>Now they have to deal with mental health episodes, the homelessness crisis, and random violence
And people who have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon trying to censor and control libraries have siezed on this, blaming libraries for endangering children. Really shameful behavior. Rather than solve social problems, let's demonize the few places where all people, if they behave themselves, are welcome.
I love that I live in a city with a robust library system. I can borrow books online, and check out books from distant branches by having them moved to my local one. The last time I actually went into my local branch to do some focused reading every chair and table was filled with other folks doing the same thing. That is, except for one whole table that a homeless guy had commandeered to lay out his belongings, and was circling and grunting. The guy clearly needed the kind of help you’re not going to find in a library. My city shelters everyone, and has a generous safety net. I don’t know what else to do, but realized the library isn’t the place to go for a library-like atmosphere.
Luckily the library cordons off the children’s section on a separate floor where adults aren’t generally permitted.
> And people who have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon trying to censor and control libraries have siezed on this, blaming libraries for endangering children. Really shameful behavior.
When shared social resources are turned into political operatives, it's not the fault of the opposition when they are attacked. If you want something to be treated as neutral, it needs to act with neutrality.
> If you want something to be treated as neutral, it needs to act with neutrality.
What constitutes "neutrality" is constantly changing. In order to remain politically neutral, in recent years, one would need to increasingly censor themselves.
For example, in 2019, wearing N95s during wildfire season to avoid inhaling smoke wasn't politically charged. Some people would wear them when outside and others didn't--nobody cared. This month, with wildfire smoke in the air, it has now become political (and decidedly not neutral) to say what was said in 2019--that N95s can help protect you from wildfire smoke.
Well, they can. You’ll notice the smoke when you take it off. Now, if you virtuously don one at the first faint hint of smoke, be my guest. But, don’t give me the stink eye, if I don’t.
Libraries have become dangerous harassment centers where drug addicts and people with mental problems congregate and assault normal people wanting to read books... and it's the group the opposes this, says it is absurd and should not be accepted and who want to get these people the hell out of the libraries who should feel shame?
No, I propose it is those that enable this problem and degrade our public spaces who should be ashamed.
This isn't new by any means. It was one reason I swerved away from the profession after getting my MLIS degree almost twenty years ago. I like books, I don't want to be a babysitter or a first responder. Of course the other reason, very much related, is that the pay isn't great. I had a graduate degree and didn't make a living wage, and looking at the salary ladder I wasn't going to be making what a first-year developer made for like... 20 years to ever.
But I still go to the library almost every weekend.
Got mine 8 years ago and same. Granted, I also got MS and then was geographically restricted, but those are the reasons I haven't looked at employment at the local public libraries.
It's really depressing that the skills I have that are worth the most are those I learned as a child, but it is what it is.
The library is one of the last places where you can exist without the expectation of buying something. I’m not some anti-capitalist at all, but I do recognize the role in which public facilities like the library play. Ideally, they provide a space essential for free and open access, within in a local community, free at the point of delivery.
That's a pretty brilliant observation. On nice days, public parks look similar to the library (and increasingly have the same vagrancy and drug problems, ha!). But public parks don't need staff like a library so it's less obvious who's job it should be to kick everyone out at night.
I've seen that observation a lot, the oldest expression of it I can find (with the key phrase "expectation of buying something") is from this union publication in July 2018:
> A library is one of the last truly public spaces, where you can go to get out of the elements or meet with people without the expectation of buying something.
I go to state and national parks all the time. You don't really see vagrancy problems in the majority of them, but they all have park rangers whose job it is to police that. Many parks, of course, let you camp overnight up to two weeks at a time.
Interesting you should say that, because as a British person I have never encountered a public park in which one is not allowed to be at night.
Public parks of course need some staff, but maybe they would be better if they didn't have them: the two gardeners for my local public park have been nicknamed 'Rack' and 'Ruin' due to their extreme approach to dead-heading..!
No, unless you're using "expectation" in a way that significantly differs from the common meaning. Browsing without buying is extremely common and expected.
Yeah, but that does not imply you will find what you're looking for, or that you want to buy it immediately (e.g. you have something else afterwards where it would be inconvenient to carry what you bought and prefer coming back another day).
I've found this to be true of many Starbucks locations. I usually do buy/drink a tea/coffee or two, but have never felt any pressure to keep buying. It might be an unwritten/unknown policy to allow this. I recall reading that Starbucks intentionally serves as a kind of 'third place'. Here's one[0] I just googled.
I can go and wander and look at the wares. But if I were to go to a Dick's Sporting Goods with some friends, plop down in an aisle, and start playing a board game they'll probably ask me to leave.
I think you’d be surprised what you can get away with if you’re really pleasant and don’t bother anyone. Just act like playing board games in the aisle is perfectly normal and smile and wave at people.
There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never been to a store, or cannot imagine being pleasant. If you're not a jerk, people will be quite patient! And if you are asked to leave, that's also not terrible! You can go somewhere else. There's a huge, quantifiable gulf between setting up a homeless encampment in a space and a normalish person just hanging out.
I've seen this notion a few times, but I think it bares some scrutiny.
What places used to exist that no longer do where you can exist without the expectation of buying something?
Thinking about it, libraries are unusual in that they have no cost at all to enter. Top of my head only religious buildings seem to be similar in that regards.
There's quite a lot of options as far as no expectations to buy anything, but you need to pay some kind of fee - sport's centres, clubs that sort of thing. (One might argue they often contain a shop/cafe, but I'd argue you don't go there to use those, and they are very optional)
The societies of North America have totally abandoned the middle class and its ambitions. Instead of staying true to their goals of education, libraries have become daytime homeless shelters driving away their original patrons. So have busses, and trains. Schools have opted out of their obligations to provide the best educations to the public instead tailoring the education to the least capable. Ultimately this will lead to the further hollowing of our civil society as the middle class realizes the bureaucratic core does not have their best interests at heart. But Brutus is an honorable man.
My library looks nothing like this. You're painting all libraries with a broad brush, generalizing from a very small number of libraries in the downtown core of a handful of cities.
But yeah. Our view of homelessness as a personal failure of the homeless person, rather than a societal failure to care for its people, is not working. More punishment and less services only exacerbates the problem.
I don't think property tax factors much at all into land price. Else wouldn't land price be relatively consistent across locations with same tax systems
It factors very much into the rent price. Lots of people think the property tax is paid by the landlord, and think increasing it sticks it to the landlord, but it is paid by the renters.
See also California in 2009 had a proposal in their budget for a $1.2 million commission to promote the blueberry industry- paid for by a new tax specifically on blueberries.
A levy of 45 cents per $1000, which according to the seattle times:
> The bulk of money raised from the new levy, $707 million, would go toward the construction of new subsidized rental homes and improvements to aging affordable apartments. Those programs are focused on housing for people making 60% of area median income or less, about $74,000 a year for a family of three. Nearly two-thirds of the funding would fund housing for those making even less, 30% of area median income or $37,000 for a family of three.
The current levy (passed in 2016) is 25 cents per $1000. A tax of a few hundred dollars per year on a million dollar home isn't making an impact on housing affordability. Expanding the availability of affordable housing might. I'm skeptical that $707M is enough to make a dent.
That's projected over 7 years, so $101 million per year. The city's annual budget is nearly 6 billion dollars. While $707 million sounds big, it's quite small relatively speaking.
If you'd rather criminalize homelessness, build prisons and courts, employ more cops and prosecutors and prison guards, and defense lawyers for the inevitable lawsuits that arise from inhumane treatment, you might want to work up a budget for all that. And tell me where the money is going to come from, in a state with no income tax.
The tax is $970 million over 7 years, with $707 million for buying and maintaining housing. Remember that each apartment costs something like $200K. That covers acquiring the estimated 3400 apartments plus maintenance for existing ones.
The levy is an order of magnitude too small to fix problem. King County has 40,000 homeless. Also, I don't think the levy is for chronic homeless since it doesn't have programs to help them. The problem may be too big for local government and needs federal government to help out.
When you buy a house, what you pay for it is determined by the mortgage you can afford.
If interest rates go down, house prices go up. If property taxes go down, house prices go up. If property taxes go up, house prices go down.
In the long term, it's a net wash. That and the people on the boundary of homelessness are renters, not homeowners. Rents are set by what the market will bear, not by what it costs the landlord to own the property.
> Rents are set by what the market will bear, not by what it costs the landlord to own the property.
If landlords cannot make a reasonable rate of return, they will not enter the market, and existing ones will exit. This will reduce the supply, and then the rents will rise.
Logically this would increase ownership rates (since the landlords exiting the market will over-supply houses, lowering the price), which will remove pressure from the renting market, lowering the price.
Landlords leaving the market sell to people who previously had to rent and can now own their own house. Since many landlords leave at once, people can buy houses cheaply. Where is the problem in my logic?
And are they going to take their existing houses and beam them up to the Starship Enterprise? Or are they going to let them rot empty, while paying those same taxes and maintenance on them?
... Or do you think they will let them out for whatever they can get?
Houses aren't a soccer ball, you can't pack them up and leave if you don't like the playing field.
It's weird how whenever houses are the topic of discussion, people seem to think that economics should only work in one direction.
For existing buildings, landlords who lose money on them will stop doing maintenance and repairs, and they'll eventually become slums or will be abandoned. Look what happened to Detroit.
> For existing buildings, landlords who lose money on them will stop doing maintenance and repairs, and they'll eventually become slums or will be abandoned.
Ah, so because expenses temporarily exceed revenue on your million-dollar investment, you'll just let it rot down to zero?
What happened in Detroit was a collapse in demand of housing, caused by a collapse in employment. That collapse and reduction in the tax base lead to a death spiral, as a city's infrastructure costs are fixed - which pushed further marginal demand out.
You know what didn't happen in Detroit? A housing collapse because of a 20-cent-per-thousand-dollar property tax levy.
No town can survive a collapse in employment. The coastal cities with 11 job openings for 10 people who are fighting over 9 apartments aren't suffering from that problem, and it's ridiculous to point at Detroit as a comparison.
And if you think a 3% tax increase for landlords is 'massive', how would you describe the 20-40% increase in rents? If the poor landlords shouldn't be subjected to such a horrific thing, shouldn't the tenants be protected from ballooning rents?
Housing investors still either live in the house themselves or rent it out to people who live in them. Getting rid of them won't change the price. The price is driven by the supply and the people who want to live there (demand).
They are the cities that have to make up the slack for the rest of the country not pulling its weight, and exporting its poverty and problems to them.
Or they are the cities with the worst housing affordability problems.
Or they are just the cities that have these public services. Not a lot of people complaining about homeless people riding the subway in rural Texas, because rural Texas doesn't have a subway.
----
Seattle, by the way, got a 'prosecute everything and restart the war on drugs' city attourney and a 'sweep the homeless away' mayor.
Strangely enough, neither policy has done shit to resolve any of the problems. Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone...
It took the state legislature to fix the city's problem (by banning SFH zoning, and hitting NIMBYs over the head with a stick), and maaaaybe we'll see the fruits of that policy ripen in a decade or two.
Seattle ended up changing to those policies because of their previous “let vagrants do whatever and spend endless amounts on services” failures — and people who pay taxes were understandably upset that negative results were produced for huge sums of money. The situation improved for average people after those changes.
> Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone
Yes, everyone is better off when parks are drug vagrant free and possible to be enjoyed by everyone — even if that policy doesn’t solve every problem.
Toxic empathy is saying you should destroy society and afflict everyone with suffering because you haven’t yet created Utopia — and I think the responses to me show why excluding other voices under the guise of “mUh SyStEmS tHiNkInG” failed in cities like Seattle.
You need both law and order and compassion for society to flourish. The only part we agree on is that cleaning up the mess is a decade scale challenge — especially now that toxic empathy has taken Seattle down the wrong path for the past decade.
So in Seattle you house the homeless in a giant Rem Koolhaas terrarium. There are worse things.
When I lived there, I didn't know many other software folks who used the public library system at all. Not because of smelly homeless people. It was just more convenient for them to buy anything they wanted to read/watch/listen to.
And there were lots of convenient branch libraries for kids - better than trekking to the terrarium downtown anyway.
The vast bulk of books are available used on Amazon for a couple dollars & shipping. I buy a lot that way. The local public library doesn't have the books I want to read. But the library does have DVDs I can borrow and watch, and music CDs I can borrow and see if I like. Netflix will parcel out a miniseries one disk at a time, while I can borrow the box set from the library and binge it.
What? My town has three libraries alone, all of which are large, spacious, extremely clean, super quiet, full of great material, and are constantly full of well behaved citizens. You're not describing a feature of modern libraries. You're describing a local problem.
There is usually a huge congregation of homeless there by afternoon. And its even worse inside the library. You get hit with stench as soon as you open the library door.
Sucks because libarians have exceptional knowledge that any book lover would enjoy talking to.
> You're describing a local problem.
Unless you are suggesting middle class can only exist in the burbs and small towns.
I 've lived in pilsen chicago for over 25 yrs, this is my home. Hate to relocate in next few yrs because now i have newborn.
Agreed. I live in a city with a noticeable homeless problem, but our extensive system of libraries is perfectly safe.
Now, ten or twenty years ago, the main branch downtown was in what certain conservative commentators might have called a "no-go zone"—but really the neighborhood around the library was fine. It seemed to me that the drug gangs in the area back then had some kind of unspoken agreement that the library was neutral (dare I say sacred?) ground.
you know there are actual no go zones like austin area in chicago. Why are you hiding behind 'conservative commentators' as a cover for your statement.
I don't know what you're talking about, but I spend about 60 minutes in Austin (the Chicago neighborhood) every day, and live across a street from it. Austin is not a "no go zone". Residents of one of the wealthiest suburbs in Chicago routinely bike through it on their way to work in the Loop.
> Man, 38, shot in the face in Austin.
> The 38-year-old was walking on the sidewalk when someone started shooting around 10:20 p.m. in the 4900 block of West Hubbard Street, according to police.
> Austin Neighbors Are Helping Each Other Get Mental Health Care After Shootings Near Preschool
> Some kids said they were too scared to play outside after hearing gunfire, a preschool leader said. A 20-year-old woman was killed and two men were wounded in two shootings days apart.
With respect, your argument is poorly informed and seems extrapolated from media stories. I don't know if you live in Chicagoland or not --- the belief you're expounding on is prevalent in suburban Chicago as well. It's false.
Once again: one of the wealthiest suburbs in Chicago is directly adjacent to Austin. I live in that suburb, across a street (that street would be Austin) from the neighborhood. People in Oak Park commute, on bicycles, through Austin. Notably, in the ~20 years I've lived here, I haven't heard a single story about any of those people being shot. Austin residents patronize our businesses. Much of Austin is middle class.
Austin is a troubled neighborhood (it is literally ground zero for US housing segregation), but it is absolutely not a "no-go zone". Words mean things. Ironically, people who "go" to Austin are probably much safer (essentially they _are_ safe there) than young male Black residents, who are the exclusive targets of the gang violence that occurs there.
You get the same weird arguments about the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Hyde Park on the south side, and the same rebuttals apply.
its not "argument" though, i don't see what 'wealthiest suburbs' have to do with shootings in austin. Yes suburbs including the one you live in are safer. Not sure what that has to do with anything. CabriniGreen used to be next to rivernorth.
> I don't know if you live in Chicagoland or not
I've lived in pilsen for last 25 years and grew up here. I don't live in the burbs. I know what 'no go zones' mean, the block i grew up on in west pilsen used to be one ( but not anymore) . I now live on the edge of 'no go zone' in pilsen ( east of western ) . My wife works for charter school in englewood where i do weekly drop off and pickup. Englewood is a 'no go' zone for us, meaning we won't go there if we have no business being there, we never make a stop in that neighborhood ( like the cyclists you mention) .
you choose live white majority suburb with double the median income but not in austin. That revealed preference proves that Austin was a 'no go' zone for you? Going to coffeshop once in a while doesn't really count, imo.
> is absolutely not a "no-go zone". Words mean things.
You said austin is not a no go zone, can you give me an example of an area considered no go zone. Perhaps that will clarify.
> Notably, in the ~20 years I've lived here, I haven't heard a single story about any of those people being shot.
I just gave you two examples from last 2 months of ppl getting shot by stray bullets. What does you personally hearing about cyclists have to do with anything? This type of statement is really hard to respond to.
We considered Oak Park and Lincoln Square in the city proper for aesthetic reasons, and chose Oak Park for the schools (I'm retrospectively unhappy we did that, since we contributed to school segregation by opting into a de facto private school system, but whatever).
But even if we hadn't, and we'd simply chosen Oak Park over Austin, that wouldn't be a "revealing" preference. Austin is troubled and disinvested, again by dint of being the literal ground zero for post-redlining US housing segregation. At the beginning of the 1970s Austin was majority white; by the end it was over 90% Black, because of panic selling and white flight. There aren't that many restaurants, few grocery stores, &c, all as a result (if you're a middle class family in Austin, chances are you shop in Oak Park).
I think Austin is pretty neat; wide tree-lined blocks with some great, big houses. But I'm not arguing that it's unproblematic. It certainly is.
As for the definition of "no-go zone", Wikipedia's will suffice. Austin compares with literally none of the many examples given. You can go to Austin; you will be just fine.
Incidentally: people in Chicago have generally the same feelings about Auburn and Grand Crossing as they do about Englewood, but people still go to Lem's. It's true: I have no reason to go to Englewood. I also know less about it than I know about Austin. But Austin is simply not a no-go zone.
I don't know if there are or there aren't, but none of the descriptions of "no-go zones" anywhere in the world on Wikipedia apply to Austin. I'm not arguing "it's not a no-go zone because Wikipedia doesn't list it as one"; I'm saying the definition simply doesn't apply. You can go there. You will be fine. People go there constantly.
Cabrini Green, by the way? Never a no-go zone. I went to high school across the street from the old ABLA high-rises. Housing projects do not equate to "no-go zones".
yea for sure if you are using wikipedia definition ( but you mentioned something about cyclists and stray bullets) . No city or town in USA qualifies that definition. We use 'don't take your kids to the park there' definition in our neighborhood ( maybe what you are referring to as 'problematic') . I wouldn't take my kids to austin parks where stray bullets are flying around. Maybe we are more aware of this stuff than ppl in burbs because our neighborhood in pilsen is not completely safe even now. We have to be extra caution going out with kids .
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/02/15/facing-spike-in-murd...
Totally false. It happened just last weekend in Oak Park, and a few months earlier at a gas station in Oak Park (that resulted in us, idiotically, banning 24/7 gas stations).
If you'd just said "places like Austin have high crime" or something, we wouldn't be on this thread. But you said it was a "no-go zone", doubled down, then walked the definition back to "places I'd be comfortable hanging out with my kid in the park".
We can be done with the thread now; I'm happy with what it says about our respective arguments. My suggestion is maybe strike the term "no-go zone" from your vocabulary. It's mostly politically charged bullshit. But in any of its reasonable definitions, it doesn't apply to Austin, and didn't apply to Cabrini.
Look. This is an exceedingly stupid thread and I should know better than to comment on it. But clearly you 2 are arguing about the definition of a “no-go” zone, which is not rigorously defined.
But you’ve posited in this comment that one criteria is the count of people getting shot in the last month. By that argument River North[0] is a no go zone. Which, perhaps it is for you, but thats not an interesting social commentary because it means that effectively all urban US neighborhoods are. Just say you won’t go to US urban environments. We get it.
At the end of the day, in Chicago, the tragic gun violence problem is real. But counter-intuitively its not real for people that _visit_ neighborhoods. Its real for the young men that live there. And by invoking “no-go” rhetoric you hide the real problem. That years of public policy have made certain neighborhoods extremely dangerous for those that live there, but ironically, not for those that visit.
> Just say you won’t go to US urban environments. We get it.
I grew up in pilsen which was gang controlled 'no go zone' until it got gentrified over last 1-2 decades on the east side. We knew which gangs controlled which areas, we are only a few blocks away from El Chapo's 'The Pilsen twins' family home ( never saw them though) . People who live here and raise families here know where 'no go zones' are and stay away from. If you visit any local here for a few you will get a lecture about which areas are 'no go' gang controlled zones ( south of cermak and west of western).
Ofcouse, you can 'go' to gentrified restaurants and coffee shops on 18th st/Thalia hall and get 'the experience' for outsiders and suburbanites. Doesn't mean there aren't no go zones in pilsen.
It frustrating to me that people who chose live in white segregated suburbs ( 'for aesthetic reasons', code for not too many non whites ) and send their kids to segregated schools are lecturing us what words to use and what to call ourselves. I personally detest these white ppl more than Tucker Carlson types. Yes they are 'no go zones' and govt/community should fix it, calling them 'problematic areas' instead isn't a fix.
Dude, don't call parts of Chicago "no-go zones" and then try to high-horse residential segregation. I'm up front about how my decisions have fed into our pathologies. Try to be more honest about yours.
What town is that? As I go through my life experiences, every affluent place I've lived in my state, NC, has had decent libraries. They are used mostly by kids and old people, anecdotally.
I laughed on the inside a bit when I considered the fact that a public library existed just a few blocks down from the library of a large public university. But this was my youthful ignorance. Anyone could walk in the university library and open a book (well, you could at that time, not so sure about anymore) but you had to have a school ID card to check out a book or access the computer system.
Before cell phones, I visited libraries traveling around the coast. The computers were 100% taken. There was a line to get one, and the librarian directed us to a scheduling system. These were people who needed to use a computer and the internet to apply to a job. Access was scarce, low-quality, and competency to use those tools were lacking.
Nowadays, cell phones have mostly taken away that niche of the past. I'm not sure if or why the people there still need the libraries.
Ive tried making a resume or applying for jobs on a phone, it’s doable but much easier and more pleasant to do for two hours on a desktop. Fewer people have up to date desktop computers so I see the need for this continuing.
I live in a smaller city / large town and the local libraries are pretty dangerous-feeling with lots of cops & homeless folks. My anecdata doesn't match yours; actual data may be more useful.
This is only true in big cities. Definitely true in LA and NYC.
I was astounded to find that the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all (not just the homeless or teenagers.) The bathrooms are usually spotless.
I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.
> I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.
Somehow I doubt that all of the branch libraries of those systems are "homeless shelters." More likely the it's just the larger libraries near the actual shelters. Where "the average taxpayer" wouldn't spend time anyway.
> the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all
Small college towns have a couple of real advantages over big cities in this regard. First, they're small, which helps a lot. Second, they tend to have more funding available per-capita than large cities do.
That has definitely not been my experience in NYC. I've lived in 3 neighborhoods in Queens, and all of them have had great local libraries that were clean and had friendly staff.
It's just one of the few places where you can hang. Read, watch movies, and nobody is expecting you to spend money. It's air conditioned in the summer, heated in the winter.
Also in the burbs, it's not a trivial task for homeless to even get to a place like the library, where in NYC it's pretty easy to get around.
I still use the library in NYC, but I agree that some locations aren't exactly great places to spend the day studying, but it very much depends on the branch. "unusable" feels like a stretch. I can still pickup books and get help from librarians if I need it.
Not in my opinion, those smaller towns have largely (but not universally) abandoned the middle class ambition of home ownership through exclusionary land policy, despite not degrading their basic services.
How popular was your small east coast college library?
I have a theory about this. Which is that the upper/upper-mid class in particular cares more about the image of a pristine library than they do the actual effectiveness/reach of that library. This theory shows itself quite a lot through how people talk about libraries: not in how many students find what they're looking for, how happy librarians are, how many grades or careers have been improved. It's bathrooms and walls.
Since when are public libraries responsible for improving the grades of students? I relied on the public library for computer/Internet access and of course reading for most of my childhood and never had that expectation... no doubt it helped me indirectly because I read a lot and I had no consistent access to the Internet otherwise, but how do you define "effectiveness/reach"? Can a filthy library occupied by homeless people be effective? My thoughts: it's largely up to parents to bring their kids to public libraries and encourage them to read. And that's not going to happen if it's not a comfortable place to spend time (i.e. clean and quiet). What's in the collection is of secondary importance.
I'm in a very progressive and educated town. The library here serves as a community education center. It's very well used, well loved, and well resourced, with tons of free classes for the community. There are three colleges in this town, so it's a more educated populace than the average town.
I agree on principle, but in the details I have some quibbles. The core of a library is the books (the root of library is the Latin for book). For me, all I really want from a library is to loan me all the books I want for as long as I need them. I’m not particularly interested in the librarians’ happiness or grades or careers.
NYC libraries aren’t defacto shelters for the unhoused. When I visit them they have robust children’s sections and the adult section is filled with a cross section of the community, which does include people with a large bag who are just resting but also includes twenty something’s with designer closet hung and MacBooks.
> Instead of staying true to their goals of education, libraries have become daytime homeless shelters driving away their original patrons.
Previously, there had been private libraries for the elite. Carnegie libraries, making public libraries widespread across the country, were known by uppity folks for attracting "undesirables." People of all races, genders, and social statuses were welcome there. Those were the original patrons. That was Carnegie's goal.
> Schools have opted out of their obligations to provide the best educations to the public instead tailoring the education to the least capable
Our current school system was designed to create compliant factory workers. They're still making an uncreative, docile workforce, but where are the jobs?
> The societies of North America have totally abandoned the middle class and
They've totally abandoned the the middle class and the lower class. That's why we're having these problems. Pitting middle class against lower class allows the upper class to get away with sucking every last penny out of society and abandoning the greater good.
Comes far from even closing the gap on the net favorable tax treatment of capital gains which itself favors the wealthy, but, sure, “totally abandoned” the classes below the haut bourgeoisie may be a slight exaggeration; there is some concern which occasionally manifest is some small policy measures.
Washington is not separate from the United States, and income is
taxed in the United States, and 7% at $250k plus doesn’t close the gap between it and normal (or, a fortiori, specifically labor, which has additional taxes on top of general income tax) income.
The fact that Washington wasn’t further widening that gap between labor capital taxes by taxing regular income before adopting its capital gains tax is tangential.
“federal income tax” is only about 2/3 of federal taxes on income, and the other 1/3 is the much more bottom-weighted payroll tax.
And in any case, yes, high end earners of normal income (which can include some of the top 1%, ~$700k non-capital income isn’t unheard of) get heavily taxed; capital income is favored, not high non-capital income.
Payroll taxes are dedicated to pay for Medicare and Social Security programs. The amount you get in old age is directly proportional to how much you paid in (with a formula that favors lower earners via “bend points”), so its disingenuous to just lump it all in with regular federal income taxes.
Yes, sure, for both the benefits are weighted more towards lower-income earners (in other words, they get back much more, on average, than they paid in). I don’t know how that supports the thesis that those with lower income are overtaxed compared to those with higher incomes.
It seems to me that libraries would prefer not to deal with this stuff either. Much like how police are often dealing with things that aren't really police matters, the reason for this state is that we as a society have decided to largely abandon people in dire need.
Libraries (and police, and other services) are left to deal with this problem by default, because we as a society don't value finding solutions to the problem enough to bother to do that.
Is it possible that rather than abandoning people in dire need, we're now actually trying hard to help those in need instead of criminalizing bad luck and pretending they don't exist, but that that is exceedingly hard to do well?
There is certainly a greater interest in finding real solutions than there has been for decades, yes, and there are absolutely certain groups that are trying hard. I think the trendlines are heading the right direction here.
But, as a society in general, I think we're not actually trying hard yet. We're still largely debating whether or not we should be.
These people can't be helped. Meanwhile, you are harming functioning healthy people and destroying any public space at great cost to everyone paying the bill. We are all sick of it.
No, I don't think they can be helped; additionally, I don't accept that functioning productive people have to sacrifice their comfort or well being to accommodate these people's problems.
I don't think they can be helped, but certainly letting them mill about in public libraries accomplishes what exactly? Yes, I write them off because I am a realist, not a utopian, and I write them off because on balance they cause so many problems for normal people.
It is not worth destroying nice places, cities, libraries, streets for pie in the sky morality that presumes mental illness to this degree or drug abuse can be overcome, or that it is worth all of the mess, harassment, violence, filth, and degradation that we all see everywhere waiting around for this supposed solution that never comes. It's not working.
The librarians I know are proud of the way the role of the library has expanded. They don't think of themselves as in charge of books. They think of themselves as in charge of using knowledge to help people.
They don't necessarily want to be in charge of providing other needs for the homeless. But their question is: where else are those homeless supposed to go? The library is the most visible public-facing aspect of the government. If they can leverage that to bring services to people, that's a good start.
The solution is not to ban the homeless from the libraries. The solution is to bring the rest of homeless services and support to the place where the homeless are.
The librarians you know support this because they've been tricked by their managers and society into taking on a tremendous amount of dangerous and stressful work for free.
It isn't reasonable that we expect librarians to do this kind of work, and I would argue that there are elements of doing so that are outright illegal.
This field draws on a lot of the same people who are drawn to social work. They know they're not going to make big money doing it, but they're going to get into it anyway because taking on the profession is a virtuous thing to do. There's a degree of willing self sacrifice, especially since (like other similar fields, such as museum curation) it practically takes someone dying for a position to open up.
Given all of this, these librarians aren't being tricked by anyone. It's just one more moral, virtuous thing to do for the community, despite not having the training or support to handle anything but the easy cases.
>The solution is to bring the rest of homeless services and support to the place where the homeless are.
No, it is not. The solution is to reduce homelessness, drug addicts and poverty. If needed create actual spaces for homeless people to go to, where there are actually people/resources which can help them.
Turning libraries into homeless shelters and librarians into social workers is an absurd policy idea.
Look into that incident further, I think you're mixing a couple separate things. Calculus was moved later in California, not "removed" and the Seattle math thing was outcry over a couple parts where teachers were encouraged to explore the history of maths and the various cultures that shaped it (think Arabic cultures leading to 360 degrees in a circle)
This is still incorrect. Seattle did not get rid of Advanced Placement math classes (like calculus), which any student has the option to take and end with a nationally-recognized test.
They did get rid of various gifted/talented programs in middle school, with the goal of getting the majority of students to the same level of math, because the placement tests for the gifted/talented/honors math courses in middle schools correlated much closer to family income than actual math aptitude. (I took one of these tests in elementary school and failed, despite placing in math Olympiad the same year. They were mostly about folding pieces of paper.)
Easy example: if the test results do not correlate with other test results and grades, but do correlate with family income, the likelihood of the test measuring math aptitude is small. It's not hard to come up with examples.
What other tests? If those tests are better, why not use them?
> and grades
Grades are quite unreliable, as they are too easily manipulated (like grade inflation). For example, my high school physics teacher proclaimed that everyone in his classes should get As. He did that a little too loudly, and the administration had to ask him not to do that. Instead, during tests, he'd offer to help anyone answer the questions if they had any difficulty. He was a nice fellow, I liked him, but the grades he handed out weren't worth spit.
Grades might not correlate with aptitude. Actually, a lot of grade inflation going on in K-12 education. Straight A’s aren’t enough to get into even UW these days if you are coming from SPS.
That an aptitude test correlated with family income isn’t weird, kids with well to do parents generally get more instruction, resources, and pressure to do well on these tests. All of that is useful in developing actual aptitude, although it is still very unfair.
It more related to the education of the parents, not income. But hey, we can’t Talk about that less we admit that lower income Asians magically happen to do well in school.
Is that true? South Seattle is full of poorer Asians who also do worse at school than Asians in north Seattle who are richer. If you go to Asia the inckme correlation is even stronger than in the USA. Poor country kids in China perform just about as well as you would expect compared to rich city kids.
I worked in a library, though not as a librarian, for a long time. And I had worked in one as a high school student.
I no longer support libraries as they stand. Most of their current issues are self-inflicted. I will now lay out why. The Internet came along, and Google of course. (You remember when Google seemed to have the correct answer to everything, in the past) And then the scanning of books, and the librarians panicked. They had an identity crisis: What good is a library in the age of Google?
This contagious panic spread and the usual questions came about. "What will we be, then?" And they immediately started trying to be everything to everyone. In a university setting, that means that various small groups will immediately come looking. Maybe the library can help us! And so the library begins to do things outside of its original scope, further and further. We begin housing various student groups, despite not having enough space for books. Checking the logs of the prayer room and the breastfeeding room was a little bitter, but we still need that ... but we have too many books. Named faculty carrels, we keep those, but we have too many books. Bathrooms we have, but that one woman just likes to empty her bladder in the elevator. Librarians, in their helpfulness but lack of identity, have become janitors and people who help you fill out your tax forms and security guards who have to keep an eye out for that guy who likes to jerk off on Level A, in the back.
I received a survey from my library a couple of years ago. Multiple choice: "Are our libraries A) doing enough to help LGBTQ people? B) not doing enough?" Note the lack of the third option, maybe you're focusing on them too much because WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? My local "civilian" library doesn't seem to have anything to lend that isn't recent any longer. It's Redbox for books. The shelves are fewer, the shelves are shorter, the shelves have been shoved back for "community spaces." The local loan system is garbage, the statewide system is getting thinner and thinner, and inter-library loan beyond that, well, it used to be great, but they're shoveling out books (and I'm not talking about that thirty-ninth copy of Twilight which was once in hot demand but isn't any longer) that were once in most branches I visited.
Many academic libraries are playing a game of Hearts. There's only two ways to win Hearts. The first involves getting rid of your Hearts before the other players do, paring down books. The other involves trying to collect all the hearts, which makes you the hub of an interlibrary loan system that externalizes the cost of having and housing books, which is not insignificant. Before she retired, a librarian passed on to me a shocking paper describing the cost per year of the average book just to exist on a shelf. Most people don't think about that.
No, I don't think a middle ground is what is called for. Get back to books, by which I mean, the acquisition and organization of information such that the depth of it can be accessed by those in need of it, perhaps more so than they really understand, not just the first thing that Google (or ChatGPT) vomits out.
> I received a survey from my library a couple of years ago. Multiple choice: "Are our libraries A) doing enough to help LGBTQ people? B) not doing enough?"
Same at my local library, singular focus on LGBT kids content and activism with all budgets entirely allocated to it. Would make sense to rebrand as state-run LGBTQ bookstores, more glam for the librarians than homeless shelters perhaps?
Our King County library spends about $250 per household, and the average family borrows three books. Honestly, given their cost per book, they should just buy books people want and close down.
While I agree with you, I think those librarians with an identity crisis were right: they need to justify their existence in an age where they aren't needed. I do believe that if a library tries to just be a library it will not last for much longer.
Which is OK. We honestly don't need libraries for what they are anymore. The reason is in the medium. When we want a book (or a CD or DVD or VHS tape or whatever) we don't want the physical object, we want the information inside. We no longer physically need the object to get at the information, we no longer need a central repository to store these objects for our convenience. Libraries have no reason to exist anymore.
The true libraries of today are maligned, banned, hated, called criminals. They are libgen, scipub and torrent trackers. They're done often for no profit, just for the sake of an ideological motivation to make information available. The medium has changed but people's desire for the information is still there. There are people out there keeping up the fight, but the ones trying to maintain a quite room full of shelves just refuse to see where the fight is going and are being left behind.
They really are needed, which is the ironic part. Subject librarians are the people you want because they know what book you need before you need it, they know what sources of information are outdated, they know how to organize and get at that information, in depth. People who "just Google" something lack that depth of understanding, they end up picking the wrong books to look in, and so on.
You are right that the people want the information inside, but you're missing the part where the subject librarian puts people in touch with the container that the user really wants (every user their book), even if they aren't stating it well to a search engine. And we both know how poorly people phrase things to search engines, or how a novice to the field simply does not know the correct terminology of the field (the jargon) to put in.
I think you're overstating the importance of that role. The importance of libraries is that they employ a consultant that can tell you the name of a book that has the information you're looking for? And this performs better than reading the blog or publication of a field specialist? Even Wikipedia does a better job at this than any librarian I've ever talked to at any library. The most I've seen one do in recent years is enter my question into a computer and tell me the products available like an autozone employee. Nobody just has the depth of knowledge you imagine in their head at all times at a library.
Not my somewhat extensive experience at all. The subject librarians I worked with had immense amounts of knowledge in their chosen fields. This, not that. That is outmoded. "What you're really looking for is ..." "That's derivative, you'll want ..." and so on. They were really the group who impressed me the most.
> the cost per year of the average book just to exist on a shelf
Of course, that cost will go up the fewer books there are. In my local library, it's a magnificent, 2 story tall building with only one story. The bookshelves are widely spaced, and not very tall. The shelves only are in one part of the floor space.
I honestly, genuinely, fail to understand the meaning of that. It can't possibly be true that homeless people didn't exist before the 1980s. What does this actually mean?
The more functioning homeless put enough scratch together to get a place at a flophouse.
I think it's also policing. There was a time that a bum who got caught in the wrong place got the crap kicked out of them by the cops. Obviously problematic for so many reasons but violence does have its way of modifying behavior.
Also drugs. Just way easier to get and more powerful than before. Back then it was mostly alcohol. While that takes a terrible toll on one's body most alcoholics are functional to a reasonable extent. Not so much for crack or heroin or meth addicts.
First, there were more big housing projects [1], and more welfare. Those created their own problems - third generation welfare moms, gangs, etc.
Second, more crazies were institutionalized. Santa Clara County used to have "The Great Asylum for the Insane.", opened in 1885. This was a huge complex of buildings in a rural setting. The place was later renamed to Agnews State Mental Hospital, later Agnews Developmental Center.[2] Beginning in 1972 this was gradually shut down. The last patient was kicked out in 1998. The remaining buildings are now owned by Oracle, and you can go look at some of them if you want.
Third, vagrancy used to be be illegal. Cops arrested people for it, and they were sorted out into "too lazy to work", "unable to work", or "crazy". This peaked during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration was created to give unemployed people jobs.[3] At peak, the Federal government employed 3 million people, mostly doing construction work. There was some really nice construction. Rincon Annex, the old post office in San Francisco, is one of the finer local examples.
As the demand for unskilled labor declined, finding some place to send the "too lazy to work" people became difficult.
Fourth, drugs. There are too many burned-out people who aren't coming back.
How would rounding up, arresting and forcing to work the "too lazy to work" fly these days? Seems like like it would be antithetical to the small government, person freedom types?
Relevant, though Canada had its run of Conservative prime ministers (which is to say, Conservative-majority governments) from 1984--1993: Mulroney and Campbell.
Not to be a totally wet blanket, but I often hear a lot of "it didn't used to be like this" or "the purpose of libraries" thrown out in discussions like this.
Carnegie's vast wealth single-handedly forced the idea of libraries that weren't just for rich university students, privileged religious orders or the mind-bendingly affluent. He loved books and wanted to share them, which is very noble. But he also had no room for slackers. To quote wikipedia, quoting, Carnegie:
> Carnegie believed in giving to the "industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others."
This vision of the public library as public welfare's physical manifestation is a modern invention that is not anchored in history. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be. My partner was a librarian for a long time and loved helping those in need. But let's make sure we're accurately remembering the past, not designing a convenient past to justify the budgets to do the work we see we need done in the present.
Not sure libraries wanted that role foisted on them. Sounds like they became the default because they were open access, and society gave up on things like mental institutions (yes, there were abuses, but imo we went too far and threw the baby out with the bath water) and aren't dealing with the issues effectively. Libraries are dealing with them because they are all there is.
> This vision of the public library as public welfare's physical manifestation is a modern invention that is not anchored in history.
It didn't need to be. It wasn't like they were turning away the homeless with library door security guards back then. It simply wasn't a problem. From the article: "In every public place, the evidence of a social welfare system that has been chipped away at for decades is on display." The library has become a last resort, by default.
The solution is "doing things that are much more difficult: building more social housing, hiring more social workers, investing in mental health workers, schools, community centres, and everything else needed to address problems before they reach the library’s doors"
> Carnegie's vast wealth single-handedly forced the idea of libraries that weren't just for rich university students, privileged religious orders or the mind-bendingly affluent.
The UK Public Libraries Act is from 1850. Boston Public Library was 1854. The first Carnegie library was opened in 1883, a whole generation later.
I go to the National Library of my backwards little country; some 2 - 3 times per week, when I know I won't have a lot of meetings and I want to focus on work. I go there, in the silence, find a nice place to sit down, plug my laptop, connect to the wifi and start up the IDE. I don't need to buy anything, I don't need to talk to anyone, it's chill in the summer and just a bit too chilly in the winter. It costs me $5 / year (parking space included...) and if I'm lucky I get a seat with an amazing view. Going to and from there on foot is also a bit of exercise.
Before discovering this hidden marvel, which is actually a huge building, I never liked the loudness of working in a cafe until one day when it hit me, why not try the library. Haven't looked back since.
> Why do we glorify the vagrants and mentally ill that do this?
How has this been glorified?
Separately, Yes— people that exhibit this behavior should be dealt with using laws against that behavior, but as a society we can’t just foot the bill for all of that and say “problem solved”. We need to understand the extremely complex interwoven factors that gave rise to that behavior to address the root cause instead of just playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms.
> These people should be thrown in jail, not allowed to roam the streets harassing everyone.
Do you know how much jails cost? More than homeless shelters, indeed more than homes, more than libraries, more than schools. Locking people up is the worst, least efficient solution to our problems.
Actually, for stopping librarians being sexually assaulted jail works really well. It is the most efficient solution out of the ones you've proffered as less expensive, because those do not solve the problem at hand.
> Actually, for stopping librarians being sexually assaulted jail works really well.
Does it? Are you proposing a lifetime sentence for all homeless people, with no possibility of parole? Otherwise, people get out of jail eventually, and then what? Moreover, rising housing prices produce more and more homeless, so there's a supply issue.
The least expensive solution would likely be to just give homes to the homeless. And guess what, it's actually significantly easier to get a job if you have a home, because a home gives you a home address (try putting "none" on a job application), a shower, a closet to put work clothes, a decent night's sleep, etc.
As a society, however, we've decided that we're not interested in the least expensive solution, because we don't want to eliminate homelessness, we want to punish homelessness. Giving homes to the homeless would not allow us to be judgmental against the homeless, and that seems to be a very high priority for a lot of people.
> So you think those of us normal people using those facilities should tolerate violent behavior to save money?
No. From the article: "building more social housing, hiring more social workers, investing in mental health workers, schools, community centres, and everything else needed to address problems before they reach the library’s doors."
> Why do we even have jails then?
Good question. They don't seem to be working very well.
I'm responding to your examples of cheaper than jail options, specifically homeless shelters, libraries, schools. Those spaces, including homeless shelters, are for us regular, normal, nonviolent people to use when we need to. I'm not responding to the article, I'm responding to you.
I'm not worried about your average homeless guy. A shelter, some housing, something like that will do fine. We need to do something about those problems and help those people.
What would you do with a naked guy who hasn't showered in 3 weeks walking around the library with a piece of glass in his hand threatening to potentially cut someone? I don't like jail either, but I'm at a loss as to what you do with them. What do you have in mind?
> I'm not worried about your average homeless guy. A shelter, some housing, something like that will do fine. We need to do something about those problems and help those people.
You should be worried, though, because there aren't even enough homeless shelters. People are going to the library because they have nowhere else to go. From the article: "Some branches are open later than other social services, and most shelters in Toronto had been full anyway, so library workers were often asked to do the impossible—find shelter for someone in a system that often had no room. “When people come to us at the eleventh hour, when we’re closing, and they say, ‘Can you help me find a bed for tonight?’ we call Central Intake, and they’re at 100 percent capacity."
1) when I said "I'm not worried about your average homeless guy" I didn't mean that I don't care what happens to him, I meant that I don't think he's the one people are worried about jerking it in the kids section at the library, I was pretty sure that was evident in my sentences I wrote (you even quoted the part where I said we need to help those people), and 2) you didn't answer my question.
I'm confused by your proposals and by your questions.
People who commit violent or lewd acts are arrested and jailed. But that obviously doesn't prevent the actions.
Homelessness itself isn't currently illegal. But if it were made illegal, and all of the homeless were rounded up and permanently jailed, that would actually prevent any homeless people from harassing other people in libraries (assuming that the police could find all of the homeless, which we can't assume in reality, but let's assume it for the sake of argument). However, this mass jailing of the homeless would be obscenely cruel and also obscenely expensive.
Jailing a person prevents that one person from committing crimes outside of jail (but not crimes inside of jail) for as long as that person is jailed. Otherwise, though, there's very little empirical evidence to show that jailing people in general reduces crime in general, as proved by the statistics I gave earlier.
> I'm confused by your proposals and by your questions.
Not questions plural, question singular.
> What would you do with a naked guy who hasn't showered in 3 weeks walking around the library with a piece of glass in his hand threatening to potentially cut someone? I don't like jail either, but I'm at a loss as to what you do with them. What do you have in mind?
I think we have already agreed on helping homeless people that aren't taking a shit in the foyer.
> What would you do with a naked guy who hasn't showered in 3 weeks walking around the library with a piece of glass in his hand threatening to potentially cut someone?
What would I do in one hypothetical case that you invented, with no other details about the situation and person? I don't know. Is that really the question you're interested in here?
What I think is that as soon as a situation becomes really bad, it's likely already too late. There's no magical solution, certainly not jail. The jail proponents often say "We shouldn't tolerate this behavior", but we don't tolerate murder, for example — we arrest and jail murderers — yet murder continues to be a problem, for which jail has demonstrably not been a solution. You might ask, "What then should we do with a murderer?", and we could talk about that at length, but I don't think the answer to that question would actually be a solution to prevent murder. We have to look at the conditions that result in increased murder rates, and do what we can to prevent those conditions from arising in the first place. And the question here, relevant to the linked article, is why do homeless people end up at libraries? It's because they have nowhere else to go. What we do with the homeless once they end up at libraries is already missing the point, in my opinion. Jail is not a solution, it's at best a bandage for a gaping wound.
Edit: it looks like you've mostly been posting flamewar-style comments. Can you please stop this? We have to ban accounts that keep doing this and I don't want to ban you!
My local small-town library has become a pseudo homeless shelter. It’s exactly as this article describes. Often I’ll go in and there will be a local homeless person muttering in the corner.
That has certainly dissuaded me from going regularly.
Same here - well, small city library (Boulder, CO).
Late last year we even had to shut down our library for multiple weeks, because methamphetamine was detected during testing, because people were smoking it in the library.
It's also the main reason I have no interest in working in public libraries at the moment. I studied to help manage information, not babysit or be a social worker.
I couldn't even tell you the quality of my local library because they are only open from 10am-5pm and aren't open on Sundays. Those hours are fine for students, but how is anyone with a job supposed to be able to visit?
Same here. I end up only going to the library to pick up books I requested to borrow online and to return books. It's rare if I actually stay in the library to read.
I am not sure the reason for these articles talking evolving the library and providing homeless services and supports.
There are already resource centers with services and supports that homeless need, which may duplicate what libraries already offer, eg. computers. They are staffed with people from their community as well.
The libraries are taken advantage of because they don’t enforce the same standards that homeless service centers do, often because of unfamiliarity. Sadly, they eventually learn what to do.
I visit the library quite often. My kids love going. If I'm waiting for something, like my car being serviced so I can't get home, then the library is the best place for doing some quiet work.
Last time I went to the library I had to go through a metal detector. Then they had only one floor of books out of 5. Going to try another branch but I wasn't particularly happy
I often see the police at my local library here in SF. They now have a large security guard there full time. More often than not the library is reasonably calm, but I would say once a week we have someone screaming and freaking out. Overall though, I love the library and go a few days a week when I need to get out of my apartment to get some work done.
If libraries did not exist already, I couldn't even imagine them being funded now a days. A free place!? Where people can read books for free!?!?!?
We really do not have a solution to mental health issues and homelessness in the US. We determined asylums were cruel and inhumane, but our alternative is nothing.
It's a tough battle. If you only consider the wealthiest countries, homelessness strongly correlates with nominal GDP. But, reducing GDP would probably create more homelessness.
The whole deinstitutionalization thing was supposed to come with community mental health centers funded by the government. But when Reagan took office after Carter this was one of the first things on the chopping block. This left us in the situation we have today of lots of really ill people ending up in jail or on the streets. But I’m sure someone saved some taxes somewhere.
209 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 358 ms ] threadAnd people who have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon trying to censor and control libraries have siezed on this, blaming libraries for endangering children. Really shameful behavior. Rather than solve social problems, let's demonize the few places where all people, if they behave themselves, are welcome.
Luckily the library cordons off the children’s section on a separate floor where adults aren’t generally permitted.
When shared social resources are turned into political operatives, it's not the fault of the opposition when they are attacked. If you want something to be treated as neutral, it needs to act with neutrality.
What constitutes "neutrality" is constantly changing. In order to remain politically neutral, in recent years, one would need to increasingly censor themselves.
For example, in 2019, wearing N95s during wildfire season to avoid inhaling smoke wasn't politically charged. Some people would wear them when outside and others didn't--nobody cared. This month, with wildfire smoke in the air, it has now become political (and decidedly not neutral) to say what was said in 2019--that N95s can help protect you from wildfire smoke.
No, I propose it is those that enable this problem and degrade our public spaces who should be ashamed.
But I still go to the library almost every weekend.
It's really depressing that the skills I have that are worth the most are those I learned as a child, but it is what it is.
> A library is one of the last truly public spaces, where you can go to get out of the elements or meet with people without the expectation of buying something.
[0] https://www.afscme.org/blog/camden-county-library-workers-ra...
Public parks of course need some staff, but maybe they would be better if they didn't have them: the two gardeners for my local public park have been nicknamed 'Rack' and 'Ruin' due to their extreme approach to dead-heading..!
[0] https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2022/reimagining-the-t...
What places used to exist that no longer do where you can exist without the expectation of buying something?
Thinking about it, libraries are unusual in that they have no cost at all to enter. Top of my head only religious buildings seem to be similar in that regards.
There's quite a lot of options as far as no expectations to buy anything, but you need to pay some kind of fee - sport's centres, clubs that sort of thing. (One might argue they often contain a shop/cafe, but I'd argue you don't go there to use those, and they are very optional)
My library looks nothing like this. You're painting all libraries with a broad brush, generalizing from a very small number of libraries in the downtown core of a handful of cities.
But yeah. Our view of homelessness as a personal failure of the homeless person, rather than a societal failure to care for its people, is not working. More punishment and less services only exacerbates the problem.
I am not making this up.
> The bulk of money raised from the new levy, $707 million, would go toward the construction of new subsidized rental homes and improvements to aging affordable apartments. Those programs are focused on housing for people making 60% of area median income or less, about $74,000 a year for a family of three. Nearly two-thirds of the funding would fund housing for those making even less, 30% of area median income or $37,000 for a family of three.
The current levy (passed in 2016) is 25 cents per $1000. A tax of a few hundred dollars per year on a million dollar home isn't making an impact on housing affordability. Expanding the availability of affordable housing might. I'm skeptical that $707M is enough to make a dent.
If you'd rather criminalize homelessness, build prisons and courts, employ more cops and prosecutors and prison guards, and defense lawyers for the inevitable lawsuits that arise from inhumane treatment, you might want to work up a budget for all that. And tell me where the money is going to come from, in a state with no income tax.
The levy is an order of magnitude too small to fix problem. King County has 40,000 homeless. Also, I don't think the levy is for chronic homeless since it doesn't have programs to help them. The problem may be too big for local government and needs federal government to help out.
If interest rates go down, house prices go up. If property taxes go down, house prices go up. If property taxes go up, house prices go down.
In the long term, it's a net wash. That and the people on the boundary of homelessness are renters, not homeowners. Rents are set by what the market will bear, not by what it costs the landlord to own the property.
If landlords cannot make a reasonable rate of return, they will not enter the market, and existing ones will exit. This will reduce the supply, and then the rents will rise.
... Or do you think they will let them out for whatever they can get?
Houses aren't a soccer ball, you can't pack them up and leave if you don't like the playing field.
It's weird how whenever houses are the topic of discussion, people seem to think that economics should only work in one direction.
Additionally, no new housing will be built.
Ah, so because expenses temporarily exceed revenue on your million-dollar investment, you'll just let it rot down to zero?
What happened in Detroit was a collapse in demand of housing, caused by a collapse in employment. That collapse and reduction in the tax base lead to a death spiral, as a city's infrastructure costs are fixed - which pushed further marginal demand out.
You know what didn't happen in Detroit? A housing collapse because of a 20-cent-per-thousand-dollar property tax levy.
No town can survive a collapse in employment. The coastal cities with 11 job openings for 10 people who are fighting over 9 apartments aren't suffering from that problem, and it's ridiculous to point at Detroit as a comparison.
And if you think a 3% tax increase for landlords is 'massive', how would you describe the 20-40% increase in rents? If the poor landlords shouldn't be subjected to such a horrific thing, shouldn't the tenants be protected from ballooning rents?
If only the city could step in and ensure that new housing would be built. Oh wait, that's the purpose of the housing levy.
Or they are the cities with the worst housing affordability problems.
Or they are just the cities that have these public services. Not a lot of people complaining about homeless people riding the subway in rural Texas, because rural Texas doesn't have a subway.
----
Seattle, by the way, got a 'prosecute everything and restart the war on drugs' city attourney and a 'sweep the homeless away' mayor.
Strangely enough, neither policy has done shit to resolve any of the problems. Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone...
It took the state legislature to fix the city's problem (by banning SFH zoning, and hitting NIMBYs over the head with a stick), and maaaaybe we'll see the fruits of that policy ripen in a decade or two.
> Oh, now the camp isn't in the park, it's on the street bordering the park, what an improvement for everyone
Yes, everyone is better off when parks are drug vagrant free and possible to be enjoyed by everyone — even if that policy doesn’t solve every problem.
Toxic empathy is saying you should destroy society and afflict everyone with suffering because you haven’t yet created Utopia — and I think the responses to me show why excluding other voices under the guise of “mUh SyStEmS tHiNkInG” failed in cities like Seattle.
You need both law and order and compassion for society to flourish. The only part we agree on is that cleaning up the mess is a decade scale challenge — especially now that toxic empathy has taken Seattle down the wrong path for the past decade.
If you're going to make fun of people like this, you shouldn't expect thoughtful responses.
When I lived there, I didn't know many other software folks who used the public library system at all. Not because of smelly homeless people. It was just more convenient for them to buy anything they wanted to read/watch/listen to.
And there were lots of convenient branch libraries for kids - better than trekking to the terrarium downtown anyway.
i think GP is talking about big cities. My library ( heart of chicago) is def fits the description.
streetview : https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x880e2d00ee6fbd09:0x...
This is outside my libary from st view: https://imgur.com/a/CE51r2v
There is usually a huge congregation of homeless there by afternoon. And its even worse inside the library. You get hit with stench as soon as you open the library door. Sucks because libarians have exceptional knowledge that any book lover would enjoy talking to.
> You're describing a local problem.
Unless you are suggesting middle class can only exist in the burbs and small towns.
I 've lived in pilsen chicago for over 25 yrs, this is my home. Hate to relocate in next few yrs because now i have newborn.
Now, ten or twenty years ago, the main branch downtown was in what certain conservative commentators might have called a "no-go zone"—but really the neighborhood around the library was fine. It seemed to me that the drug gangs in the area back then had some kind of unspoken agreement that the library was neutral (dare I say sacred?) ground.
you know there are actual no go zones like austin area in chicago. Why are you hiding behind 'conservative commentators' as a cover for your statement.
I do not live in Chicago and have said nothing here about it.
maybe your definition is different.
From last few weeks,
> Man, 38, shot in the face in Austin. > The 38-year-old was walking on the sidewalk when someone started shooting around 10:20 p.m. in the 4900 block of West Hubbard Street, according to police.
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/man-38-shot-in-the-face-in...
> 7 Shot, 1 Fatally, in Austin as Group Gathered to Honor Life of Man Killed in Car Accident
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/7-shot-1-fatally-in-au...
> Boy, 15, injured after shooting in Austin overnight
https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/boy-15-injured-after-sho...
> Austin Neighbors Are Helping Each Other Get Mental Health Care After Shootings Near Preschool
> Some kids said they were too scared to play outside after hearing gunfire, a preschool leader said. A 20-year-old woman was killed and two men were wounded in two shootings days apart.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/04/27/austin-neighbors-are...
> Devout 'God-fearing' woman killed by stray bullet in front of Austin home, blocks away from church
https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shooting-crime-woman-killed-...
Once again: one of the wealthiest suburbs in Chicago is directly adjacent to Austin. I live in that suburb, across a street (that street would be Austin) from the neighborhood. People in Oak Park commute, on bicycles, through Austin. Notably, in the ~20 years I've lived here, I haven't heard a single story about any of those people being shot. Austin residents patronize our businesses. Much of Austin is middle class.
Austin is a troubled neighborhood (it is literally ground zero for US housing segregation), but it is absolutely not a "no-go zone". Words mean things. Ironically, people who "go" to Austin are probably much safer (essentially they _are_ safe there) than young male Black residents, who are the exclusive targets of the gang violence that occurs there.
You get the same weird arguments about the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Hyde Park on the south side, and the same rebuttals apply.
> I don't know if you live in Chicagoland or not
I've lived in pilsen for last 25 years and grew up here. I don't live in the burbs. I know what 'no go zones' mean, the block i grew up on in west pilsen used to be one ( but not anymore) . I now live on the edge of 'no go zone' in pilsen ( east of western ) . My wife works for charter school in englewood where i do weekly drop off and pickup. Englewood is a 'no go' zone for us, meaning we won't go there if we have no business being there, we never make a stop in that neighborhood ( like the cyclists you mention) .
you choose live white majority suburb with double the median income but not in austin. That revealed preference proves that Austin was a 'no go' zone for you? Going to coffeshop once in a while doesn't really count, imo.
> is absolutely not a "no-go zone". Words mean things.
You said austin is not a no go zone, can you give me an example of an area considered no go zone. Perhaps that will clarify.
> Notably, in the ~20 years I've lived here, I haven't heard a single story about any of those people being shot.
I just gave you two examples from last 2 months of ppl getting shot by stray bullets. What does you personally hearing about cyclists have to do with anything? This type of statement is really hard to respond to.
But even if we hadn't, and we'd simply chosen Oak Park over Austin, that wouldn't be a "revealing" preference. Austin is troubled and disinvested, again by dint of being the literal ground zero for post-redlining US housing segregation. At the beginning of the 1970s Austin was majority white; by the end it was over 90% Black, because of panic selling and white flight. There aren't that many restaurants, few grocery stores, &c, all as a result (if you're a middle class family in Austin, chances are you shop in Oak Park).
I think Austin is pretty neat; wide tree-lined blocks with some great, big houses. But I'm not arguing that it's unproblematic. It certainly is.
As for the definition of "no-go zone", Wikipedia's will suffice. Austin compares with literally none of the many examples given. You can go to Austin; you will be just fine.
Incidentally: people in Chicago have generally the same feelings about Auburn and Grand Crossing as they do about Englewood, but people still go to Lem's. It's true: I have no reason to go to Englewood. I also know less about it than I know about Austin. But Austin is simply not a no-go zone.
Cabrini Green, by the way? Never a no-go zone. I went to high school across the street from the old ABLA high-rises. Housing projects do not equate to "no-go zones".
Woman, 40, hit by stray bullet while driving in Austin ( https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/2/7/18389033/woman-40-hit-... )
13-year-old boy hit by stray bullet in South Austin, hospitalized (https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/13-year-old-boy-critically...)
pretty sure this stuff never happened in oak park where you live for safety of your family.
'Its not no a go zone , its a problematic area' is not a very useful distinction for me.
If you'd just said "places like Austin have high crime" or something, we wouldn't be on this thread. But you said it was a "no-go zone", doubled down, then walked the definition back to "places I'd be comfortable hanging out with my kid in the park".
We can be done with the thread now; I'm happy with what it says about our respective arguments. My suggestion is maybe strike the term "no-go zone" from your vocabulary. It's mostly politically charged bullshit. But in any of its reasonable definitions, it doesn't apply to Austin, and didn't apply to Cabrini.
But you’ve posited in this comment that one criteria is the count of people getting shot in the last month. By that argument River North[0] is a no go zone. Which, perhaps it is for you, but thats not an interesting social commentary because it means that effectively all urban US neighborhoods are. Just say you won’t go to US urban environments. We get it.
At the end of the day, in Chicago, the tragic gun violence problem is real. But counter-intuitively its not real for people that _visit_ neighborhoods. Its real for the young men that live there. And by invoking “no-go” rhetoric you hide the real problem. That years of public policy have made certain neighborhoods extremely dangerous for those that live there, but ironically, not for those that visit.
[0] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shooting-river-north-crime-c...
I grew up in pilsen which was gang controlled 'no go zone' until it got gentrified over last 1-2 decades on the east side. We knew which gangs controlled which areas, we are only a few blocks away from El Chapo's 'The Pilsen twins' family home ( never saw them though) . People who live here and raise families here know where 'no go zones' are and stay away from. If you visit any local here for a few you will get a lecture about which areas are 'no go' gang controlled zones ( south of cermak and west of western).
Ofcouse, you can 'go' to gentrified restaurants and coffee shops on 18th st/Thalia hall and get 'the experience' for outsiders and suburbanites. Doesn't mean there aren't no go zones in pilsen.
It frustrating to me that people who chose live in white segregated suburbs ( 'for aesthetic reasons', code for not too many non whites ) and send their kids to segregated schools are lecturing us what words to use and what to call ourselves. I personally detest these white ppl more than Tucker Carlson types. Yes they are 'no go zones' and govt/community should fix it, calling them 'problematic areas' instead isn't a fix.
I didn't invoke any 'rhetoric'. you link shows which areas are no go zones. https://abc7chicago.com/feature/tracking-crime-and-safety-in...
> By that argument River North[0] is a no go zone.
you posted one solitary example. Argument isn't 'one shooting' makes no-go zone. Try to finding other examples and you'll see.
This claim presupposes an objective definition of “no go zone” supporting the existence of actual examples.
Please provide the objective definition (ideally, with sourcing) and the evidence supporting the claim that “austin area in chicago” meets it.
I laughed on the inside a bit when I considered the fact that a public library existed just a few blocks down from the library of a large public university. But this was my youthful ignorance. Anyone could walk in the university library and open a book (well, you could at that time, not so sure about anymore) but you had to have a school ID card to check out a book or access the computer system.
Before cell phones, I visited libraries traveling around the coast. The computers were 100% taken. There was a line to get one, and the librarian directed us to a scheduling system. These were people who needed to use a computer and the internet to apply to a job. Access was scarce, low-quality, and competency to use those tools were lacking.
Nowadays, cell phones have mostly taken away that niche of the past. I'm not sure if or why the people there still need the libraries.
I was astounded to find that the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all (not just the homeless or teenagers.) The bathrooms are usually spotless.
I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.
Somehow I doubt that all of the branch libraries of those systems are "homeless shelters." More likely the it's just the larger libraries near the actual shelters. Where "the average taxpayer" wouldn't spend time anyway.
Small college towns have a couple of real advantages over big cities in this regard. First, they're small, which helps a lot. Second, they tend to have more funding available per-capita than large cities do.
Also in the burbs, it's not a trivial task for homeless to even get to a place like the library, where in NYC it's pretty easy to get around.
I still use the library in NYC, but I agree that some locations aren't exactly great places to spend the day studying, but it very much depends on the branch. "unusable" feels like a stretch. I can still pickup books and get help from librarians if I need it.
I have a theory about this. Which is that the upper/upper-mid class in particular cares more about the image of a pristine library than they do the actual effectiveness/reach of that library. This theory shows itself quite a lot through how people talk about libraries: not in how many students find what they're looking for, how happy librarians are, how many grades or careers have been improved. It's bathrooms and walls.
Previously, there had been private libraries for the elite. Carnegie libraries, making public libraries widespread across the country, were known by uppity folks for attracting "undesirables." People of all races, genders, and social statuses were welcome there. Those were the original patrons. That was Carnegie's goal.
https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie...
> Schools have opted out of their obligations to provide the best educations to the public instead tailoring the education to the least capable
Our current school system was designed to create compliant factory workers. They're still making an uncreative, docile workforce, but where are the jobs?
https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...
They've totally abandoned the the middle class and the lower class. That's why we're having these problems. Pitting middle class against lower class allows the upper class to get away with sucking every last penny out of society and abandoning the greater good.
The fact that Washington wasn’t further widening that gap between labor capital taxes by taxing regular income before adopting its capital gains tax is tangential.
“federal income tax” is only about 2/3 of federal taxes on income, and the other 1/3 is the much more bottom-weighted payroll tax.
And in any case, yes, high end earners of normal income (which can include some of the top 1%, ~$700k non-capital income isn’t unheard of) get heavily taxed; capital income is favored, not high non-capital income.
Yes, and doing that as a dedicated levy on labor rather than general revenue is a policy choice. It doesn't somehow not count as a tax.
> The amount you get in old age is directly proportional to how much you paid in
No, its not. Especially not for Medicare.
Libraries (and police, and other services) are left to deal with this problem by default, because we as a society don't value finding solutions to the problem enough to bother to do that.
But, as a society in general, I think we're not actually trying hard yet. We're still largely debating whether or not we should be.
It might be interesting to actually try to help these people before writing them off entirely like that.
I don't think they can be helped, but certainly letting them mill about in public libraries accomplishes what exactly? Yes, I write them off because I am a realist, not a utopian, and I write them off because on balance they cause so many problems for normal people.
It is not worth destroying nice places, cities, libraries, streets for pie in the sky morality that presumes mental illness to this degree or drug abuse can be overcome, or that it is worth all of the mess, harassment, violence, filth, and degradation that we all see everywhere waiting around for this supposed solution that never comes. It's not working.
They don't necessarily want to be in charge of providing other needs for the homeless. But their question is: where else are those homeless supposed to go? The library is the most visible public-facing aspect of the government. If they can leverage that to bring services to people, that's a good start.
The solution is not to ban the homeless from the libraries. The solution is to bring the rest of homeless services and support to the place where the homeless are.
It isn't reasonable that we expect librarians to do this kind of work, and I would argue that there are elements of doing so that are outright illegal.
It's one reason why I won't work in public libraries as someone with an MLIS.
Given all of this, these librarians aren't being tricked by anyone. It's just one more moral, virtuous thing to do for the community, despite not having the training or support to handle anything but the easy cases.
No, it is not. The solution is to reduce homelessness, drug addicts and poverty. If needed create actual spaces for homeless people to go to, where there are actually people/resources which can help them.
Turning libraries into homeless shelters and librarians into social workers is an absurd policy idea.
The most unforgivably absurd policy idea is when the Seattle public schools got rid of calculus classes because of "equity".
They did get rid of various gifted/talented programs in middle school, with the goal of getting the majority of students to the same level of math, because the placement tests for the gifted/talented/honors math courses in middle schools correlated much closer to family income than actual math aptitude. (I took one of these tests in elementary school and failed, despite placing in math Olympiad the same year. They were mostly about folding pieces of paper.)
I don't know how one could get data on this, because how does one measure math aptitude without a test?
What other tests? If those tests are better, why not use them?
> and grades
Grades are quite unreliable, as they are too easily manipulated (like grade inflation). For example, my high school physics teacher proclaimed that everyone in his classes should get As. He did that a little too loudly, and the administration had to ask him not to do that. Instead, during tests, he'd offer to help anyone answer the questions if they had any difficulty. He was a nice fellow, I liked him, but the grades he handed out weren't worth spit.
That an aptitude test correlated with family income isn’t weird, kids with well to do parents generally get more instruction, resources, and pressure to do well on these tests. All of that is useful in developing actual aptitude, although it is still very unfair.
I no longer support libraries as they stand. Most of their current issues are self-inflicted. I will now lay out why. The Internet came along, and Google of course. (You remember when Google seemed to have the correct answer to everything, in the past) And then the scanning of books, and the librarians panicked. They had an identity crisis: What good is a library in the age of Google?
This contagious panic spread and the usual questions came about. "What will we be, then?" And they immediately started trying to be everything to everyone. In a university setting, that means that various small groups will immediately come looking. Maybe the library can help us! And so the library begins to do things outside of its original scope, further and further. We begin housing various student groups, despite not having enough space for books. Checking the logs of the prayer room and the breastfeeding room was a little bitter, but we still need that ... but we have too many books. Named faculty carrels, we keep those, but we have too many books. Bathrooms we have, but that one woman just likes to empty her bladder in the elevator. Librarians, in their helpfulness but lack of identity, have become janitors and people who help you fill out your tax forms and security guards who have to keep an eye out for that guy who likes to jerk off on Level A, in the back.
I received a survey from my library a couple of years ago. Multiple choice: "Are our libraries A) doing enough to help LGBTQ people? B) not doing enough?" Note the lack of the third option, maybe you're focusing on them too much because WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? My local "civilian" library doesn't seem to have anything to lend that isn't recent any longer. It's Redbox for books. The shelves are fewer, the shelves are shorter, the shelves have been shoved back for "community spaces." The local loan system is garbage, the statewide system is getting thinner and thinner, and inter-library loan beyond that, well, it used to be great, but they're shoveling out books (and I'm not talking about that thirty-ninth copy of Twilight which was once in hot demand but isn't any longer) that were once in most branches I visited.
Many academic libraries are playing a game of Hearts. There's only two ways to win Hearts. The first involves getting rid of your Hearts before the other players do, paring down books. The other involves trying to collect all the hearts, which makes you the hub of an interlibrary loan system that externalizes the cost of having and housing books, which is not insignificant. Before she retired, a librarian passed on to me a shocking paper describing the cost per year of the average book just to exist on a shelf. Most people don't think about that.
No, I don't think a middle ground is what is called for. Get back to books, by which I mean, the acquisition and organization of information such that the depth of it can be accessed by those in need of it, perhaps more so than they really understand, not just the first thing that Google (or ChatGPT) vomits out.
Same at my local library, singular focus on LGBT kids content and activism with all budgets entirely allocated to it. Would make sense to rebrand as state-run LGBTQ bookstores, more glam for the librarians than homeless shelters perhaps?
Which is OK. We honestly don't need libraries for what they are anymore. The reason is in the medium. When we want a book (or a CD or DVD or VHS tape or whatever) we don't want the physical object, we want the information inside. We no longer physically need the object to get at the information, we no longer need a central repository to store these objects for our convenience. Libraries have no reason to exist anymore.
The true libraries of today are maligned, banned, hated, called criminals. They are libgen, scipub and torrent trackers. They're done often for no profit, just for the sake of an ideological motivation to make information available. The medium has changed but people's desire for the information is still there. There are people out there keeping up the fight, but the ones trying to maintain a quite room full of shelves just refuse to see where the fight is going and are being left behind.
You are right that the people want the information inside, but you're missing the part where the subject librarian puts people in touch with the container that the user really wants (every user their book), even if they aren't stating it well to a search engine. And we both know how poorly people phrase things to search engines, or how a novice to the field simply does not know the correct terminology of the field (the jargon) to put in.
Of course, that cost will go up the fewer books there are. In my local library, it's a magnificent, 2 story tall building with only one story. The bookshelves are widely spaced, and not very tall. The shelves only are in one part of the floor space.
This is worth remembering.
The more functioning homeless put enough scratch together to get a place at a flophouse.
I think it's also policing. There was a time that a bum who got caught in the wrong place got the crap kicked out of them by the cops. Obviously problematic for so many reasons but violence does have its way of modifying behavior.
Also drugs. Just way easier to get and more powerful than before. Back then it was mostly alcohol. While that takes a terrible toll on one's body most alcoholics are functional to a reasonable extent. Not so much for crack or heroin or meth addicts.
Second, more crazies were institutionalized. Santa Clara County used to have "The Great Asylum for the Insane.", opened in 1885. This was a huge complex of buildings in a rural setting. The place was later renamed to Agnews State Mental Hospital, later Agnews Developmental Center.[2] Beginning in 1972 this was gradually shut down. The last patient was kicked out in 1998. The remaining buildings are now owned by Oracle, and you can go look at some of them if you want.
Third, vagrancy used to be be illegal. Cops arrested people for it, and they were sorted out into "too lazy to work", "unable to work", or "crazy". This peaked during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration was created to give unemployed people jobs.[3] At peak, the Federal government employed 3 million people, mostly doing construction work. There was some really nice construction. Rincon Annex, the old post office in San Francisco, is one of the finer local examples.
As the demand for unskilled labor declined, finding some place to send the "too lazy to work" people became difficult.
Fourth, drugs. There are too many burned-out people who aren't coming back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnews_Developmental_Center
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
The modern world is terrifying and confusing, but every so often some small nugget of information comes along that makes profound sense.
https://www.thoughtco.com/hoovervilles-homeless-camps-of-the...
Kids growing up on the streets used to be extremely common.
Purely a coincidence that was the same era Reagan was president.
Carnegie's vast wealth single-handedly forced the idea of libraries that weren't just for rich university students, privileged religious orders or the mind-bendingly affluent. He loved books and wanted to share them, which is very noble. But he also had no room for slackers. To quote wikipedia, quoting, Carnegie:
> Carnegie believed in giving to the "industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others."
This vision of the public library as public welfare's physical manifestation is a modern invention that is not anchored in history. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be. My partner was a librarian for a long time and loved helping those in need. But let's make sure we're accurately remembering the past, not designing a convenient past to justify the budgets to do the work we see we need done in the present.
It didn't need to be. It wasn't like they were turning away the homeless with library door security guards back then. It simply wasn't a problem. From the article: "In every public place, the evidence of a social welfare system that has been chipped away at for decades is on display." The library has become a last resort, by default.
The solution is "doing things that are much more difficult: building more social housing, hiring more social workers, investing in mental health workers, schools, community centres, and everything else needed to address problems before they reach the library’s doors"
The poop on the street started maybe 15 years ago, along with the tent cities and the "ranching" of RVs.
The UK Public Libraries Act is from 1850. Boston Public Library was 1854. The first Carnegie library was opened in 1883, a whole generation later.
Before discovering this hidden marvel, which is actually a huge building, I never liked the loudness of working in a cafe until one day when it hit me, why not try the library. Haven't looked back since.
Nobody is glorifying anyone.
How has this been glorified?
Separately, Yes— people that exhibit this behavior should be dealt with using laws against that behavior, but as a society we can’t just foot the bill for all of that and say “problem solved”. We need to understand the extremely complex interwoven factors that gave rise to that behavior to address the root cause instead of just playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms.
Do you know how much jails cost? More than homeless shelters, indeed more than homes, more than libraries, more than schools. Locking people up is the worst, least efficient solution to our problems.
Does it? Are you proposing a lifetime sentence for all homeless people, with no possibility of parole? Otherwise, people get out of jail eventually, and then what? Moreover, rising housing prices produce more and more homeless, so there's a supply issue.
The least expensive solution would likely be to just give homes to the homeless. And guess what, it's actually significantly easier to get a job if you have a home, because a home gives you a home address (try putting "none" on a job application), a shower, a closet to put work clothes, a decent night's sleep, etc.
As a society, however, we've decided that we're not interested in the least expensive solution, because we don't want to eliminate homelessness, we want to punish homelessness. Giving homes to the homeless would not allow us to be judgmental against the homeless, and that seems to be a very high priority for a lot of people.
No. From the article: "building more social housing, hiring more social workers, investing in mental health workers, schools, community centres, and everything else needed to address problems before they reach the library’s doors."
> Why do we even have jails then?
Good question. They don't seem to be working very well.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...
Top 10 Countries with the most people in prison
1. United States — 2,068,800
2. China — 1,690,000
Top 10 Countries with the highest rate of incarceration per 100,000 population
1. United States — 629
2. Rwanda — 580
How many more people do we have to lock up to "solve" our social problems?
I'm not worried about your average homeless guy. A shelter, some housing, something like that will do fine. We need to do something about those problems and help those people.
What would you do with a naked guy who hasn't showered in 3 weeks walking around the library with a piece of glass in his hand threatening to potentially cut someone? I don't like jail either, but I'm at a loss as to what you do with them. What do you have in mind?
You should be worried, though, because there aren't even enough homeless shelters. People are going to the library because they have nowhere else to go. From the article: "Some branches are open later than other social services, and most shelters in Toronto had been full anyway, so library workers were often asked to do the impossible—find shelter for someone in a system that often had no room. “When people come to us at the eleventh hour, when we’re closing, and they say, ‘Can you help me find a bed for tonight?’ we call Central Intake, and they’re at 100 percent capacity."
People who commit violent or lewd acts are arrested and jailed. But that obviously doesn't prevent the actions.
Homelessness itself isn't currently illegal. But if it were made illegal, and all of the homeless were rounded up and permanently jailed, that would actually prevent any homeless people from harassing other people in libraries (assuming that the police could find all of the homeless, which we can't assume in reality, but let's assume it for the sake of argument). However, this mass jailing of the homeless would be obscenely cruel and also obscenely expensive.
Jailing a person prevents that one person from committing crimes outside of jail (but not crimes inside of jail) for as long as that person is jailed. Otherwise, though, there's very little empirical evidence to show that jailing people in general reduces crime in general, as proved by the statistics I gave earlier.
Not questions plural, question singular.
> What would you do with a naked guy who hasn't showered in 3 weeks walking around the library with a piece of glass in his hand threatening to potentially cut someone? I don't like jail either, but I'm at a loss as to what you do with them. What do you have in mind?
I think we have already agreed on helping homeless people that aren't taking a shit in the foyer.
What would I do in one hypothetical case that you invented, with no other details about the situation and person? I don't know. Is that really the question you're interested in here?
What I think is that as soon as a situation becomes really bad, it's likely already too late. There's no magical solution, certainly not jail. The jail proponents often say "We shouldn't tolerate this behavior", but we don't tolerate murder, for example — we arrest and jail murderers — yet murder continues to be a problem, for which jail has demonstrably not been a solution. You might ask, "What then should we do with a murderer?", and we could talk about that at length, but I don't think the answer to that question would actually be a solution to prevent murder. We have to look at the conditions that result in increased murder rates, and do what we can to prevent those conditions from arising in the first place. And the question here, relevant to the linked article, is why do homeless people end up at libraries? It's because they have nowhere else to go. What we do with the homeless once they end up at libraries is already missing the point, in my opinion. Jail is not a solution, it's at best a bandage for a gaping wound.
Edit: it looks like you've mostly been posting flamewar-style comments. Can you please stop this? We have to ban accounts that keep doing this and I don't want to ban you!
That has certainly dissuaded me from going regularly.
Late last year we even had to shut down our library for multiple weeks, because methamphetamine was detected during testing, because people were smoking it in the library.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/us/boulder-colorado-meth-...
There are already resource centers with services and supports that homeless need, which may duplicate what libraries already offer, eg. computers. They are staffed with people from their community as well.
If libraries did not exist already, I couldn't even imagine them being funded now a days. A free place!? Where people can read books for free!?!?!?
It's closed on the weekends, and during the week it's 9:30 to 5 PM, with the exception of 11:30 to 7 PM on Wednesdays.
My library literally doesn't have funding and the city nor its taxpayers care enough to help.