My day job is in a public library, and I try to follow the goings-on in my line of work. Periodically, I get reminded that an apparently widespread sentiment is that the biggest problem facing public libraries is not underfunding, inaccessibility, or censorship, but rather, the fact that poor and disabled people use them.
Specifically, that public libraries are struggling with the “mental health crisis” and “homeless crisis,” and that library workers are ill-equipped to handle these “crises.” So, let’s take apart these “crises” one at a time: The existence of Mad, neurodivergent, or psychiatrically disabled people is not a crisis.
Mad/neurodivergent people being “visibly weird” is not a crisis.
Mad/neurodivergent people existing in public spaces like public libraries is not a crisis. People saying and doing things that other people do not understand is not a crisis. Mad/neurodivergent people are members of the public. They deserve the same rights to access public services as any other members of the public. They are not a crisis. None of these things are problems. This is simply the nature of unsegregated human diversity having access to a truly public space.
The existence of unhoused people in public spaces is also not a crisis.
To be clear: The fact that people are unhoused is a crisis. The fact that housing prices are so high relative to real wages that many people cannot afford a place to live is a crisis. The fact that we don’t have universal housing is a disgrace. The fact that there are empty houses which unhoused people are forbidden from occupying is a moral evil. The setup of society and its legal and economic systems that results in some people not having a place to live? That’s a crisis. Unhoused people are victims of this unjust, oppressive system. Their living situation is a crisis, but their existence is not the crisis.
Let’s take a look at the functions of the word “crisis” here.
One function is to use compassionate-sounding, progressive-sounding, social-problem language to convey what is essentially a desire not to have to see poor and disabled people in public. The fact that public spaces, by default, are supposed to be free of poor and disabled people means that a truly public space, not segregated by income or ability, is seen as a “crisis.”
Another function, perhaps even more harmful, is to obscure the reality of the causes of homelessness, and the relationship between disability, lack of healthcare access, and homelessness. Homelessness is a serious social problem, but is “crisis” the right way to convey it? “Crisis” has a connotation of an urgent, short-term problem. Many people have written about the ways that people, especially Americans, are much more willing to help with a short-term problem than to build the social structures to address or prevent long-term problems.
Homelessness is a long-term problem. For decades, investors and landlords have been allowed to buy up housing and charge exorbitant rents for it. For decades, real wages have not kept up with housing costs. For decades, politicians have slashed public assistance and subsidized housing.
Systemic ableism, along with other forms of systemic bigotry and oppression, including racism, classism, and queerphobia, have left disabled people (especially multiply-marginalized disabled people) overwhelmingly unemployed or underemployed, and unable to afford housing.
Lack of access to preventative healthcare, along with other consequences of poverty like stress and inadequate nutrition, leads to chronic illness and disability, which leads to reduced value in the capitalist labor market, which leads to more poverty. Lack of access to treatment and management for chronic pain leaves desperate people turning to black-market painkillers, which are both medically dangerous and criminalized. All these things entrench poverty and entwine poverty with disability and untreated chronic health conditions.
This isn’t a sudden short-term crisis. This is the entirely foreseeable result of entrenched, cumulative years of intentional public policy and systemic social oppression, and it will take years of multifaceted public policy and cultural changes to undo (although some desperately-needed changes – like banning police from destroying homeless encampments or arresting people for the “crime” of being homeless – could be implemented immediately). Calling it a “crisis” obscures that the system of unregulated crony capitalism and structural oppression is simply working as intended.
There’s a third function of the “crisis” framing: Supporters of institutionalization and forced drugging like to depict these abuses as the correct solution to homelessness, and one way they do this is by categorically classifying homeless people as “in crisis” meaning, not only financial crisis, but “mental health crisis,” which they define as a problem that requires forced drugging to rectify. In this framework, the solution an unhoused person needs is to be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hold and forcibly drugged in order to “stabilize” xyr out of xyr “crisis.” After this, the unhoused person will be sufficiently “stabilized” and neurotypical-passing, and xe can successfully find a paying job and pay for long-term housing.
Of course, there are many flaws in this strategy – besides the inherent human rights abuse of forced drugging, there’s the fact that most employers will not hire a person without a fixed address, no matter how neurotypical-passing xe is, and many jobs do not pay enough to cover rent in even the cheapest urban housing. There are also neurodivergent people who will not be made neurotypical-passing after being forcibly drugged (because the U.S. is a two-party political system, there are two major proposed solutions to this: Permanently institutionalize them until they die, or leave them permanently unhoused until they die).
This usage of “crisis” framing is entirely intentional – politicians have explicitly opposed funds for long-term subsidized housing for unhoused people because, they assert, what unhoused people really need is “crisis care.”
Sometimes people do experience profoundly distressing emotional states that they genuinely experience as a crisis. But in no case is forced drugging or institutionalization helpful or appropriate, and in no case is emotional support, even genuinely helpful and consensual emotional support, an adequate substitute for physical, material needs like housing, food, and medicine.
Nor is it really a library-specific problem. If people in profound emotional pain want to come into the library for a quiet place to sit and read, that’s a valuable service to offer. If unhoused people want to come into the library because they have nowhere else to go, let them come. The problem is that people come to us for help securing physical resources, and we cannot, because the resources are not there. I can help you apply for subsidized housing, medical assistance, food stamps, social security, and explain the forms in plain language – I know how to do these things, by now – but I cannot help when your claim comes back denied, as it usually does. I can do my best to help you navigate a hostile system, but I can’t make the system less hostile. Library workers aren’t dealing with the “homelessness crisis”; we’re just the repeated bearers of bad news.
We don’t need more calls for pity for financially secure people supposedly having to deal with the existence of poor and disabled people. We need acknowledgement that poverty and homelessness are economic problems caused by public policy, not emotional problems caused by “mental illness” and bad choices. It’s not a “crisis.” It’s kyriarchy and capitalism working as intended.
