If a person has to go to the bathroom while out in public, it may be difficult to find a toilet without some sort of catch. Often, it’s in a coffee shop, a convenience store, a pharmacy, or another private building, so it’s not a true public toilet.

The U.S. has eight public toilets per 100,000 people. That number is comparable with the rate in Botswana and far behind Iceland’s world-leading 56 public toilets per 100,000.

So why is it so hard to find a public toilet in the U.S.?

It’s a question with a complicated answer, and that has a long history. Surprisingly, it relates to many different issues, including public health, social services, and almost every form of discrimination imaginable.

Public toilets were a fact of life in the U.S. and elsewhere for centuries — at least as far back as the Roman Empire. But they were pretty public, without any walls or barriers between them. The expectation for privacy while going to the bathroom in a public space emerged in the 19th century, with the industrial revolution and houses with modern plumbing.

Later on, in the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century, sanitation became a greater priority. As leaders began understanding sanitation's role in containing outbreaks of waterborne diseases, cities built and celebrated their public toilets.

Temple University history professor Bryant Simon, who has studied and is writing an upcoming book on the history of toilets, shared more about how toilets used to be a big deal.

"City officials get on their soapboxes and brag about how much they spend on public bathrooms," Simon said. "They brag about the touch points in these bathrooms. They brag about the brass fittings. They brag about the marble countertops. They brag about the floors. They're proud of their accomplishment."

Bathrooms quickly became points where people were segregated. Bathrooms were split up by gender, as they still frequently are. But the splits can be broader than that and lead to discrimination against many different groups.

For example, public toilets started closing as early as the 1930s, with the LGBTQ community as a target.

"Beginning in the 1930s, 1940s, that early, public officials begin to complain about perversions," Simon said. "They begin to complain about same-sex sex in bathrooms. As there are fears about gay sex in bathrooms, there's fear about people drinking in bathrooms. It's not a very popular city sort of thing to build anymore."

In the first half of the 20th century, bathrooms often were segregated by race, with Black Americans, or Latinos in the Southwest, having their own separate facilities.

"The bathroom sort of operates as a kind of hardware of inequality because, essentially, you needed a public bathroom or a bathroom of some sort in order to be out and in public," Simon said.

Racial segregation in toilets may sound like a distant thing or a footnote, but that legacy extends into the present.

In 2018, two Black men were blocked from using the restroom at a Starbucks location in Philadelphia’s Center City. The incident prompted Starbucks to act as America's de facto public toilet. It changed its policy to allow people to use the restrooms at its more than 15,000 U.S. locations without buying anything.

While money can be a barrier to private toilets in stores, historically, it’s limited access to public standalone toilets. By the 1960s and '70s, public toilets requiring small payments sprung up, but those ended up closing after concerns about gender discrimination.

The other big push to remove public toilets came in the 1980s as part of a broader push to drive unhoused people to the edges of cities by taking away their access to public spaces and aggressively enforcing public urination laws.

Now if you don’t have a home of your own, it can put access to a restroom pretty far away.

"Most of us are used to having our own bathroom," said Raven Drake, Street Roots ambassador program manager. "Where I lived when I was unhoused, the nearest bathroom was a one-mile walk away. Imagine walking a mile to the bathroom, and most of us can't fathom walking 50 feet to our bathroom, much less a mile."

Drake works with unhoused people in Portland as part of the local newspaper Street Roots. She’s an advocate for bathroom access as a central part of addressing homelessness, and she was unhoused herself in late 2019 and early 2020 during some of the strictest shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We ran a survey around bathrooms, around the importance of bathrooms and access to clean water with the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and a resounding amount of people answered that they had no access to public restrooms," Drake said. "So we took forth on this initiative of placing throughout the city 172 port-a-potties."

Underinvestment has been a major concern, too. If public toilets aren’t funded or attended to, they can fall into disrepair. They can potentially become unsafe or unhygienic.

Starbucks announced in July that it would close 16 stores due to safety concerns. CEO Howard Schultz said in June that the coffee giant might restrict its currently public restrooms to customers only as part of its broader push for store safety.

So, if Starbucks decides to no longer serve as America’s public restroom, where will people be able to go? Even if a person isn't homeless, bathroom access advocates like American Restroom Association president Steven Soifer point out this is an issue.

"For everyone, for people with shy bladder, for people with incontinence, for people with bladder issues of different sorts," Soifer said. "People who had health issues and families with children who often struggle to find a place."

Soifer is calling on government officials to step up here, but it may have to be local officials taking the lead.

"There are going to be fewer and fewer options for people to be able to relieve themselves, and that becomes a public health issue as well," Soifer said.

The consequences can be deadly for communities if no bathrooms are available. In 2017, at least 16 people died, and hundreds more got sick in San Diego in an outbreak of hepatitis A.

The disease spread largely due to contact with fecal matter and public defecation.

The city acknowledged that a lack of public restrooms, especially for unhoused people, was part of the issue and helped contain the outbreak by installing public toilets and handwashing stations.

But even then, a lack of funding or upkeep can quickly lead to toilets disappearing. Earlier this year, San Diego State University researchers reported that many toilets were closed after the COVID-19 pandemic. That nearly half the county’s census tracts, home to 40% of the population, had no public restrooms.

Other cities are moving ahead with plans to install new public toilet facilities, including Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. But there’s still a shortage of public toilets in the U.S., and it’s pretty dire.

In 2011, a United Nations independent expert, Catarina de Albuquerque, studied water and sanitation rights on a mission to the U.S. Her report found an instance in Sacramento, California, where public restroom closures and enforcement of public urination and defecation laws led to a homeless person traveling miles to dump a whole community’s human waste.

In the report, she indicated that the laws had a discriminatory effect and led to "a violation of human rights that may amount to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.”

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Claudette Colvin, a civil rights pioneer who in March 1955, at the age of 15, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, is seeking to get her conviction expunged.

"I guess you can say that now, I'm no longer a juvenile delinquent," Colvin said at a news conference Tuesday, after filing a motion asking the juvenile courts to seal, destroy and expunge her records.

"Under Jim Crow the bus driver had the authority to ask you to give up your seat to a white person and that was absolutely wrong," she added.

Colvin's legal team had said Monday it planned to file a request Tuesday with a Montgomery County court to clear her record.

Colvin, now 82, was charged with two counts of violating of the city's segregation ordinance and one felony count of assaulting a police officer. She was convicted on all counts in juvenile court, but the segregation convictions were overturned on appeal.

"There were two colored females sitting opposite two white females, that refused to move to the back with the rest of the colored," the 1955 police arrest report said. "Claudette Colvin, age 15, colored female, refused. We then informed Claudette that she was under arrest."

Colvin was placed on "Indefinite probation" for the police officer assault conviction and was never informed that her probation ended when she became of age, her attorney, Phillip Ensler, told CNN.

"So she thought she's been on probation this entire time," Ensler said.

Colvin's case came nine months before Rosa Parks made history for also refusing to give up her bus seat. However, Parks' case received more attention during the civil rights movement in part because Parks' image was more "acceptable to a white" community, Colvin told CNN earlier this year. Parks was older, married and lighter skinned, she said.

Colvin said she "resisted" and was "defiant" when police arrested her on the bus. An officer wrote in the police report that Colvin kicked and scratched him when they put her in the police vehicle.

"People said I was crazy," Colvin told CNN. "Because I was 15 years old and defiant and shouting, 'It's my constitutional right!'"

In Colvin's motion to get her record expunged, she said she wants to see society progress and not regress.

"I want us to move forward and be better," Colvin said in the filing, obtained by CNN. "When I think about why I'm seeking to have my name cleared by the state, it is because I believe if that happened it would show the generation growing up now that progress is possible and things do get better. It will inspire them to make the world better."

While juvenile court motions are typically shielded from the public, Colvin's legal team said in a statement that it released the filing "due to the unique public interest and historical significance of her case."

Ensler, Colvin's attorney, said the expungement of Colvin's conviction is "long overdue justice."

"People think it was just about a seat on a bus but it was about so much more than that," Ensler said.

At Tuesday's news conference, Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey said he was supporting Colvin's motion to "forever set aside and seal the records that taint Ms. Colvin as a violator of the law."

"Her actions back in March of 1955 were conscientious, not criminal; inspired, not illegal; they should have led to praise and not prosecution," Bailey said.

Colvin eventually became one of the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle in 1956. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling and ordered Montgomery — and the rest of Alabama — to end bus segregation.

Colvin's family and legal team say she is seeking the expungement now because she plans to move to Texas with family soon.

Gloria Laster, Colvin's younger sister, told CNN that Colvin wants to get her record cleared so she can be an example for her grandchildren and great grandchildren.

"This is going to be her legacy to them," Laster said. "I sat down on the bus so that you can stand up and take your rightful place as an American. And that's what she wants for her grandchildren and great grandchildren. This is what she's doing this for."

The Montgomery County district attorney will also file a motion in support of Colvin's expungement.

"I believe that the charges that were (originally) brought, were brought on bogus laws," District Attorney Daryl B. Bailey told CNN. "It was totally unlawful what the state, and law enforcement, did to this woman at the time."

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed legislation that allows ownership of a prime beachfront property to be transferred to heirs of a couple who built a resort for Black people in the early 1900s.

The property was purchased in 1912 by Willa and Charles Bruce, who built the first West Coast resort for Black people when segregation barred them from many beaches.

The family was stripped of the land by local officials in the 1920s.

"As governor of California, let me do what Manhattan Beach apparently was unwilling to do, and I want to apologize to the Bruce family for the injustice that was done to them a century ago," Gov. Newsom said.

The legislation signed Thursday was necessary to allow the start of the complex legal process of transferring ownership of what was once known as Bruce’s Beach in the city of Manhattan Beach and has been owned by Los Angeles County.

"We stand here ready to transfer this property back to the rightful owners," said California Sen. Steven Bradford.