Today’s edition of the New York Times carries a story about the problem of homelessness in the City of Los Angeles. What strikes the reader hardest about this piece is that the Times claims in confidence and without qualification that there are 41,000 homeless people surviving in a rough rectangle of rundown streets within the downtown area of the city. Nobody who lives in this town would dispute that figure, particularly not any public librarian.
Today’s edition of the New York Times carries a story about the problem of homelessness in the City of Los Angeles. What strikes the reader hardest about this piece is that the Times claims in confidence and without qualification that there are 41,000 homeless people surviving in a rough rectangle of rundown streets within the downtown area of the city. Nobody who lives in this town would dispute that figure, particularly not any public librarian. Homelessness, which social analysts have long seen as a complex of maladies, is also one of the main problems for the public library in any sizeable community. There are two main strategies for dealing with the permanently homeless, that loose but durable cadre of drug users, alcoholics and the mentally ill: exclusion, which is neither easy nor humane, and monitoring, which is costly though perhaps inevitable.
The real problem with homelessness is that its effects spread invisibly throughout a community, well beyond skid row: there is no way to gauge how much it costs a library in lost patronage, how many good librarian candidates seek other jobs rather than work in libraries which often seem like flophouses with a book collection. I have lived in Los Angeles and patronized the Central Library for about four decades. The situation has improved a bit there, but I can tell you that nobody can use the men’s room on any floor without being prepared to experience scenes and smells and sounds that have no place in a library.
Whatever we as a society failed to prevent or solve with regard to the homeless has come down with heavy result upon the public library; certainly not as hard as upon the county hospital or the courts of law, but the library isn’t built to remedy disaster, not intended to function as a storage house for broken people and shattered lives. The library is a durable institution, but it isn’t meant to bear that sort of burden. It suffers; we suffer. The whole machine works less well for everyone, and becomes something less in image, too.
We need to do something about the problem of homelessness in all its facets. Something new, because the old medicines are no match for the current ailment, and the disease is dragging down this part of the community as surely as any other epidemic. Homelessness is a library problem; it is a library cost item, it is a library patron and employee problem. Exclusion and policing are thin bandages over this unhealed wound. In this as in other areas the library must be an advocate for issues beyond its walls.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/national/15SKID.html
Michael McGrorty
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