Should Public Libraries Serve as Homeless Shelters?

An interesting story at the Free Press today about an ongoing argument involving public libraries. Actually there are two arguments, the first is about why the use of public libraries is on the decline. The author says librarians usually point to a decline in reading, possibly because they’d rather not discuss the other reason.

All over the country, libraries are seeing fewer visitors and more problems. Per-resident visits to public libraries fell by 56.6 percent in the 10 years ending in 2022. Meanwhile, a report from the Urban Libraries Council found that between 2019 and 2023, security incidents rose at its 115 member libraries, even as visits fell another 35 percent.

It’s not a coincidence, of course, that visits are down while incidents are up. When librarians talk about the decreasing visit numbers—which they prefer not to—they say that fewer people are coming to libraries because Americans are reading less. But with print sales up and bookstores making a comeback, that explanation doesn’t make sense. Rather, a major reason libraries are in decline is that, as a former librarian wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, libraries have become “a de facto daytime shelter for the city’s homeless.” Indeed, when libraries research what people dislike about their institution, they often find that the homeless population now congregating in the library is the biggest complaint.

And that brings us to the 2nd argument: Should libraries be de facto homeless shelters or should they be reserved for students and people looking for books rather than a place to sleep. It turns out there’s disagreement on this point with some actually arguing that libraries should be run like homeless shelters.

[Librarian Trainer Ryan] Dowd’s essential belief is that not only do the homeless have every right to spend their days in libraries but that librarians should view their needs as a critical part of the job. He believes librarians should be trained to dispense Narcan. One of his seminars is called “Jerks with Homes: How to Deal with Members of the Public Who Are Being Jerks About Homeless Folks.” His scripts for addressing problematic behaviors include examples like, “Hey, I don’t care if you urinate on the Harry Potter books, but the politicians have a no-urinating policy. Therefore, I have to ask you to stop.”

Dowd advocates for “inclusion,” even when it seems to come at the expense of the library’s environment. In Dowd’s book, some people who complain about the homeless are “everyday sadists.” As for the body odor that permeates so many public libraries, he writes that “There is a certain amount of odor that we can expect whenever we go out in public. Other people use odor as an excuse to vent their prejudices. Don’t let someone’s hypersensitivity or bias rule the day if the smell really isn’t that bad.”

Dowd apparently used to run a homeless shelter in Illinois so he’s probably used to the smell. On the other end of the spectrum is Steve Albrecht, a former cop who trains librarians on dealing with problematic patrons.

“People in the library world sometimes misunderstand that one of the primary functions of the police is to preserve the peace,” he told me. “Police can do a lot of good by just telling someone they have to leave.”

But, between these two views, most librarians have adopted something closer to the former. The view that the library welcomes all is almost a sacred text among librarians. And if that means libraries themselves become social service centers, so be it.

But as libraries stock up on Narcan, efforts to implement rules to improve the environment encounter resistance. For instance, some libraries have implemented limits on bag sizes in response to concerns about bedbugs and bad smells when homeless people bring all their possessions with them. But homeless advocates, including those in West Palm Beach, call this an attack on the homeless.

Libraries are just another public space, only slightly different from sidewalks and public parks, where the rights of the homeless are generally seen as trumping the rights of taxpayers. It took a Supreme Court ruling from a conservative court to allow most of the west coast to tell homeless people they couldn’t camp out in tents in public spaces. But the librarians running the libraries are mostly far-left progressives who aren’t interesting in fighting that battle. So libraries will continue to decline under their watch, just like blue cities have and for similar reasons.