15 years ago I lived in East London, and when I came to borrow books (e.g. to the "Idea Store Whitechapel"), I felt some sort of proudness seeing homeless people hanging out there, listening to mp3, having a coffee in the cheap cafeteria or - yes! - reading: True inclusion seemed to work in so few places in the country - at least there it was tangible. I live in Marseille/France now and haven't noticed this here; but a homeless person is not necessarily obvious - next time I visit, I'll have a look!
Library staff in my city are instructed not to do anything themselves about homeless. If there's a problem then they just call the police, who are equipped to handle it. Same as the city bus drivers are not going to enforce paying fares or making sure no riders are causing problems. They just pull over and call the police.
Their is no polite "middle ground" where a librarian can just confidently ask a disruptive homeless person to vacate the library. 9 times out of 10 that confrontation will escalate into a full blown incident. That's why the rule is always just to call the police.
The problem is not homeless peoples' reaction to the world. The problem is societies place for them.
Homeless people have always existed and likely always will. The problem is in the last 45 years we've built a brittle, zero slack society. We've optimized around a particular vision of middleclass life while steadily eliminating the margins that once allowed vulnerable people, those prone to homelessness, and increasingly young adults who just need a place to start from, to exist on the periphery without being put in constant crisis. We removed the pathways that allowed unstable people to find enough footing to maintain a place to live.
We've embraced an economic model that requires continual growth and ever more housing. We've destroyed via economics and regulation many of the housing options that once existed for the very poor such as boarding houses, residential hotels, man camps. Demanding that everyone fit into a middle class model at all stages in life is cruel. It's even crueler when we act surprised or judgmental toward people whom society has systematically left with nowhere to go.
In AI speak 'we optimized away the edge cases and then blamed the people who (always had/always will) lived in them'.
Imagine regulating that everyone must eat a meal individually prepared in an industrial kitchen, with a mandated recipe from the community (any missing ingredients and the meal can't be cooked) and approved by inspectors post cooking, and capped the total meal kitchen capacity. Not everyone would be able to afford that. For peoples' largest expense (housing) that is what we have done and today 50% of young adult Americans are living at home with parents because that is our current housing model. What happens to young adults that don't have parents to live with? In part, homelessness.
I hope wherever you live can pull out of the dive.
Libraries are amazing and I would say that the fact they are so under funded and eventually turn into little more than a place to sleep, is very unfortunate.
I have woken up so much, sitting in a library for days, reading, reading, reading ..
If it weren’t for libraries, I’d have only read 1984 and not Down and Out in Paris and London, nor the one about Aspidispira, works with gravitas which fundamentally changed my opinion about personal responsibility at a respectable age.
I wonder if any of those homeless folk get a chance to talk to the ghosts of those aisles. Probably the library worked, once.
I understand it's tough for them but some of the homeless people are not people you enjoy you want to be around. I don't understand this need to spread this sentiment.
Homeless shelter just isn't that much fun for me. If I want to be virtuous and go to a soup kitchen or otherwise try to interact with and help homeless people, I'll just do that.
What people in general don't seem to realize by taking things that almost everyone likes (libraries, as one example) and requiring one to go through some virtue test to go is that in the end, public support for the good is going to collapse, it will lose funding, and then no one can have it.
I think we're going to lose libraries.
If someone doesn't go to the library because of homeless people, the problem is with the person who doesn't go to the library.
If someone doesn't go to the library because they are being harassed, the problem is with the library. Let the library know about specific incidents so they can handle it.
I'm not saying the situation is ideal. Yet plenty of homeless people go to the library to access the services they offer, or simply to have a safe place to read a book (even if the book part is incidental). If people sleeping in the library is disturbing, well, let's just say that library security would be kicking out a lot of university students in my area.
Library staff is not equipped to kick homeless people out for fear that it will cause a scene and possibly escalate to an aggressive situation. They will just call the police. So then the police will come and remove the person, but they will come back the next week, or maybe the next day. So then what happens? Call the police again? This time maybe they get charged with trespassing and put in jail? This goes on and on. The library is supposed to be a safe place but that also means that it is somewhat of a helpless place for staff and quiet citizens. And over time it slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable to the point that regular people just stop going.
It's nobody's "fault". It's just a tragedy of the circumstances.
"In 8 states, over 50% of unsheltered homeless individuals are registered sex offenders.
National average: ~13% when including those with “unknown addresses.” "
They're just people and the library is for them too.
Plus all the trust issues of having lived in the street. Only someone who hasn't interacted a lot with the homeless would say they are just like everyone else. Even if the reason they became homeless was just random by the time they've been homeless for a couple of years they are a different person.
There's a reason many of the homeless avoid shelters, if you talked to one you'd know why, and it's not because the other guests are lovely kind people to be around.
These are regulars at that library who never caused enough disruption to be banned, and aren't dangerous enough to be in jail. They also have more to lose by getting banned than housed patrons.
That's the whole point of that post.
I've had this idea for a business kicking around for awhile, basically a private library with membership fees. It would have all the accomodations you wish a library would have but that it can't have due to being public commons, like free coffee, private reading rooms, locker storage, and of course no vagrants.
Did you know, by the way, that the Nazis also targeted the homeless (whom they called "asocial") and people with mental illness?