I was “homeless” for short period in Las Vegas. My experience was different from Quintas as I had no trouble sleeping in my car at shopping centers in the day. When I parked, I made sure I had 3 cars (one in front and two on the side) to hide from any security cameras. If I was asked why I was there, which I was never was despite being there 5-6 hours. I would have responded that I was waiting for someone who was shopping. I changed shopping centers daily. At night, I’d park my car in a casino parking lot and spend the night walking the Strip. Walking the western side is safer as you can walk from casin to casino through bridges as opposed to east side where you out on the street. I ate at the buffets with what little funds and washed up in gas stations after buying a gallon to get the key. I did use some money to gamble and did win enough to get a room and two buffets meals a day by day 4. The situation that put me in this situation, which I won’t go into here, was resolved by day 8. I was fortunate that this was during the winter and not the hot summer. Also, that I had a car, some funds, and “lucky” at the tables.
I’ll tell you what my library patrons do all day. These are chronically homeless people downtown in a state capital, medium sized city. Obviously, I’m not as familiar with what the ones who don’t come to the library do.
7:00 - Kicked out of shelter. Go stand in front of library doors.
9:00 - Library opens. If you have a library card through fair means or foul, race to the computers. If not, race to the newspaper. We have three copies of the daily paper and they’re out all day, with constant little petty fights about it. Why they don’t read one of the millions of books we also have, I don’t know.
11:30 - Start heading towards one of the church free lunches. They kind of rotate, but there are usually at least two going around, anywhere from a block or two to maybe two blocks. Not more than a mile.
2:30 - back to the library
7:00 - Head to the shelters. Once they fill up that’s it, so if it’s cold or raining or whatever they might all be gone by 6 or so to line up. The city opens a winter shelter when it gets cold, but the rest of the year Oliver Gospel Mission houses most of the guys I see.
9:00 - We kick out the ones who don’t go to the shelters at closing. They’re a real minority, though.
Now, at the beginning of the month we won’t see most of them, because many get some sort of check (pension, disability, etc.) and they check into cheap hotel rooms, often with as much liquor or whatever as they can afford, until the money runs out. Say a week. Of course we’re busier in the rain, in the cold, or when it gets over 95 or so. And of course we won’t see the kind of homeless people you see pushing shopping carts or carrying a ton of stuff, because they wouldn’t be allowed to bring it into the building. So it’s a small segment of the population, but I’d say I recognize maybe 70% of the people I see on the street from the library.
Mostly it just seems like an incredibly boring life. Almost none of them read anything but the newspaper, they ignore the people who used to come in looking for day laborers, they don’t do anything that seems intellectually or emotionally fulfilling at all. Which I don’t get, because you’re in the middle of an enormous downtown public library and there is stuff to do!
In Indianapolis - about 20%.
You will be hard-pressed to find anyone that disagrees with you in the activist community. Why did you assume you wouldn’t?
This is America, where you also have the right to be insane. What you suggest is locking dudes up because someone thinks they are mentally ill.
Uh, no, that’s not what he’s suggesting. While the state of mental institutions in the late 70s was deplorable, they were not “locking dudes up”. Heaps of resources are expended every year trying to replace them - but the hardest of cases, those that would require 24 hour monitoring, are near-impossible to reach, simply because the facilities to serve them don’t exist any more.
I think the matter here not taking rights away from the mentally ill, but providing an option to be able to care for the mentally ill instead of turning them back out the moment that they are medicated enough from an episode which has sent them to the hospital. If someone has consistently proved that they are unwilling to care for themselves by going off their medications, and no longer continuing counseling once they leave the care of the hospital, does this not prove that this person is a danger to themselves.
Unfortunately many of the mentally ill homeless are repeat visitors to the hospital and consistently go off their meds, and return to streets where it is only a matter of time before they go back to the hospital again. If there was a provision for committing the person to long term care - this pattern could be stopped, but currently once the person is reacting favorably to their meds and is “no longer a danger to themselves or others”, they either kick the person back out, or allow them to leave.
I think these policies regarding the mentally ill have less to do with the push for “rights” of the mentally ill, than how much money the medical establishment can save by cutting treatment levels to cover only the emergency situations.
Even up here in Canada, I have seen a drastic increase in the number of mentally ill on the streets since I was there due to similar policies up here. If they can commit someone on a short term basis because of the dangers of their mental health, why can they not commit these people on a longer term basis to provide a real way out for them?
Public libraries are open to everyone, so as long as the homeless person isn’t being disruptive then they have as much right to use the library as anyone else. When they are disruptive things get more difficult. I haven’t been in this situation myself (I’m a university librarian, and we only occasionally have homeless people coming in), but the usual policy for dealing with problem patrons (homeless or not) is to first ask them to settle down, then ask them to leave, and then if necessary call the police/security.
At the small college where I used to work a young homeless guy showed up one day during winter break. He was kind of creeping out our desk supervisor because he obviously wasn’t a student or a campus employee and he just kept walking around the library. The library director and security guard talked to him, and I guess let him know that he could stay as long as he didn’t make any trouble. He mostly just walked around or slept in the chairs in the reading area for the rest of the day. I think he maybe came back the next day too but after that we didn’t see him again.
I went to library school at a university with a downtown campus in a mid-sized city, and homeless people showed up at libraries there much more often than at other places where I’ve worked. The most common problem with the homeless at that school’s libraries was people using the Internet kiosks (no log-in required) to look at porn. Most of the names on the list of people barred from campus libraries were homeless people who’d become disruptive or violent after being asked to stop looking at porn on the computers. (Looking at porn in and of itself wasn’t enough to get someone blacklisted.) A friend of mine who works at one of the campus libraries there now said they cut down on homeless porn surfers by removing the stools from the Internet kiosks so you have to stand to use them.
At the library where I work, the policy is pretty much that homeless people can stay as long as they like as long as they aren’t disruptive. Having to call the police is pretty rare, but you do have to ask someone to leave every so often–usually when one mentally ill person gets in an argument with another one over the computers. One guy was really drunk once and snoring in the back, he had to leave.
Personal smelliness is not, IME, usually considered a reason to eject a person. I have helped extraordinarily stinky people use the computers, and washed my hands afterwards (the mouse was disgustingly grimy, but library professionals do not go “Ew, I’m not touching this!”). This was actually a topic of discussion in library school, since the smell can get pretty bad.
I’ve dealt with plenty of people with mental problems, of course, and unless they’re disruptive they have as much right as anyone to use the library. There’s one woman who tells us all about how she wrote all of Bryan Adams’ songs during her career in Hollywood, but she can’t remember the lyrics now so has us print them out for her. When she’s off her meds, she talks about how the Mafia is after her. Once she gave me change with a live maggot along for the ride. This other woman asked question after question about finding the addresses of Pentecostal chapels in various small towns on the other side of the country, and wanted the rules for becoming a minister in that church. She has a dress saved up for her ordination. And so on…
Welcome to the boards, **SmashtheState. ** Very interesting post.
The lady** Dangermom** describes sounds just like my mother in law when she’s off her meds. (The Nazis are after her, though, instead of the mob.) I’m pretty sure the only thing keeping her off the streets is her daughter, who keeps tabs on her and gets her put (with some trouble) in a mental hospital when she gets too crazy. Unfortunately, even after a lifetime of mental illness and multiple long stays in the mental hospital, by law MIL has to try to hurt herself or someone else before they can take her in–it isn’t enough that she’s obviously off her meds. I know there are good reasons for that law, but every time she does a lot of other damage to her life and SILs sanity before she can finally be hospitalized.
Interesting thread.
You would have preferred a dead maggot, dangermom?
If they smell bad enough to be disruptive (and believe you me, there are some seriously disruptive smells in the world - I’m so hardened to them after four years of librarianship that something really has to reek for me to even notive it) our security will tell them they can come back when they don’t smell like that anymore and suggest places they can go take a shower. It’s really, REALLY bad on rainy days sometimes.
A federal appeal panel gave libraries the power to evict the homeless from the library if they weren’t reading books, etc or if their behavior or hygenie offended the other patrons in 1992. I don’t think the case was appealed beyond that.
“Library Wins in Homeless-Man Case”
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/25/nyregion/library-wins-in-homeless-man-case.html
I would LOVE to have a hygenie! 
We had a policy that smelly customers/patrons could be ejected if another customer/patron complained about them.
I wasn’t aware of that. It seems like most disabilty activists are so focused on access to the (trumpet blare) MAINSTREAM(/trumpet blare) b/c it’s so utopiaized, that they forget that not everyone can function well in the “mainstream” Every time I pick up a disabilty thing, someone’s idealizing the mainstream as the perfect place.
Ugh… Renee…do you know if she has a very strong liking for bread and milk? There is some evidence that indicates that schizopheric patients who go off bread and milk get better at a rate something like twice the average, then patients that didn’t do that. I can’t remember where I read it so no cite (and no, it wasn’t on one of those whackadoodle “woo woo” sites) Also maybe try supplementing with fish oil? I lurk at a schiezophernia message board (as I’m fasinated by mental illness) and they have mentioned that fish oil may help with sz.
YES!!! And I mean they’re living on the streets in squalor…I dunno…I think mental hospitals etc can and should be more…communities where people can live and somewhat function despite severe mental illness
checks pants Sorry dude…I be an XX! 
I’d love to know what he did with the 80 grand.
As I mentioned before, I’m an organizer with the Ottawa Panhandlers’ Union. One of our members, Bill by name, by severely beaten by three members of the Rideau Centre security, the largest shopping mall in Ottawa. His “crime” had been looking poor, and therefore suspicious. They grabbed him and physically frogmarched him from the building. When he re-entered and demanded to speak to their supervisor to complain, they jumped him and beat him.
Bill came to us right after getting out of the hospital. The police refused to press charges or even investigate (most of the Rideau Centre security are in training to become cops and, indeed, one of the guards responsible became an Ottawa cop a few weeks later), so we documented his injuries and had our lawyer file a lawsuit for $70,000 in Superior Court against the Rideau Centre. They eventually settled out of court for a cartload of money (I’m not allowed to state how much – that was part of the deal).
At the time of the beating, Bill was homeless and living in a shelter. With the money he got from the lawsuit, he got himself an apartment and a vehicle. He was able to pay for his AZ license and got a job driving a truck. He is currently making $25 an hour, and is now a steadfast supporter of unions and our union in particular.
Good for Bill.
I’ve done that. It’s dirt cheap and has a real, immediate impact. Homeless feet are often very fucked up feet. Shoes or construction boots are another good donation, if you have a few bucks to donate.
Just make sure that you buy the socks from a unionized factory so you can be sure of good working conditions and decent pay. You don’t want to alleviate someone’s misery here at the cost of someone else’s misery two continents away.
To be fair, not only will the activist community be pushing for more facilities dedicated to the mentally ill - they’re also going to be pushing for that facility to be as integrated into the MAINSTREAM as possible. Marginalizing the marginalized is not a very good solution in any disability-related scenario.