Private security officers recently began strictly enforcing rules against sitting on planters outside the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in Dallas TX and cracked down on the size of bags brought inside. Library employees have called the police on those who litter.
The recent crackdown is the latest in response to long-standing complaints about homeless people bathing in library restrooms, muttering obscenities, panhandling outside, littering and forming a gantlet that makes some patrons uncomfortable. But many see it as another round in an endless cycle of dealing unsuccessfully with homelessness.
“This is my living room,” she said of the sidewalk at Ervay and Young streets.
Pointing across Ervay, she said, “That used to be my living room.”
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Private security officers recently began strictly enforcing rules against sitting on planters outside the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in Dallas TX and cracked down on the size of bags brought inside. Library employees have called the police on those who litter.
The recent crackdown is the latest in response to long-standing complaints about homeless people bathing in library restrooms, muttering obscenities, panhandling outside, littering and forming a gantlet that makes some patrons uncomfortable. But many see it as another round in an endless cycle of dealing unsuccessfully with homelessness.
“This is my living room,” she said of the sidewalk at Ervay and Young streets.
Pointing across Ervay, she said, “That used to be my living room.”
Dallas News requires painful registration to read The Full Story.Dallas First Assistant City Manager Mary Suhm said that homeless people have a right to sit outside the two public facilities but that the city will respond if they break any laws, including illegal drug use and drug dealing.
“When I walk over to the library I can almost get a secondary high from the marijuana smoke that’s out there,” Ms. Suhm said.
Dallas Mayor Laura Miller has said a planned 24-hour homeless assistance center will help solve the problem by giving people on the streets somewhere to go during the day. Voters approved $3 million for the project in the May bond election. The city is searching for a site.
More recently, the mayor announced an effort to develop a 10-year plan to reduce homelessness. She said she hopes it’s ready by January.
Like Dallas, El Paso also has rules limiting the size of bags that a patron can carry into libraries, Ms. Brey-Casiano said. Some cities, including New York and San Francisco, have responded to problems at libraries by providing services for homeless people at shelters, according to the association.
In Dallas, complaints about homeless people at the library date to at least the 1980s.
Homeless in the library
This has always been a touchy subject where I work. On one hand, our library isn’t huge and neither is our city. So we don’t have near the homeless problem like say, Seattle, New York, or LA. But we’ve had our fair share given the per capita homeless in the city. (If you give me half an hour, I can probably remember what the number is.)
Some of our regular folks aren’t homeless as much as they are transient. Sure, they have an apartment or room they’re renting, but they’ll move next week, and the week after, and then again the week after that. For our patrons who are truly homeless, the spectrum is broad and not easily defined. One “gentleman”, and I use that term loosely, had been writing graffiti on any stationary surface, but otherwise kept to himself and read almost constantly. (While he wasn’t mucking up the place that is.) He looked bad, he smelled worse, he belched and farted, he swore, carried two or three sacks big enough to haul bodies in, and oh yeah, did I mention he spoke fluent English, Spanish, Latin, and German? And the German was spoken with a proper Bavarian accent. He wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t ignorant, he was able bodied and could easily hold a job. I always figured that he enjoyed how he lived his life. We finally banned him for life after some 20 years of graffiti.
He was one of our worst, but others just come in, get warm, read a bit and leave for parts unknown. I figure that, as long as they behave, they’re welcome to the library just like any other person. Sure, some might just be coming in only to get warm, but a good number of them actually do things while they’re here. I’d hate to throw them out simply because they aren’t as clean or don’t look like everyone else. Besides, it’s not the homeless that make me uncomfortable. It’s the casually dressed sex offenders we have a large population of that make me nervous.
Why don’t they just get jobs?
I’m really not sure why his ability to speak Latin means that he could hold a job. There are a lot of reasons why someone who appears to you able-bodied would be unable to hold down a job: a disability you can’t see, such as an incurable but very real pain condition, for example; a mental illness or disability of some kind… I don’t think it’s necessarily up to public libraries to provide social services in addition to everything else they do. Nonetheless, I doubt that this particular guy had turned down a bunch of offers to, say, teach conversational Bavarian at the college level in order to sit in the library farting copiously.
Vent grates. Boston Public Library.
…and there’s the numerous cruelties toward the people resting on the Boston Public Library vent grates. There’s the cruelty of BPL avoiding responding to people in need around the venue of the complex of public library buildings. Better training, better supervisory programs, better continuing education programs and better graduate library and information studies programs that respond to these obvious needs around the public library venues need to be developed.