A Stall for One, A Stall for All

A visit to nysenate.gov reveals a brief summary of A6964/S7131 from the 2025–2026 legislative session. The bill “establishes standards for the design and construction of all-gender bathrooms in the state and in New York City; provides standards that will be permitted in both new construction and existing structures undergoing repair, renovation, or alteration work.” The objective is simple enough, though its backers know that it lives in the context of myriad sociopolitical, regulatory, and economic factors. For this reason, Oculus sat down with organizers and supporters of the legislation about their approach to advocacy around this issue.

(For previous Oculus reporting on all-gender bathroom initiatives in New York, see “Architecture of Gender” in the Winter 2018 issue.)

Bria Donohue, director of government affairs for the AIA New York Chapter, and Ruth Ro, a Dattner partner heading the advocacy work on behalf of Build Out Alliance, an LGBTQ+ group within the building design and construction industry, have worked together closely with the bill’s sponsors, New York Assemblymember Harvey Epstein and New York State Senator Rachel May, to push the legislation forward. Along with other supporters, including the New York Restaurant Association, Forest Hills Stadium, and The Flea, the group has worked to craft language and visual representations that will underscore the wide-ranging impacts—both social and financial—of creating new design standards around all-gender bathrooms. Under NYC Plumbing Code, there is no provision for all-gender bathrooms, so providing them would require a special variance, which is both costly and time-consuming for clients and architects. At the New York State level, the plumbing code includes a provision for all-gender bathrooms; however, it does not outline design requirements. NYS Parks provides all-gender restrooms, and it is up to the stakeholder team to design to best practices. Without the variance, toilets within multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms are considered “above and beyond” the minimum fixture count required for a facility, explains Ro.

A workaround would be to build according to higher-priced design standards, including floor-to-ceiling doors and dedicated lights, vents, and sprinklers. Donohue emphasizes that “this bill is strictly additive. It is not saying that all-gender bathrooms are the new law of the land. This just says, ‘If you want one, here’s how you can do it in an explicit way; here’s the prescriptive pathway to do it,’ rather than saying, ‘Try your best, see what passes with the Department of Buildings.’ That’s very important in this conversation.” She also notes that a similar piece of legislation passed in Massachusetts last year, though that model focuses simply on allowing all-gender bathroom “pods,” with floor-to-ceiling stalls, under the state’s codes.

Donohue and Ro took us through the anatomy of the New York bill:

BRIA DONOHUE: The costs of the variances add up super quickly. With the proposed model, a space on the top and the bottom of the stall enables you to have shared systems, creating a cost benefit compared to the currently allowed all-gender model. It also saves space, versus the current all-gender requirements of single-occupant bathrooms that still require dedicated lighting, sprinklers, and ventilation.

We’ve also been trying to highlight some other benefits of the multi-stall, all gender model. It’s not just costs and space savings; there are also operational efficiency benefits. Forest Hills Stadium is the example people are most familiar with of all-gender bathrooms, and it has been very supportive of this whole initiative. The reason the venue loves and supports this piece of legislation for all-gender bathrooms is that the less time you spend on bathroom lines, the more time you have to buy concessions and move around the venue. The stadium doesn’t have wasted assets depending on the audience makeup for certain shows—if the performer brings in more of a female-driven audience, it doesn’t have wasted men’s bathrooms, and vice versa.

There’s also the element of families and caregivers. If you’re a dad, and you need to bring your daughter to the bathroom, that could be an uncomfortable situation in the current gendered bathrooms we see across the country. The legislation includes clear reference to privacy, without gaps on the side. This is quality bathroom design, rather than many of the public bathrooms we’re used to today.

From an LGBTQ+ perspective, creating comfortable, inclusive spaces is crucial. Ruth has brought to our attention things like absentee rates of kids in schools, which can be impacted if they have a stressful bathroom dynamic. And so we’ve been approaching it from many angles: wanting to create inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ youth, the operational efficiency side, the caregiver side, and the space- and cost-saving modeling. When Massachusetts passed its legislation, state administrators reviewed their plumbing review board’s meeting minutes, and found they were spending two-thirds of their time just on bathroom variances. They said, “Let’s stop wasting your breath; let’s fix this.” We are trying to model the amazing work that AIA Massachusetts did over the past 10 years by saying, “Here are some simple requirements.” This is where the market is going. If people want it, let them have it in an easy, less time-consuming, less onerous way. The bill did not pass this session; however, we will be back in Albany in January to continue our rigorous advocacy efforts.

RUTH RO: These initiatives don’t happen in a vacuum. While I was serving on the board of Build Out Alliance, the AIANY LGBTQIA+ Alliance reached out to explore design requirements for multi-stall all-gender bathrooms—legislation wasn’t yet on the table. But as discussions progressed with Bria at AIANY Government Affairs, we realized we might as well draft the bill ourselves.

We’re building on the work of Joel Sanders and Stalled!, which influenced the International Plumbing Code change to permit all-gender bathrooms—a version NYC has yet to adopt. The study suggests that minimal stall gaps at the top and bottom offer effective, low-cost solutions. Many of our clients want to do the right thing, but cost and schedule risks are real hurdles. In crafting this bill, we focused on essential requirements to achieve privacy with the least impact to budget and timeline.

I am personally invested in this work because I am a nonbinary parent with young children of different genders. Yet, as architects, we don’t have all the answers and we certainly do not have the lived experiences of all users. We relied on the expertise and lived experiences of many others to create the guidelines. Senior Dattner designer Troy Lacombe leveraged his good relationships with engineers, working together pro-bono, to verify that the sprinklers, venting, and lighting could indeed be reduced while accommodating taller stalls. Bria, in communication with NYS Housing Committee and the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials, was informed of an existing standard for “Type A Privacy Partitions” that we then referenced in the bill. We checked with major manufacturers that they offer the taller partitions. We want this bill, when passed, to be implementable.

As Bria mentioned, there is a universal need for greater privacy, support for those who require accompaniment, and flexibility for venues to maximize their facilities. So, when seeking support, we engaged organizations representing diverse user groups, not just the builders and operators, but also PFLAG National, senior advocates, transgender organizations, as well as the broader LGBTQ+ community.

As Donohue and Ro mention, AIA New York’s LGBTQIA+ Alliance have been key supporters of the legislation. The group is currently co-chaired by Matthew Ferraro, AIA, principal at Weiss/Manfredi, and Eric Ball, AIA, managing director of the Americas at Henning Larsen. Oculus spoke with Ferraro and Ball about the group’s recent formation and its connection with local and national advocacy within the AIA.

JENNIFER KRICHELS: What are the origins of the group’s involvement in the all-gender bathrooms initiative and, to back up, of the recent formation of the LGBTQIA+ Alliance itself ?

MATTHEW FERRARO: I can start by explaining a bit about how this group got formed. During COVID, Matthew Bremer was coming in as the first openly gay president of AIANY. I also came out during COVID. I was going through a lot, as many of us were, and I noticed work was happening on the initiatives for women’s equality in architecture, for racial equality in architecture, both at the local and national levels. And I said, “Wait a minute, where are we?” And because it’s not necessarily a visible identity, it’s an identity you basically declare, there are a lot of mixed positions.

So I started the conversation and sent an email to AIA National, and in 2022 at AIANY we started doing some soft social gatherings, and seeing if people were interested in the group. When we had our first event, I thought maybe 30 or 40 people would come. We had almost 200 people show up, and it was like, “Oh, there’s a real need for this!” So we started the official formation of the alliance.

The thing we heard a lot was, what can we do as a committee to support the community, but also use our advocacy group at AIA as architects? How can we work to make things more inclusive and to make better design for people? One of the big things that came up was all-gender restrooms, so that was one of the first big hot-topic items we’ve had since 2022.

ERIC BALL: When I joined locally, I started getting engaged on the national level as well. Last June, we had our first meeting where all the alliances got together in D.C. for the national AIA conference. I began to understand how they were advocating for policy changes at NCARB and at the AIA. Fundamental to that was having the ability to capture the data of the community across architecture, which we’ve never done until last summer. My past firm, before Henning Larsen, was a Black-owned architecture firm, and so a lot of conversations I was always having were about data, metrics, and numbers: How many are we at? What are our goals? What are our targets? When I came to this group, it was startling to me that there was no understanding of that data. So, on a national level, a lot of the work was around that. Now you can self-identify and AIA captures that data. We can begin to understand, what are the metrics we’re really trying to reach to increase representation?

JK: So that brings us to the present day. How did everybody work together on this particular advocacy for New York State?

MF: For me, it was simple. I would hold meetings. I would declare them a safe space for anybody to talk about whatever they felt, whether it was architecture-related or related to the community and what’s going on in the world. And I would ask things about programming, but also things like, “If we want to use our resources here at AIA, what would be one or two things you really want to focus on?” And everybody said, “We can’t design gender-neutral restrooms as of right; they’re always a code variance.” You have to have a really spirited client behind a project, one who is willing to take the risks and costs associated with an all-gender bathroom. Bria and I met at a quarterly meeting, and I shared some things the membership was talking about in our subcommittee. She said, “We can really do something with this.” It was a lesson for me on what resources we have; it became sort of an organic conversation. Bria’s got an immense amount of knowledge on how to craft the story, get it on the appropriate desks, and make it worth supporting.

We were very conscientious about the narrative and, for good or for bad, we didn’t want it to be hyper-focused on our community. It is an aspect of it, but we had to sell to a broader coalition. So we started looking at it from so many different angles: efficiency, cost, maintenance, etc. We built that narrative with Ruth’s help and started to formulate, for lack of other terms, a really good sales pitch. We got council members behind it, got Forest Hills Stadium behind it, and other coalition partners behind it. Bria took it from there with Ruth’s very kind support and guidance from Build Out Alliance.

JK: Is there anything about the design side of things you would like to elaborate on as architects?

MF: What Ruth has prepared is balancing privacy, universal needs, and costs. The de facto way to create an all-gender bathroom is to have a two-piece standalone washroom with full-height partitions, etc. That, spatially, takes up a lot of square footage and floor space, and it costs a lot more. The design is trying to balance all these different priorities while still providing a safe and comfortable place for people to do what they need to do, so to speak. That’s done by creating individual cubicles that have a certain dimension off the floor and ceiling for ventilation, fire protection, and lighting. There is a comingled area where you wash your hands, because that’s a less private act. So the design is trying to optimize the spatial needs for an efficient toilet room or washroom, while making sure everybody feels safe and comfortable to do basic human necessities.