Why so many homeless @the library?

Imagine having no place of your own and being unwelcome at most businesses or other private establishments. Public places may be open to you, but parks and streets may be cold or dangerous, bus and train stations noisy and chaotic, museums and art galleries expensive or lacking places to rest for long. A logical candidate for a reasonably safe, warm in winter, cool in summer, and relatively quiet place to rest for hours undisturbed is the nearest public library. Encyclopedia of Homelessness

Homeless people at the library? Huh?

While explaining my research interest in public space and democracy, and more specifically public libraries and poverty to a coworker the other day, it suddenly dawned on me that something obviously evident to me was in no way common knowledge to everyone else.

“Are homeless people hanging around public libraries everywhere,” she asked? “I thought it was just us.”

Not everyone is tuned in to the ubiquity of homeless people at urban public libraries across America. Even fewer, I imagine, are tuned in to the broader social, economic and political contexts underlying the issue.

My plan this evening was to blog about the famous case of Kreimer v. Morristown. This is the early 1990’s lawsuit in which a homeless man alleged that a New Jersey public library’s anti-odor policy violated his civil rights. The case is said to have propelled a major shift in public library policies, especially with respect to the treatment of seemingly-homeless people.

That post is coming. Tonight’s topic is a bit more basic. Tonight we take a look at one prominent and visible symptom of a much much grander problem. Woeful calls them “irregulars.” Sometimes they’re homeless, they’re not always rational, sometimes they’re drunk or strung out … They’re the ones you notice… because they smell, they’re wearing dirty puked-in, peed-in clothes, sometimes they’ve got bedrolls or big napsacks, they might try to shave or take a make-shift bath or sleep or shoot up or anything really in the restrooms. If they fall asleep in the library and a librarian has to wake them up due to some sort of anti-sleeping policy, they might not be polite … These are the so-called “problem patrons.” Oh there are plenty of well-heeled “problem patrons” to be sure. But they bring up a whole other set of issues. What I’m interested in here is poverty and the negotiation of public space. …

Any public library director will tell you that they don’t discriminate against categories of people, and that policies which regulate hygiene and behavior are there for the safety and comfort of patrons and employees. What they’re reluctant to admit is that not only do behavior and hygiene policies function, regardless of intention, as anti-homeless policies, they’re deliberately used to keep the “homeless” out.

“Homeless” is a problematic name for the people I’m talking about, actually. They’re not all homeless. They’re not all suffering from mental illnesses. They’re not all alcoholics or drug addicts. But many of them are all or some combination of these things and wherever they congregate, those places become arenas where the boundaries of social life are made, unmade and remade. If you’re transient and have no fixed address, my public library says you are, in effect, a non-person. They’ll deny you a library card until you can bring in something that proves you are a resident - read, taxpayer - in their service-area, and you’ll have trouble voting as well, by the way. You don’t just live in the margins, you are the margin.

Facing shrinking budgets, closures and privatization, public libraries are exceedingly preoccupied with proving their social value these days. You see this in the subtext of the new “bookstore” template which many libraries eager to become “destinations” are adopting (public libraries with cafes, couches, and interior design elements which literally mimic bookstore chains like Borders, Chapters or Barnes&Noble). Richmond Public Library’s Brighouse Branch is an example of this sort of “customer-driven model” which John Buschman critiques. Buschman is a librarian and professor at Rider University, and author of the important book Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy. Here’s what Buschman has to say about the “customer-driven model” of librarianship:

Librarianship - which has prided itself on its vital role in democracy - is turning that credo into empty lip service through its avid adoption of the customer-driven model and in the process chipping away at what remains of the public sphere in our institutions…”

In the end, customer-driven librarianship contributes to the changeover from “a democracy of citizens [to] a democracy of consumers” because it is only those who can “vote” with money or tax support who are meaningfully addressed by libraries. Henry Giroux contends that “within this new public philosophy there is a ruthlessly frank expression of doubt about the viability of democracy” and a ‘disdain [for] the democratic implications of pluralism.”

I digress. My original point was simply to underscore the ubiquity of “wackos” at the library. Wackos? Am I crazy? I’m using the word for two reasons. First, I think that by being descriptive, I can in fact be prescriptive. “Wackos” paints a pretty accurate picture of how lots of people (including, and perhaps especially library staff) see them. Second, I’m trying to point out the problem of identifying, accurately, just who these “wackos” really are. Who are my subjects? Why are they so shadowy and elusive?

I think we need a study.

How would this work? Position a grad student outside a library with instructions to count the number of hygiene-deficient, and otherwise stereotypically “wacko” souls dragging their backpacks and bedrolls inside? This is preposterous. Everyone knows you can’t always recognize the homeless. Hell, if you count couch-surfing, I was homeless for 2 months back in the summer of 2005. I was definitely pennyless and I used my maximum 1 hour of free computer time daily, writing resumes and scouring job adverts. But nobody would ever have lumped me into the “wacko” cohort. And anyway, there are plenty of “wackos” at the library who aren’t homeless. Just ask woeful. Just visit your local library …

Anyway, according to the Encyclopedia of Homelessness, library publications rarely (if ever) mentioned homeless patrons before the late 1970s. This changed sometime during the mid-1980s when seemingly homeless patrons began attracting negative attention at several large public libraries, mainly due to poor hygiene issues (346). The encyclopedia doesn’t actually say this, but it’s pretty tough not to notice that “homeless” folks started to be identified as a problem at public libraries right around the same time as the de-institutionalization movement kicked off …

Why libraries?

Public libraries offer safety, shelter, Internet access, restrooms, chairs, reading materials, social interaction, and quite a bit more. Public libraries don’t typically turn anyone away unless they violate behavioral or hygiene policies, and although borrowing privileges and sometimes also computer access will require a library card, you can hang around anonymously and read stuff for free all day. Restrooms are often used for bathing, shaving, tooth-brushing and other activities which may or may not be tolerated to varying degrees. Even in libraries with policies prohibiting bathing etc. in the restrooms, if you go about your business quickly, don’t make a big mess, and don’t otherwise call attention to yourself, you can usually get away with it.

Public libraries also typically offer free computer and Internet access. Whatever your view on the supposedly looming death of the book, it’s hard to deny the speed at which on-line and electronic information is replacing and surpassing print media. For people with nowhere else to access e-mail and the web, the library is the place to be. And why not? Personally I can’t imagine how stranded and disconnected from the world I’d feel without broadband. …