Encouraging All-Gender restrooms!

Hello All,

Our project also embraced the concept of Gender Neutral facilities by default and it was interesting to hear their rationale for this "experiment".  The client is a very employee centric company and they were quick to acknowlege that negative feedback would cause them to rethink the concept, so it will also be interesting to see if the facilities are readily accepted by the building occupants.  User feedback will be a very important consideration in our next design.

This is a great credit fostering equity but would like to see a way to lower the point impact in the WE category if this credit is persued. Maybe a stepped point compliance if all restrooms are gender neutral to not suffer for not having urinals. 

If space permits, I think providing urinals along with water closets in the restrooms could lower water use. This may not impact significantly in the WE category rather than just having water closets. 

I've had a project pursue the All-Gender restrooms and it did provide both toilets and urinals. Toilets use more water than urinals. Even dual flush-toilets, so in order to meet both the equity/inclusivity and WE indoor water savings goals of the project our solution was to include them. Using non-potable water to flush or some other kind of toilet wasn't the preferred option (and honestly we didn't ask if it would have been allowed). 

Our team was very excited about this pilot credit and would like to pursue it for future LEED projects as we are seeing more higher education and high school clients interested in All-Gender restrooms. Currently, we are pursuing this credit on a University project where the Owner was interested in providing all-gender locker rooms. The existing men’s and women’s locker rooms will be reconfigured to provide three fully accessible, gender-inclusive locker rooms to serve the student body. In agreement that user feedback and having a post occupancy evaluation will be incredibly helpful in understanding what what worked, what didn't work and ways to improve for future projects. 

In our case it was easy to implement the strategy because of the type of project and its size. But we see the difficulty of implementing it in other projects while meeting all the requirements.