Read it: “Hard Truths for Hard Times” - The Urban Homeless and their Librarian Caretakers

Try going to the Seattle Library on a rainy or a cold day and counting the number of homeless people taking refuge there. This points to a huge problem. These people need help beyond finding temporary shelter in our public structures. In Seattle, our new library cost more than $165 million and yet we have not found a better way to take care of our mentally ill and chronically homeless populations than to let them inside in the morning, monitor them for behavioral issues, and then clear them every night.

Former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library system, Chip Ward, has written an outstanding piece called “How The Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel” (found via a short pointer piece at LibraryJournal.com) for the Atlantic Free Press, in a column called Hard Truths for Hard Times. This is a fascinating read and it touches on some real loopholes and ineffectiveness in our policies to deal with the mentally ill. I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to read it.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

The library wrestles with where to draw the line on odor. The law is unclear. An aggressive patron in New Jersey successfully sued a public library for banning him because of his body odor. That decision has had a chilling effect on public libraries ever since. When library users complain about the odor of transients, librarians usually respond that there isn’t much they can do about it. Lately, libraries are learning to write policies on odor that are more specific and so can be defended in court, but such rules are still hard to enforce because smell is such a subjective thing — and humiliating someone by telling him he stinks is an awkward experience that librarians prefer to avoid. None of this was covered in library school.

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it’s downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.

What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.