Good morning.

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This morning, we have the latest dispatch from Marie Tae McDermott, in our series answering readers’ questions about inequality in California:

Patricia Dunn, a reader in Sonoma wrote: “I have witnessed open urination in San Francisco on the public streets and wonder why portable toilets at minimum are not on city streets.”

We’ve heard from residents about sidestepping human waste on their way to work, and some, including Ms. Dunn, have wondered why there aren’t more portable toilets.

A 2017 report by the city of Los Angeles on the state of toilets on Skid Row found that there were just nine public toilets available for its 1,964 homeless residents. By contrast, the United Nations’s standard for refugee camps requires there to be one toilet for every 20 people.

When there is a lack of public toilets, as there is in California, people are forced to relieve themselves elsewhere. Sidewalks become a breeding ground for infectious diseases.