If libraries were open late they would be filled with homeless people looking for a safe, warm place.
What I’m saying is we need safe warm places for the homeless AND libraries to be open late.
Truthfully, putting the homeless in a safe warm place that enables them to have access to a library at night sounds like a smart combo.
My local library has security guards because people keep shooting up heroin in the bathrooms.
This would exacerbate that
We should absolutely have safe housing for homeless people with UBI and transitional programs. We should also offer mental health and substance abuse treatment – and in extreme cases humane involuntary treatment for people that are a danger to themselves and others.
And none of this should take place in shared, public spaces for the safety and dignity of everyone involved. This is a failure of society and needs to be treated as such. Placing the burden on individuals isn’t the solution. Expecting public spaces designed for other uses to pick the slack of a broken societal safety net is insane.
humane involuntary treatment
You can’t have humane involuntary treatment. In cases where somebody is threatening someone else, I would say involuntary treatment is called for. But we shouldn’t decide when its okay to imprison people for exercising their bodily autonomy.
Or fix the housing crisis lmao
hire the homeless to build housing for homeless people
that’s a good point, we should also end the drug war
Almost nowhere in Seattle offers public bathrooms anymore because of this. It’s a massive problem that still doesn’t have a solution
we know the solution. it’s building a shit ton of cheap housing and handing it out to people and charging them 30% of the income, not counting the first $20k. it’s just rich psychopaths who run the country would rather profit off of prison and let them die instead.
Same. The homeless population has unfortunately made libraries where I live pretty dangerous places and I can only imagine how much worse that would be if they were open all night. My city doesn’t seem to care at all about people shooting up and ruining public spaces.
Sounds like my kind of party!
And also, the heroin.
Homeless people usually don’t have the peace of mind required for reading books, they are kinda busy surviving.
Yeah, nothing against that idea in theory, but in practice, places like that end up full of urine-soaked drug addicts that are high on meth, making it an extremely unattractive place to hang out and socialize.
Denver’s Union station downtown is a perfect example. It’s a “public private” space that tries to stay open late on weekends to cater to the crowd but ends up being a hellhole.
places like that end up full of urine-soaked drug addicts that are high on meth,
You’re putting all homeless into a box. Not all are homeless because they are addicts. Some are legitimately forgotten by the system and for different reasons lost job/domestic abuse/no fam/disability/health issue/financial issues. And even at that : addiction is also a symptom of a shit society. Not the same issue as what causes other homeless people but there can be more than one problem in a poorly designed system that comes up with the same result of being homeless.
Society built on capitalistic ideals for more than just survival as a goal has an extremely narrow scope for who it is interested in serving.
You’re putting all homeless into a box.
With the exception of your first sentence (me putting homeless people in a box, which I’m not sure if you’re making a pun or not), all of other the things you said are correct and I agree with. The things you said and the things I said are not mutually exclusive.
In other words, not all homeless are the same, not all are drug addicts, and society should do better at preventing homelessness, and you might still have a late-night library filled with urine-soaked drug addicts.
You’re putting all homeless into a box. Not all are homeless because they are addicts.
Are we not allowed to make generalizations at all? I promise you if you open a homeless center in any major city you will find out very quick that psycho behavior comes with homeless people at scale. It’s a guarantee that you will have meth addicts ruin whatever infrastructure you provide them. It doesn’t matter that there are some good homeless people when you are almost guaranteed to face the bad ones.
also more homeless drug addicts started after they became homeless, not before. being on the street like that deteriorates your mental health. the longer we let this go unaddressed the worse it gets.
except I’m not likely to spend much time in my local library if it is constantly filled with homeless people.
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Crazy idea : let’s use churches to accommodate homeless people since you can find them fucking everywhere, surely they’re not used after 8pm, and that’s basically the point of them in the first place, no?
As much as I despise organized religion they aren’t fully to blame for the situation. Some of them have really made an effort.
Religion even at its very very best can’t do that job. That is why we need the government.
As much as I despise organized religion they aren’t fully to blame for the situation.
They are if they don’t pay the taxes that would have been used to help with situations such as this.
Most churches can’t keep the lights on. For every LDS or RCC there are a thousand places on the verge of bankruptcy. Every atheist I know makes a big deal about the big players but not one has shown me the raw the numbers that proves that if they paid corporate tax rates it would be mean more than a few more cruise missiles used to blow up weddings in Pakistan.
Proposal: taxes that scale with income… You could call it, I dunno, some sort of income tax.
Income tax is paid by church employees. The thing that isn’t taxed is their profits.
Cool. My employer now pays the bulk of my earnings in stock and corporate perks.
Prayer is not a corporate perk ;)
Yeah agreed. There are some small churches with actually kind people who help the homeless and do good stuff.
We need the government: to stop blocking housing development
I agree but on no other neoliberal positions. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Government can’t do that job either. We already have homeless shelters. I don’t know why people talk like this is a new idea. We have homeless shelters in our society. They’re government funded in some cases, or church-funded in other cases.
We still have homeless people. We do provide free shelter and food to people. And we still have people sleeping on the street.
The governments barely do anything, in general not putting more than a token effort into helping.
There’s never enough support for the increasing number of homeless people.
You aren’t allowed to do drugs in homeless shelters which is why a lot of homeless people don’t use them.
we need places to accommodate them. like how restaurants used to have smoking sections. there should also be access to drug abuse healthcare with no mandate and allow long term residency in shelters, including the ability to receive mail and use it as a legal address for ID documents and employment. if we did all that we could see a fraction of them, perhaps even a large fraction, eventually getting back on their feet and out of the system.
I think monks aren’t excited about washing off piss in the morning
Then they should provide access to toilets. Where are they going when they want to take a piss? Also isn’t helping the poor in anyway they can a charitable act revered by their religion?
I get the idea and I think it’s wonderful but have you ever been to a homeless shelter? They need staff to break up fights, protect women, clean up the mess made by drug users and alcoholics, and all sorts of other difficult things your average old lady pew duster isn’t capable of dealing with.
Maybe for the Sikhs?
Every major religion reveres helping the needy, for example in Islam, zakat, giving money for charity (if you have enough wealth to afford it) is a requirement.
You are making the mistake of assuming homeless people’s actions are rational.
Are you aware that churches do some of the most public outreach for homeless people in the united states?
some of the most?
That and stressed-out students pulling all-nighters.
We’ve been doing extended openings 0700-2200 for several years in Oslo. As do libraries all over Norway. You need to use your library-card or app to open the door, so there’s some control (data lives for 7 days). We have very little problems - maybe there’s some homeless there but they are as welcome as anyone else. We do have security guard, or one that strays between branches. And yes we do have homeless people in Oslo.
Go Norway! I whish we had a library law here in Germany like you do - our places are underfunded and understaffed… a lot of my colleagues are very passionate about their jobs, we could do so much more with our local libraries.
A lot of Norwegian libraries are underfunded as well.
In Oslo public library (Deichman) we’ve been given more money the last 10 years than previously. And we have shown what that money can do.
During Covid shutdown the Library was what kept open except for two weeks - that really showed what kind of back-bone we were for Oslo.
It was very tough on our frontline workers as we were swamped with students ignoring any precautions. Working in libraries are still low paying compared to the education
They’re already full of homeless people 😐
the housing crisis and resulting homelessness have dramatic downstream effects on everything
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Once again, Scandinavia is making me so so jealous
I live in the US, and my local library has a cafe, 3d printers, and you can even borrow tools.
It’s there to make sure they don’t kill themselves in the winter.
Winter is hitting my little town in Sweden and I have to say that your suggestion is looking increasingly appealing. It’s not the cold. It’s not the rain we get now in place of snow thanks to global warming. It’s not even the darkness. It’s the gloomy all-encompassing grey.
It’s like all life and joy leaves the world until spring hits in May.
At least with snow you get white. The dead and the grayness is soul destroying.
Yeah. We don’t get a whole lot of snow anymore though. At least not where I live.
Well, I say that but I moved in September, maybe this area gets a tonne of snow!
Isn’t Norway separate from Scandinavia?
No.
Where do you have this from?
I think I saw it tossed around on Lemmy, of all places.
Fairly normal where I live
Not sure where you live, but I have actually been to a fair few libraries like this in the US. Usually if you want a really cool library, you’ll have to go to the main one in the state. If not that, the highest reviewed one. Of course, it all depends where you are, as different regions seem to care about having nice libraries at different amounts.
And the most popular one: the podcast studio. I’d like to point out that the other 20-ish libraries we have besides of Bjørvika are amazing too! You should see the one we open in Holmlia dec 1st. It’s even got a separate youth-library next to the normal one.
BRING BACK THE THIRD PLACE
Examples of third places include churches, cafes, bars, clubs, community centres, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, makerspaces, stoops, and parks.
Gyms, stores, cafes, etc. aren’t good third places because you’re expected to pay money to be there
Well, first off, “free” is not a requirement for a 3rd place, but even if we accept that the best third places are free, that doesn’t make ones where money is involved bad by default.
The difference is between paying admission or membership dues like gyms usually require vs a public space where there’s an expectation you will buy something but it’s not a requirement for entry, and it’s not the only thing to do there.
Stores don’t work because the purpose of being there is to buy things, so there’s nothing else to do, and no other acceptable behavior beyond maybe some chit chat.
But at a cafe, the seating area is designed for you to just chill and do other things besides ponder what you’re going to buy next. The seating areas are open and there’s an expectation a purchase is made, but you can order nothing while a person with you orders something, or you can order something small and cheap, and get the same level of access as anyone. That’s a very low barrier of entry for a place that is purpose made for social activity.
Same is true of bars. You need to buy something, sure, but the place is designed for social activity, not just reading the menu.
Well, first off, “free” is not a requirement for a 3rd place
in order to be effective it has to be. there’s plenty of places where you can go out if you can regularly spend $10^2 or $10^3 on a weekly basis, but not that many people can, hence the problem. we need to set out with free as an explicit requirement or we will fail.
back when I went to college I tried handing out in bars, but it was too loud in all the ones in town but one that was too far from home to hear yourself think let along have a casual conversation, and the drinks were too expensive to make it affordable. eventually I decided drinking at home was cheaper and stopped bothering. lots of fast food places are starting to explicitly post time limits and even in places where they don’t I feel pressured to constantly consume or leave. I’ve never timed how long you can sit there before being formally asked to leave for loitering but a business wants to free up space for paying customers so the pressure exists which makes any private for profit business a poor choice
I’m just saying there’s plenty of third places apparently
I feel like this video (link below) does a good job of explaining why a lot of current third places aren’t quite meeting the need, or just don’t really fit the definition of third places.
https://piped.video/watch?v=MD_CMrCpBMc
I can think of a few places that meet most of the criteria near me, but there’s very few. The closest ones are probably the gaming shops, where you can show up and just hang out playing games with friends for free - but those are kind of geared towards specific activities, so you can’t always show up and just hang out with others whenever, as there are usually only regulars on certain days of the week, and often they are involved only in playing a game, not casual conversation.
Gyms are absolutely not social places. The where you go if you want to be pissed off by everyone around you because they’re hogging the equipment.
STOOP KID LEFT HIS STOOP
A truly tremendous day in the neighbourhood.
Why does nobody ever accept my invitations to hang out on my stoop?
It didn’t go anywhere
have you heard of a street
the death of ‘third place’ locations has had a brutal impact on society
There are still a ton of “third places” – restaurants, bars, and coffee shops are everywhere. They just cost too much money for a lot of people.
Restaurants, bars are part of number first one. Coffee shops to me close early. Never seen one open at 10pm+
The library having games and such would be nice. They likely would run into the issue that thoae unfortunate would turn up and try to stay all night every time to get out of the cold/rain/heat.
Bars usually manage to bounce them without issue due to them not being paying customers. Getting bounced by a librarian does sound kind of cool though.
Homelessness is a problem everywhere. Libraries already struggle with it being a public place, so it would just extend into the night.
Would love something like this!
Cafes near me don’t open late a lot of the time. They close at about 5pm. So if you want some place to hang out after work? You have no choice other than a bar.
I hate it.
In the UK they defunded youth centres. Whatever shady shit we used to get up to at those, it was in a safe-ish place which at least one responsible person not far away in the worst case. Our behaviour/activities outside of those places once they were gone, as bored youths in a town of middle age to old people, was much worse.
A lot of us don’t even have a second location anymore.
I have a second location. Workplace and my car. Welcome to hell.
discord is the de facto their place for people my age these days. sad there isn’t a better alternative
After a short while, the library owners would realize that they could make a lot more money if they served alcohol in the evenings.
I can’t express enough how badly I want this.
It’s really disappointing how much of our space is privatized.
I’m hoping to eventually open something like a board game cafe to help address this for my hometown. Far from a perfect solution, but I would like to get as close to a “third place” community-oriented vibe as possible without going totally broke, at least.
Apparently we’re even supposed to give individuals private space now!?
It’s actually pretty easy to book libraries for after hours events. There’s a small cost associated because it requires staff to work outside normal hours.
I can’t even afford to rent a room during normal working hours though. Plus, I’m pretty sure my local library doesn’t offer evening bookings.
Asterisk: I can technically afford it, but I’m not paying like $160/mo to host a weekly club at the library. That defeats the whole point of a third space.
Paying for something doesn’t defeat the point of a third place. Enterprising and profit do. People covering just the cost of materials required for their activity is not that bad a thing.
I would rather more basic activities be covered by taxes too though.
I agree with you, but I do wish our society/culture allowed us to exist without requiring constant payment. Just exhausting after a while.
Just throwing it out there: most libraries do have one late night day a week, there are probably a million people on earth right at this moment that would love to play a tabletop game with you or take a zoom class, every single area has clubs/associations/charities that would love some new faces.
Don’t expect the universe to give you companionship. You need to do it yourself
You reap what you sow. you sow nothing you reap nothing.
well said.
I read something about the Carnegie libraries in Pittsburgh basically doing this way back when. Apparently it was popular for people to get off work, go home, clean up, eat, then head out to the library. There was stuff there for kids like story tellers, tutors, art workshops, and more. For adults, quiet places for people who just wanted to read, places for study, areas for people to discuss various subjects, classes on various skills (painting, pottery, carpentry, etc) and the ground floor main area had a general social space. They served coffee, food trucks set up outside, and some inside. It was a popular place for people who didn’t want to go to the bar.
That sounds fantastic. Experiment run its course, get derailed, something else?
A combination of factors. Lower funding, suburbanization, growing means for home entertainment, growing wages sending people to more expensive options, etc.
One thing that happened is society forgot they can go do these things at libraries today.
Everything he listed is on the calendar of a great number of city libraries, if you check their websites! (Source: I built and maintained the websites for several libraries)
That’s called a community centre and used to be pretty common. Growing up we had multiple that were run by the local Catholic organizations, and I think there were also some that were run by the youth branch of the various political parties.
But a key component of such a place being success is having a certain kind of open culture. There’s countries where if you throw 10 strangers in a room and return an hour later, you’ll find 10 strangers on their phone, having not uttered a single word to each other.
People also have a tendency to divide into subgroups and isolate from each other. It’s a step in the right direction and better than no community at all. But it can breed resentment and even violence. That’s a common problem of community centres here.
If we constantly tell people that their primary defining characteristic is their race, or their sexuality, or their nationality, and we tell them that those people are the only ones who can truly get them, then it’s no surprise this results in a culture of isolating into little demographic groups.
Heck, or political beliefs. People should agree to disagree more nowadays.
You shouldn’t talk and socialize inside a public library though.
Maybe a community center for activities would be better. Lemmy is basically a bunch of virtual community centers anyways.
During the day, sure.
After dark, board games, LAN parties, Cards Against Humanity,
The library makes it appealing to me. Most of the time, I would rather just read in the corner, social-adjacent rather than socialization.
You should check out some board game/card game shops around where you live.
Also, Cards Against Humanity is funny if you play it with your friends once every couple of months, I wouldn’t want to play it regularly, it gets old really fast.
It gets old immediately. I hate playing any game whose only entertainment comes from shock value
There’s a lot of board/card games on the market like that, where once you’ve been through the deck once it’s kind of done.
Yeah I hate all of those games. I try to shut them down any time someone suggests them
So many people don’t even care if the cards fit together, so playing “the biggest, blackest dick” will always win even if it doesn’t make sense.
Public libraries hold community events all the time, though…? At least the ones near me have conference rooms and such that can be booked. One reason why drag time story hour has been under attack lately. One of the many avenues to further ostracize us
But libraries demand silence… You need loud libraries late at night… with live music, and maybe alcohol… wait…
We need BYOB open indoor spaces that don’t demand anything of anyone.
In my town, such a space would be destroyed within days, become an impromptu homeless shelter, or both. Likely both.
Some sort of house of culture. Wait a second. This is COMMUNISM!
Ohh yes please. Honestly i love the idea of having spaces in libraries where you could socialise.
Isn’t that what the conference rooms are?
I host late night D&D. Or play team sports. Life is what you make it folks.
Yup, even though I’m pretty new to D&D I’m hosting a game with a few people from the us (I’m from Europe), nearly every weekend I’m chuckling because of the things they come up with, some of the best fun from the entire week, even though it’s literally 1 am for me at that time
Yes I get a little bit sleep deprived, but I fix it by oversleeping till 10 AM
Life sucks but this is some of the few things keeping me here
I refuse to play D&D online. It is my “real people time”, an irony considering we’re all playing imaginary characters.
About five years ago I started hosting D&D 9pm (21:00) Friday evenings. There was a restaurant in town that was open late, largely serving takeout orders. So we requested a regular table in the back corner and they offered us a free plate of nachos every Friday. We usually played for three or four hours, and a few people ordered drinks or finger food – enough for the restaurant to break even on the nachos at a minimum. It was our “bar replacement” activity. I immediately had buy in from the players, and had to turn people away.
I moved a few years later, and my new house had a large-group friendly basement suitable for D&D. In my new city, I posted looking for players for the same time slot: 9pm Fridays. I was oversubscribed within a few hours. We had a few pauses during COVID, but are still playing at the same timeslot.
I still use the “in person only” rule at my table. During COVID, a bunch we’re proposing we play online. I don’t want to play online. I can do that with innumerable games that already fill that niche. I want pencil and paper and friends.
Yeah, I mentioned us playing online since I can’t exactly fly every weekend to the US just to play dnd
D&D at the latest night libraries!
It would also be useful for people that don’t like church, which is the main third place in much of rural America.
Many libraries in Denmark do stay open to 9pm. They even have tables and invite people to hang out there. Although I må not sure if you’re allowed to drink or eat there they do want you to just hang out. They have boardgames that you can borrow or play there and they even have boardgames nights where you can play against other guests. Some libraries even have gaming computers and playstation 5 with sofas and all. It’s pretty cool! Some of them also let you borrow things like baking forms, instruments, and tools!
NL here. One of the libraries in my city has a café on the ground floor, as well as space for more noisy activity or higher traffic volume, like music practices or a polling station. While for calm you do need to go up the stairs, the function of the third place does exist in there.
Such a construction, as far as I can tell, is pretty uncommon among libraries in the country though, the cultural sector has been criminally underfunded and disrespected for quite a while. This was a happenstance thing where several local cultural organisations teamed up to make this happen.
NL here. Which city and which library are you talking about?
One in Zwolle, near the Sassenpoort
Yeah, the libraries in Minnesota typically stay open until 9pm too.
They also would have rooms where you would be welcome to have dnd type things.
I’ve worked in a public library and we were fine with food as long the patrons cleaned up after themselves and it wasn’t something like a full pizza. We got salty when folks just left trash on the tables.
As former and probably future homeless person this is a bad idea.
Or we could implement this AND provide decent accomodation for unsheltered people.
Providing houses for the homeless? This smells like socialism and this America! The only people who get socialism are the rich and corporations. Everyone else can get fucked. /s
