"God must have a sense of humor, why else would he put a snack shack next to an outhouse."
The version I remember was "...a playground next to a waste treatment facility"
I think it was from a joke about city planning departments.
It is a joke, I just don't remember who said it. I keep going back to either George Carlin or Red Foxx, I want to say Red Foxx, but not sure.
This triggered a memory from my college years.
There is some real world engineering in that thought. In an Environmental/Civil Engineering course in the 70's we were tasked to consider a hypothetical law that a city's raw water intake must be located immediately downstream of its sewage treatment effluent discharge. In other words:
Shit out = Shit in.
Imagine treated urine, feces, fertilizer and industrial waste being 90+ percent of the drinking water supply for New York City. We did not get to pursue the idea very far, but the engineering and facilities cost was astronomical to assure clean safe drinking water. We did all agree though that it would be a helluva incentive for cities to really clean up their waste water discharges.
That was based on the ancient 'dilute urine with water' days, which eventually included some inevitable fecal matter too, yet the 'acceptable amount of fecal matter started growing exponentially, as did the factory dumping directly onto beaches and open bodies of water too. In those days, the locals knew the best places to avoid the crowds, as well as the dump zones, as the smell would be atrocious at times, dependent on the weather and volume.
When I first heard that description, it had nothing at all to do with water suppies or sewage treatment. It was talking about human anatomy.