PORTLAND, Ore. — The phrase "Portland bans urinals" has trended on search engines a few times in recent weeks, and not always with a clear reason. But the most recent case does seem to have a likely origin: it began with a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday morning.
The post features what appears to be a screenshot of an article headline titled "Portland Bans Urinals Because Women Can't Use Them" stacked on top of another screenshot of another tweet apparently commenting on the headline. Monday's tweet was viewed over 5 million times by Tuesday afternoon, and copies of the image quickly popped up on a couple of meme sites.
THE QUESTION
Did the city of Portland ban urinals?
THE SOURCES
THE ANSWER
No, the city of Portland did not ban urinals. They were left out of one specific building when the city remodeled it in 2019.
WHAT WE FOUND
There is no mention of a urinal ban in Portland's city code — in fact, the code specifically requires minimum numbers of urinals in some buildings such as schools. The code does not require urinals in public or city employee buildings, but it doesn't ban them either — it only specifies that urinals can be substituted for up to a third of the requisite number of men's toilets in a building. The city even offers rebates to customers who replace older urinals and toilets with water-efficient models.
So where did the headline in the screenshot come from, and what it is it referring to? Copies of the image have been posted as far back as 2020, and an October 2019 tweet uses the headline's exact phrase with a link to a blog post from a Virginia radio station. The URL also contains the exact headline wording, suggesting that it is likely the source of the screenshot, though the post is no longer online, so it's impossible to confirm.
However, there were a smattering of similar headlines in September and October 2019 that proclaimed Portland had banned urinals, mostly coming from conservative-leaning sites like Gateway Pundit and Daily Wire, and they prompted a round of scornful posts on Twitter, Reddit and other social media sites at the time.
Most of those articles cited a September 2019 KGW story about a $195 million renovation of the historic Portland Building, a city-owned 15-story building located next door to city hall that houses many of the city government's staff offices. The project was in progress at the time and wrapped up in early 2020.
The renovation was extensive, so much so that the city at one point strongly considered starting over with a new building. A 2015 assessment commissioned from the firm FFA Architecture and Interiors noted that there were problems with the restrooms on almost every floor — including urinals that were typically "too far from the wall and in some cases too high" — and recommended replacing all of the restrooms.
So it's not like the city went out of its way to remove the original urinals — given the scale of the project, they were likely coming out no matter what. But the city did opt to forego installation of any replacements, according to an earlier email to staff from the city's chief administrative officer at the time.
The KGW story reported that the renovated building was going to feature shared multi-stall restrooms on a few floors, while maintaining separate men's and women's restrooms — along with at least one single-user, gender-neutral restroom — on the other floors, for a total of 42 all-gender stalls and 104 gender-specific stalls throughout the building.
The email to city staff said the omission of urinals would give the city "the flexibility we need for any future changes in signage," apparently referring to the possibility of switching more restrooms to gender-neutral later.
But the urinal omission applied only to the Portland Building remodel, and there was no wider city policy change. Some of the headlines that appeared on other websites did note that distinction, but others did not, such as the Gateway Pundit headline that simply proclaimed "Portland bans urinals in public buildings" or the headline in the image that was trending on Tuesday.
There has been no further local news about Portland urinal policy since 2019, but the screenshots from the Portland Building discourse continue to occasionally resurface, causing variations of the phrase "Portland bans urinals" to briefly trend again.
