms or food. They are great to visit, but you have to rely on off-premises businesses to fulfill your basic needs. And by then you’ve left the public space and probably aren’t going back.

Many of our country’s public spaces are built for passive activities, like sitting, and to be used for an hour at most. To keep these places occupied, we have to get more and more people to use them because no one has a reason to stay in them for long.

Make these parks places where people want to and can spend a ton of time. Offer snack bars and bathrooms, and give a public user base a reason to stay for hours.

And then we wonder why these spaces are occupied by the homeless or drug dealers. So then we think that the solution should be more guards and more programming — that we need events to keep these places occupied. That takes work so we offload the responsibility to maintain these places to nonprofits, who in turn then subcontract out the programming and maintenance to someone else, adding to the expense. Then we say we shouldn’t build more public spaces because they lose money.

Perhaps there could be another solution: Make these parks places where people want to and can spend a ton of time. Offer snack bars and bathrooms, and give a public user base a reason to stay for hours.

I honestly didn’t have the time to find out the exact arrangement that keeps my park going — but it seems that the City has some kind of agreement with our local sports association that uses the snack bar building as its offices, operates the snack bar, and helps to maintain the bathrooms. The families that are part of the sports association pay a relatively nominal two-figure fee for each kid to play in baseball and football leagues, and then each team additionally fundraises another nominal three-figure fee.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but it seems that this low-key public-private situation works.

While most public spaces can’t accommodate a baseball field, plenty of them could stand to feature a snack bar. Instead, we have lots of food trucks that pull up to parks, but few are reliable enough to have set days and hours when they operate, making it dicey to rely on them.

Still, public bathrooms remain elusive. Philadelphia, like just about every city, has struggled to build public restrooms.

The Philly Phlush program was supposed to entail six public restrooms, and only two got built (a third has been in limbo for years and is supposed to open this summer).

Writer Lloyd Alter recently cited a study that notes the lack of public restrooms effectively reduces public access to public spaces.

“Loo Leash” sometimes also called a ‘urinary leash,’ refers to being unable to stray far from home, in case no toilet can be found. Two in five (42 percent) respondents reported that they have restricted outings on this basis, including 4 percent who have to do this more than once a week.

Could building a couple of public restrooms show the public that government can get stuff done? Let’s hope so.

As Americans now spend more and more time at home, depleting our cities of the vibrancy they need to survive, the lack of public restrooms is one more reason people feel they can’t spend time out in public.

Philadelphia is expecting millions of visitors for its 2026 festivities, between the 250th anniversary of the country’s independence, World Cup and more — I can already see the porta-potties lining streets for weeks on end.

What if we added a $1 charge to each ticket or hotel stay to pay for a public restroom fund? We would amass a fund that could surely help us install a few more restrooms after the festivities. Ideally these would not be standalone restrooms, but integrated into public spaces to help turn them into complete destinations.

Unfortunately, I worry the problem isn’t just the funding. Across the country, the actual government know-how and can-do to get this done seems to be lacking. I have been musing with a friend about how to rebuild faith and trust in government capacity. Could building a couple of public restrooms show the public that government can get stuff done? Let’s hope so.

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.

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