Some problems do actually have solutions

In places without private sanitation generally available there should, of course, be some measure of public sanitation provision. This is a public health matter after all. There are problems with this:

Incentivising quality of public infrastructure excludes users and worsens public health

Community toilets in slums are often degraded, dirty, and poorly maintained, but upgrading facilities is difficult because of low willingness to pay among potential users and free riding. This column looks at community toilets in Uttar Pradesh, India, and asks whether externally incentivising maintenance can sustainably improve the quality of public infrastructure. Providing cash incentives to the caretaker and a one-time facility upgrade improved the quality of facilities and reduced free riding, but pushed more residents to practise open defecation, with poor public health outcomes. Fully subsidising basic services is important but measures are needed to prevent overcrowding and degradation.

Making those communal toilets better - cleaner at least - causes problems by itself. One solution is:

As the prevalence of private access to sanitation is low and coordination fails in the presence of overcrowding (Banerjee et al. 2008, Chidambaram 2020), a model with fully subsidised public infrastructure should consider imposing restrictions on the number of users per facility and/or enacting monitoring mechanisms to ensure that facilities are preserved by users.

If we’re going to go that public provision route then we must either have queues and rationing or we must have detailed inspection of how people use them places.

This is Garret Hardin all over again. When there is that open - Marxist - access to a resource and demand is greater than capacity then we’ve only two solutions. Either go private - capitalist - or regulate access - the socialist route. Elinor Ostrom’s caveat, that in small enough groups social restrictions will solve the problem is true, but that depends upon the definition of small enough group. Anyone who has ever lived in a student flat knows that small does mean small here.

Which leaves us with that other solution - private plumbing.

As in Hardin’s original presentation, sometimes public is better than private, sometimes the reverse. Which depends upon the specifics of the issue under discussion. Our disagreement with the modern world is only that private works better much more often than generally believed, public much less.