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July 1 - September 10, 2024
The bat was meant as a joke whose evolution I now forget, but more than once I had watched an employee slowly move closer to it during violent incidents.
Sometimes, though, questions surprised me. Being a librarian in DC meant regularly being asked for the address of the FBI or where someone might find and talk to a CIA agent or how and where they might begin research about a specific conspiracy theory they believed in.
And although I started each day with a drive to help, there were things I simply could not fix. Things no librarian can.
It was a question I often posed to others in my years as a librarian: where else, other than a library, can people facing housing insecurity go for the entire day and not be kicked out?
Underserved populations who might otherwise find refuge in America’s public city spaces are often met with rules that are meant to create a barrier between them and tourists—a barricade between them and beautiful architecture, design, and other facades that are, we might infer, viewed as more valuable to protect and preserve than human lives.
A visitor can move more freely and comfortably in the space, with Wi-Fi, clean drinking water, bathroom facilities, conversation, and other basic comforts available without as much judgment or being ejected on grounds of trespassing.
It is what vulnerable populations of people are readily able to access at libraries that I’ve found makes some people most uncomfortable.
Internet access means an ability to view pornography or adult content, and it also means anyone sitting nearby might see it.
And many times, the people who were complaining were other regular patrons who wanted the library to be a more comfortable space for them and others.
It is not the library of our ideals—the one where it is always quiet, pristine, stately, where the space is treated with an almost holy reverence for its inherent cultural value and the computer lab is mostly for printing emergencies.
This upheld idea and ideal of public libraries becomes a tool against marginalized groups. When we call libraries “social equalizers” or “safe havens,” we don’t have to worry so much about what happens to that equality and safety outside the library.
No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become. —Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Our modern era of houselessness can be best traced back to the early 1980s, when several major forces changed its complexion: gentrification of the inner city, sweeping deinstitutionalization, budget cuts to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and social services agencies in response to the country’s worst recession since the Great Depression, high unemployment rates, the emergence of HIV/AIDS, and inadequate amounts of affordable housing options.
President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963 as the first of multiple federal initiatives to create a more community-based system of care.
In 1965, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress passed the Medicaid Act, which offered higher reimbursement rates for community-based care and excluded payments to mental health institutions.
This rapid shift away from institutionalization was encouraged by federal legislation, policy changes, and litigation that incentivized and eventually mandated public mental health systems to shift the locus of care to the community.
In the 1975 US Supreme Court case of O’Connor v. Donaldson, it was declared that a person had to be a danger to themself or to others for a hospital confinement to be constitutional. As it became increasingly harder for people to be admitted to a hospital, many people with severe mental illness ended up unhoused.
By 1980, the inpatient population at public psychiatric hospitals had declined by 75 percent. In 2000, approximately fifty-five thousand people remained in these institutions, a number less than 1...
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The 1999 US Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C. stated that mental illness was a disability covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring that all governmental agencies, not just the state hospitals, were required to make “reasonable accommodations” to move people with mental illness into community-based treatment to end unnecessary institutionalization.5 The shift was especially pronounced among children and youth: by 2009, the institutionalized population had declined by 98 percent.6
In 2006, psychiatrist Darold Treffert profoundly described how laws had gone too far in protecting the rights of the individual at the expense of their own safety and well-being as “dying with one’s rights on.”
All of this has led to increased risks, and numbers, of people with mental illness experiencing substance abuse disorders, suicide, and houselessness, with 20.5 percent of unhoused people in the United States having a serious mental health condition.
People living with untreated mental conditions are sixteen times more likely to be shot and killed by police.
Among incarcerated people with a mental health condition, non-White people are more likely to go to solitary confinement, be injured, and stay in jail longer.9 And it should be common knowledge that the three largest public mental health providers in America are correctional systems: Los Angeles County, Rikers Island in New York, and Cook County in Illinois.10
One October 2020 article in the Washington Post called a visit to Planet Word a “high-tech, feel-good experience,” but all I could think about was who had lived in the space a little over a decade earlier. Who heard them? Who valued their words? How had they tried to communicate?
In an additional blow to the unhoused population living in the area, Franklin Square Park closed for renovations in July 2020 to make it “more user-friendly.”11 Plans included restoring the tree canopy, eliminating rodent infestations, replacing paths, and installing rain gardens. These changes certainly improved the appeal to many of the people who work in the area, patronize the local businesses, or visit as tourists, but they also effectively exiled the twenty or so unhoused people who had still been living in the park.
Once again, preference was given to the profits of tourism and the comforts of only some.
Every year a regional census of the houseless population in DC, called the Point-in-Time (PIT) count, takes place in a single twenty-four-hour period, typically at night and in the last ten days of January. According to the 2020 results, 6,380 people were experiencing houselessness in the District,
As of 2020, 5,823 out of 6,380 or 91.3 percent of adults who were experiencing houselessness are Black/African American (In 2018, it was 6,286 persons out of 6,904 or 91 percent),14 yet only 46 percent of District residents are Black/African American.
Washington, DC, also has the highest rate in the country of adults with dependence or abuse of illicit drugs or alcohol at 12.51 percent of its population, with the national average being 8.47 percent.
In 1984 Initiative 17, the DC Right to Overnight Shelter Act (often referred to as the right to shelter law) passed with an overwhelming 72 percent of the vote, making DC one of the first in the country to legislate a legal right to shelter.
Some of the places where cots were placed included the gyms of in-use schools, a rooming house with no heat and broken windows, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium dressing rooms—including the one used by the Washington Football Team cheerleaders—and the DC Council building.17
In July of 2019, I searched for this quote over a period of several days. I had a vague recollection of reading it somewhere years earlier, but could not recall where, what the exact wording was, or even who exactly said it, but I became obsessed with finding it. I eventually discovered it cited in an April 2019 article20 by a postdoctoral research fellow at Georgetown. By my best recollections, I had originally seen the quote on a blog maintained by an unhoused person living in DC who created his posts semiregularly at a DC Public Library computer.
In 2018 alone, the District spent $25 million to shelter families in motels. When the temperature is below freezing, temporary shelters are opened. When temperatures rise again, hundreds of people are left without access to overnight shelter once more.
The library was never officially a part of the city’s homeless services. There was no partnership, agreement, or formal contract. The hundreds of unhoused patrons who arrived at its doors every morning by bus from the shelters would imply otherwise, but librarians knew better: there was an unspoken, informal agreement that they always had, and would continue, to fill in the gaps of services and resources for unhoused people.
I used to fall asleep at a study carrel on the fifth floor of the Lockwood Memorial Library on the University at Buffalo campus frequently in undergrad and then again in graduate school. The carrels had cushioned benches with built-in desk lamps that created a soft, warm light. In the frigid Buffalo winters the heat would be blasting and I’d settle in to do work and end up falling asleep on a pile of books and printed pages instead. No one ever woke me up—not a librarian or a campus security guard. I am sure they had rules about sleeping too, but they weren’t enforced against me. I was not
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The DC Public Library Rules of Behavior—thirty-one in total when I worked there—were nothing if not specific. They covered everything from headphone volume to engaging in sexual activity on library grounds.
Social norms exist on a spectrum. Not everyone behaves the same way, especially not people who have experienced trauma, as so many patrons at Northwest One had. Their actions, reactions, beliefs—their behaviors and ways of being in the world overall—were informed by this trauma, sometimes in ways others could readily understand, but oftentimes not.
At their most effective, library rules help to eliminate profiling or biases.
I knew from my work in the schools that people of all ages who have had unclear boundaries in the past may push against even the most clearly established boundaries to more clearly define them. I also knew that people who create, or are enforcing, rules often struggle to see it this way. Especially when the pushback is violent, as I saw on my first day and many more times in the months that followed.
The official procedure for when we found a bedbug was to call “downtown” to report it to the library administrator on duty. We were required to isolate the bug—catching it on a piece of tape or underneath a clear cup—and eventually, an employee from Orkin would come and verify that it was indeed a bedbug. Only when it was identified were we allowed to close the branch for the day. Sometimes this process took upward of three hours, and we always, without fail, opened the following day.
The DCPL administrators’ responses implied several things. The most infuriating, to me, was that they clearly wanted to gloss over what they had falsely categorized as problems specific to only a few branches, including Northwest One. Their attention—their energy and money and programs—would go to the “other” branches, ones that they felt they could help. Ones in “better” neighborhoods.
As the central library in the DC Public Library system and being located in the epicenter of downtown DC, MLK unquestionably served unhoused populations, perhaps more than any other location in the system. But the designs for it reflected who the $211 million renovations were envisioned for and most benefited. The blueprints were released publicly in 2018, and I saw that there were plans for a rooftop terrace, a sculptured staircase, a large auditorium and conference center, and maker spaces for fabrication, music production, and art. These were beautiful, modern additions to a community space
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And the DC Public Library is hardly the first major library system in the country to redesign branches without keeping marginalized groups in mind. It does not have to be, and should not be, this way.
Library technicians, library associates, and adult librarians each had their own grouped meetings that the library system wanted us to begin to have more regularly.
“I wish we had spent some time talking about these individuals. If these are the people we are serving, we need to focus on them. We need training; we need help.” I tried to speak deliberately, to choose my next words carefully. “It is traumatic to try to help people we aren’t adequately equipped to help day after day. I can do my own research and find information, but I’m also tired at the end of the day, and the last thing I want to do is go home and spend additional time trying to figure out how to do more. If this is all part of the job, and for me it’s a significant part, we need to talk
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Robert was eventually replaced with a permanent manager named Rose. Rose had been working for the DC Public Library for years, and she brought a level of empathy to the work that anyone who worked alongside her learned from. Rose didn’t shy away from difficult conversations, and above all else, she valued maintaining positive relationships with patrons.
The DC Public Library has hired and employed gun-carrying police officers since at least 1978,2 in part because DC public libraries are considered DC government property, the same as the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and so forth.
All the officers I knew well and saw frequently were Black, including Jonesy, and several of them had previously worked for the NYPD. They were all outwardly kind, and many of them were excellent at de-escalating situations, especially with library patrons struggling with addiction or their mental health. None, to my knowledge, had ever discharged the guns they carried on their hips while working for the library. They were often overextended as well, though they had received more formal training in their work and were practiced at responding to what came their way.
Former Dallas police chief David Brown was praised in a 2016 New York Times piece for earning “a national reputation as a progressive leader whose top priority is improving relations and reducing distrust between the police department and the city’s minority residents.”3 Brown, who now serves as Chicago’s police superintendent, has regularly spoken candidly about the nature of police work. Some of his perspective is informed by his own lived experiences, including losing his son in a June 2010 police shooting, seven weeks into his position as Dallas’s chief. His son, David Brown Jr., suffered
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At a news conference in July 2016, Chief Brown stated: “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. . . . Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. . . . That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”4
