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Comment by supertofu | Hacker News Reader

This is only true in big cities. Definitely true in LA and NYC.

I was astounded to find that the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all (not just the homeless or teenagers.) The bathrooms are usually spotless.

I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.

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How popular was your small east coast college library?

I have a theory about this. Which is that the upper/upper-mid class in particular cares more about the image of a pristine library than they do the actual effectiveness/reach of that library. This theory shows itself quite a lot through how people talk about libraries: not in how many students find what they're looking for, how happy librarians are, how many grades or careers have been improved. It's bathrooms and walls.

I'm in a very progressive and educated town. The library here serves as a community education center. It's very well used, well loved, and well resourced, with tons of free classes for the community. There are three colleges in this town, so it's a more educated populace than the average town.

Since when are public libraries responsible for improving the grades of students? I relied on the public library for computer/Internet access and of course reading for most of my childhood and never had that expectation... no doubt it helped me indirectly because I read a lot and I had no consistent access to the Internet otherwise, but how do you define "effectiveness/reach"? Can a filthy library occupied by homeless people be effective? My thoughts: it's largely up to parents to bring their kids to public libraries and encourage them to read. And that's not going to happen if it's not a comfortable place to spend time (i.e. clean and quiet). What's in the collection is of secondary importance.

I agree on principle, but in the details I have some quibbles. The core of a library is the books (the root of library is the Latin for book). For me, all I really want from a library is to loan me all the books I want for as long as I need them. I’m not particularly interested in the librarians’ happiness or grades or careers.

> the small east-coast college town where I now live has a clean, bright, pleasant library that serves as a community educational space for all

Small college towns have a couple of real advantages over big cities in this regard. First, they're small, which helps a lot. Second, they tend to have more funding available per-capita than large cities do.

That has definitely not been my experience in NYC. I've lived in 3 neighborhoods in Queens, and all of them have had great local libraries that were clean and had friendly staff.

I agree that borough libraries are very useable. The LIC library is wonderful, for example. But Manhattan libraries are pretty difficult.

It's just one of the few places where you can hang. Read, watch movies, and nobody is expecting you to spend money. It's air conditioned in the summer, heated in the winter.

Also in the burbs, it's not a trivial task for homeless to even get to a place like the library, where in NYC it's pretty easy to get around.

I still use the library in NYC, but I agree that some locations aren't exactly great places to spend the day studying, but it very much depends on the branch. "unusable" feels like a stretch. I can still pickup books and get help from librarians if I need it.

Not in my opinion, those smaller towns have largely (but not universally) abandoned the middle class ambition of home ownership through exclusionary land policy, despite not degrading their basic services.

NYC libraries aren’t defacto shelters for the unhoused. When I visit them they have robust children’s sections and the adult section is filled with a cross section of the community, which does include people with a large bag who are just resting but also includes twenty something’s with designer closet hung and MacBooks.

> I wonder: how have massive cities like LA and NYC allowed their libraries defacto homeless shelters? It's a shame that public libraries in these cities are essentially unusable to the average taxpayer.

Somehow I doubt that all of the branch libraries of those systems are "homeless shelters." More likely the it's just the larger libraries near the actual shelters. Where "the average taxpayer" wouldn't spend time anyway.

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