An ambitious experiment in Minneapolis is changing the way librarians work with their homeless patrons and challenging how we share public space.
Andrea Hansen-Miller, a licensed clinical social worker, keeps drop-in hours at her office in downtown Minneapolis. To signal that she’s ready to begin, she sets two chairs outside her door, to create a makeshift waiting room, and turns on the lights. A wicker basket holds free hats, shoes, scarves, and gloves, and cabinets and a wardrobe rack are stocked with donated coats. Regulars often go straight to Hansen-Miller’s stash of granola bars and Tide Pods. “It gets them in here,” she says. “Then I can ask, ‘Where are you staying at night?’ ” Hansen-Miller, a native Minnesotan in her late thirties, played college volleyball, and is recognizable by her willowy height. She has an upper-ear piercing and wears aqua nail polish and fun socks. Once she learns a client’s name, she doesn’t forget it, even if she hasn’t seen the person in a while. The other day, she pressed a packet of Mott’s fruit snacks into the palm of a known diabetic. If someone asks for a transit pass, Hansen-Miller, thinking ahead to morning, may hand him two.
On a recent Friday, Hansen-Miller helped a new immigrant from Afghanistan with some paperwork, then greeted her next visitor, Robert Blood, a skinny, soft-spoken former cook with eyeglasses and a goatee. He had on a puffy jacket and wore a baseball cap over his shoulder-length hair. Blood had been mostly unhoused for about seven years when, last summer, Hansen-Miller helped him land a studio apartment on the tenth floor of a public-housing building downtown, for sixty-one dollars a month. He moved in on his fifty-eighth birthday. “Best present I could have gotten,” he said.
When a homeless person finally gets a place of his own, both sudden solitude and the presence of neighbors can be unsettling. Noise bothered Blood. At the moment, though, Hansen-Miller learned, he was more concerned about a power outage in his building: “I don’t know if everybody’s got their heat all the way up, or what.” It was late March. Forecasters were predicting six inches of snow that night and another foot starting Sunday. Blood worried that his food would be ruined if the electricity didn’t come back on soon. Hansen-Miller said, “The fridge! I didn’t even think about that.”
Blood’s precarious housing situation started with the deaths of his sister and his mother, a depressing period that was exacerbated by heavy drinking. He couldn’t afford to live by himself and gave up on roommates after sharing a two-bedroom rental with a personal-care aide and the aide’s client, who had a habit of relieving herself throughout the apartment. Blood had never spent a night on the street. Sometimes, he stayed at a shelter; more often, someone let him crash. Now he tried to repay that favor, but his lease forbade long-term visitors, and a recent house guest had tested his patience. “Is she still there?” Hansen-Miller asked.
“No,” Blood said. “And I wouldn’t want her back. She stole a bunch of my cups.” It irritated him that the guest would go grocery shopping for herself but never for the house. “It’s just little stuff,” he said. Hansen-Miller praised Blood for asking the woman to leave, saying, “It’s hard to set boundaries with apartments.”
Hansen-Miller’s next visitor was arriving. Blood stood and said goodbye. As he walked out, he passed cheerful displays of novels and children’s literature, and, in the lobby, a large bronze statue of Minerva, the goddess of justice and wisdom, shown cradling an open book. Hansen-Miller works in a public library.
The Minneapolis Central Library, built in 2006, is a glass-walled Cesar Pelli jewel box with a long, narrow atrium that tapers like the bow of a ship. The atrium features interior balconies, open staircases, and transparent elevators with visible cog-and-wheel mechanics. Central, which anchors the Hennepin County Library system, occupies a block at South Fourth Street and Nicollet Mall, not far from the Mississippi River. The fritting on the windows mimics a different natural element on each side of the building: birch trees, water, prairie grasses, and, as if Minnesotans needed a reminder, snow.
The original Central resembled a stone castle. It opened in 1889, forty-one years after the first settlers arrived in the area hoping to build “a New England of the West,” as Bruce Weir Benidt writes in “The Library Book: Centennial History of the Minneapolis Public Library.” East Coast élites were encouraging the creation of public libraries as an investment in social order, reasoning that well-informed masses would be less likely to “follow simplistic demagogues.” The steel baron Andrew Carnegie, who endowed four of Hennepin County’s forty-one branches and some seventeen hundred other libraries nationwide, said that libraries would “make men not violent revolutionists, but cautious evolutionists; not destroyers, but careful improvers.”
The American Library Association rates the Hennepin County Library system one of the most robust in the country. In an annual study conducted by John Miller, the late president of Central Connecticut State University, Minneapolis consistently ranked among the nation’s most literate cities. Miller once said, “This isn’t about whether or not people can read, it’s about whether they do read.” Minnesota also votes big and blue. In five of the past seven Presidential races, the state has led the U.S. in voter turnout. An astonishing eighty per cent of eligible voters participated in the 2020 election.
A few of Minnesota’s smaller cities have witnessed the hatefulness that has befallen public libraries in other states, but Central has hosted drag-queen events and puts on an annual queer prom without incident. Joshua Yetman, the library system’s communications manager, told me, “Book bans aren’t even a question.” The people of Minneapolis, the Hennepin County seat, support their libraries so ardently that, in 2000, they voted to earmark a hundred and forty million dollars to build Central and improve the branches; voters tend to elect county leaders who are demonstrably committed to the library’s longevity. This year, Hennepin allocated seventy-six million dollars for its libraries—more than some counties’ entire operating budgets. “We don’t have to beg for money,” Yetman said.
Minneapolis was among the first large cities in America where a woman oversaw the public library: Gratia Countryman’s thirty-two-year tenure began in 1904, not long after she graduated from the University of Minnesota. “Her gospel was books and human concern,” Benidt noted. The year after Countryman started, she wrote, “If a library is to perform its functions of elevating the people, it will need to adopt methods other than buying a fine collection of books and housing them in an attractive building and then waiting in a dignified way for people to come.” She placed books in factories, fire stations, hospitals, and prisons, ran an early version of a bookmobile, and is thought to have created the first children’s department. Early on, the library counselled immigrants seeking citizenship and offered books in twenty languages.
In Countryman’s day, the unhoused people of Minneapolis stayed in flood-prone encampments—Swede Hollow, Bohemian Flats, Rooseveltville-on-the-Mississippi—which the police sometimes burned to the ground. Countryman created a reading room for “drifters flopping in cheap motels and boardinghouses,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. She explained, “They have no homes, they have not even the privilege of a chair in many of the lodging houses; where shall they go in the daytime?” One biographer said that Countryman “was a hundred years ahead of her time.”
A century later, Minnesota ranks somewhere in the middle on the issue of homelessness, faring far better than California and New York, and worse than about thirty other states. At least eight thousand Minnesotans have no home, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, though another recent study put the number at more than ten thousand. Nationally, the number of unhoused Americans rose by twelve per cent between 2022 and 2023, to at least six hundred and fifty thousand people. (The problem worsened as COVID-era assistance programs expired.) According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, more than half of Americans survive paycheck to paycheck, putting them “one crisis away from homelessness.”
Social workers serve the most vulnerable members of society, and that has also become true of librarians. In “The Librarian’s Guide to Homelessness,” a book published in 2018, Ryan Dowd, a Chicago-area shelter director, notes that “staff at public libraries interact with almost as many homeless individuals as staff at shelters do.” Shelters often require residents to leave during the day. In Minneapolis, many end up at the library, one of the few public places where anyone can walk in and use the rest room or a phone or a computer, and stay warm or cool, and dry, no questions asked.
Central opens its atrium an hour earlier than the reading rooms. Every morning at eight, at least a dozen people can be found waiting there with overstuffed backpacks and luggage, looking as if they got lost on the way to the airport. The police regularly clear the city’s streets of encampments, but officers don’t run unhoused people out of Central. As long as they follow the rules, any patron—and everyone at the library is called a patron—can stay all day, every day.
Social workers started embedding in libraries when it became clear that libraries attract people who might not seek government services elsewhere. Hansen-Miller calls it “meeting people where they are.”
Hansen-Miller does not function as a caseworker, but people do visit her repeatedly, sometimes working up the nerve to make a life change. “You have to capitalize on that moment when unhoused patrons are like, ‘O.K., let’s do this,’ ” she told me. “We work on getting them connected as quickly as possible because you don’t ever know if they’ll come back.”
One afternoon, she sat in her office with a thirty-five-year-old man, R., as he called a prospective landlord on speakerphone. The woman on the other end of the line informed him, “You’re No. 346 on our waiting list.” Hansen-Miller started scanning her computer screen for other options. She asked R., “Are you getting food stamps at all?” He was. Hansen-Miller zeroed in on an apartment in public housing for five hundred and fifty dollars a month, then mentioned another program within Hennepin County’s array of resources. R. told her, “This is my first time hearing about stuff like this.”
Another day, a woman, K., showed up to merrily say that she was still living “literally by the side of the road.” She was staying in a “tunnel” but wouldn’t say where. Many times, Hansen-Miller had offered to help with permanent housing, but K., who was in her fifties, had always refused. “Were you able to stay dry last night?” Hansen-Miller asked. K. said, “You’re not gonna believe it. I call it a miracle. They say, ‘Oh, you’re in the sewer, she sleeps in the sewer!’ The truth is, it’s a godsend, because when it’s flooded, I mean raining like crazy, I’m dry. The snow falls, I put the cardboard up. Nobody knows how to get in. You gotta know how. And guys have tried. I stabbed one in the eye. I said, ‘You’re not gonna come and rape me, you bastard.’ ”
The tunnel was surprisingly warm, but acquaintances had been warning K. that it might collapse. “They’re trying to scare me so I’ll go into prostitution and be desperate,” she said. “They don’t know about my job.” K., who has a raspy voice and thick bangs, belongs to a union that sets up and breaks down concerts and shows. “They wouldn’t guess that a person who has a perfectly good job would sleep like that,” she said. “Well, no housing in the world can I afford.” Forty to sixty per cent of unhoused Americans are working, but, as the Council on Homelessness recently reported, “There is no county or state where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest apartment.”
“Do any outreach workers know where you’re staying?” Hansen-Miller asked.
“If they did, they’d freak out,” K. said. She described her dicey method of accessing and exiting the tunnel, which she seemed to prefer to the bureaucracy of a shelter system. Hansen-Miller told her, “I hope you get some work soon.” K. lamented that she’d just missed a “Lion King” opportunity. “And Bad Bunny—”
“I know! He cancelled!” Hansen-Miller said.
“I just wanted to do the concert so I could see the guy who went out with one of the Kardashians.”
Central is a five-story building that gets quieter the higher you go. Dillon Young, the library’s services manager, walked me around one day—the stacks, the study rooms, the gas fireplace that no longer works. Library staff were wheeling books around on red carts. We passed dozens of snoozing men. The main library in St. Paul, across the river, doesn’t allow patrons to sleep, but Minneapolis Central does, as long as they’re in a chair, not at a computer, and their face is exposed. Young said, “It’s not without its tensions.” We stopped to check on an alarmingly motionless man whose eyes were slightly open. My first thought was overdose, given the prevalence of fentanyl and other opioids. But the man was just sleeping. Anne Rojas, a librarian who works the main information desk, later told me, “If you’re out on the streets all night, you don’t get much rest.”
When the sight of marginalized people makes another patron feel uncomfortable, the library tends to hear about it. “There are massive unmet needs in our society, but it should not fall to the library to try to meet all of them. It would be better if other county departments, non-profits, etc. could attempt to meet those needs, and allow the library to be a library,” one person wrote, in a recent library-system survey, adding that Central had “alienated traditional library users.” In another survey, a patron complained about “people sleeping like a flophouse.” These types of remarks are rare, though. In the second survey, ninety-six per cent of respondents reported positive experiences, though they’d prefer more parking and cleaner desks. One patron griped, “Never do you see any conservative-leaning books on display.”
Librarygoers have correctly pointed out that employees probably didn’t receive training for the job that they’re currently doing. Nobody becomes a librarian to break up fistfights and tell patrons to quit peeing in the drinking fountain. “A lot of people come into the public library, or go into librarianship, and are shocked by the fact that it’s not their childhood library,” Rojas said. “It can be exhausting to see so many people who need so much, or who have so little.” In the early twentieth century, one of Countryman’s employees was said to have quit because he was “tired of doing ‘missionary work.’ ”
At Central, uniformed security officers make regular rounds and carry pepper spray, and there are panic buttons for staff throughout the building. In recent years, patrons have been written up, escorted out, and banned—for anywhere from a day to a year—for violating a no-trespass order; drinking (malt liquor, beer, brandy, vodka); smoking cigarettes; smoking meth; shooting up fentanyl; using a crack pipe; calling people “bitches” and homophobic slurs; calling security officers the N-word, “dirty-ass wigwam,” and “motherfucker Somali pig”; spitting at staff; flipping people off; peeing on the floor; masturbating at a computer; having sex in the rest room; telling security “I will fuck you up” and “Suck my dick!”; threatening to return with a gun; and punching a woman in the back of the head for no apparent reason, according to the hundreds of incident reports that I read via a public-records request. Four hundred and twenty patrons were banned from Central in 2023, according to the library, though most disruptions were minor enough to manage without involving the police. (About six hundred and twenty thousand people visited the library that year.) One patron recently wrote, on Reddit, “Given that my wife and child witnessed a fistfight with thrown chairs in a library, yeah, I’m all for these kinds of bans.” Scott Duimstra, the director of the Hennepin County Library system, told me, “Whatever’s happening out in the world walks through our doors.”
Until fairly recently, “there was a mentality of push and pull between library staff and security,” Young, the library-services manager, said. A county security official once told him, “You guys want to keep people in, and we want to kick people out.” The new model for hiring and recruiting security is embodied by Brandon Butler, a big guy with calm energy who was promoted to security supervisor because, as Young put it, “he recognized the humanity in our patrons even when he had to enforce the rules.”
Security officers undergo training in de-escalation, crisis intervention, implicit bias, and “trauma-informed” response. “A lot of people are just struggling with mental-health issues,” Kayla Goley, the security division’s training coördinator, explained in a recent Webinar. She mentioned responding to a call involving a man who could not stop screaming about the cost of replacing his birth certificate; by speaking to him slowly and calmly, Goley learned that he had just lost his mother. She told the Webinar participants, “When people are in a crisis, their brain is in survival mode.”
Social workers began embedding at libraries when it became clear that libraries attract patrons who might never show up at another government building. Hansen-Miller, who previously worked at a hospital, calls it “meeting people where they are.” The San Francisco Public Library, in 2009, became the first of the nation’s seventeen thousand or so public libraries to appoint a full-time social worker. Social workers and social-work students can now be found in libraries from Denver to Philadelphia.
In their book “Whole Person Librarianship,” Sara K. Zettervall and Mary C. Nienow, a librarian and a social worker, respectively, noted that in 2018 alone the number of collaborations between libraries and social workers doubled, to more than a hundred. They wrote, “With the advent of libraries serving as safe spaces in the midst of unrest (see Ferguson Public Library) and librarians rediscovering the power of information literacy post-U.S. election, many more of us are searching for tools to foster empathy and understanding in ourselves and our communities.”
Central’s employees never remark on the state of a patron’s hygiene or clothing. Staring can inflame paranoia, so they don’t stare. They resist parenting other people’s children, having accepted that it is none of their business if a kid sits in front of a computer screen and plays Roblox all day. Instead of obsessing over the fact that some families never seem to leave the building to get food, Kelly Wavrin, a children’s librarian, buys juice boxes and Goldfish with her own money, and slips them to patrons who ask.
From her desk, Wavrin can see an enormous dragonfly sculpture, which dangles outside Hansen-Miller’s office, marking the entrance to the children’s area. As Wavrin and I talked one evening, a young mother and her toddler son played Connect Four at a children’s table. An older woman stopped by to borrow “Where the Wild Things Are,” then went off to a corner to read it to her granddaughter, over FaceTime. Wavrin loaned out a phone charger. These services may seem to fit the traditional vision of a library, the one that some patrons feel has taken a back seat to the provision of more complex social services. But the Connect Four family, who Wavrin suspected were residents of a nearby shelter, knew that they could also count on Central for snacks. “Libraries have changed a lot in the past twenty years,” she said.
One frigid afternoon, a young woman in sock feet and with short haircut scurried into the building. She was talking too fast and wore a filthy purple fleece blanket wrapped around the lower half of her body. Hansen-Miller knew that the woman likely had nothing on beneath the blanket but pretended not to notice, just as she never asks how a patron acquired an addiction, lost his family, ruined his teeth, caught a case. After plucking a pair of overlarge boots from the wicker basket, the woman chose a preppy orange overcoat off the wardrobe rack. She asked Hansen-Miller for a new tote bag and dumped the contents of her old one onto the carpet, saying, “Somebody pissed in it or something.”
The woman tore into a granola bar, then transferred her belongings to the new tote, muttering about having just been kicked off the light rail. Hansen-Miller, updating a computer file, said, “Wait, what happened?”
“They told me to take a breather or whatever.”
After the woman said that she wanted to go to a shelter with “nice showers,” Hansen-Miller offered detailed directions to the bus. We soon saw her leave the ladies’ room and exit the library in her orange coat.
In came a woman, C., scratching her arms and gnawing her knuckles. She selected two black leather coats from the wardrobe rack. It was four-twenty in the afternoon and the temperature was dropping. C. spoke to Hansen-Miller in a jumble: “I can’t have a relationship”; “As soon as they find me, I’m going to jail, for something I didn’t even do”; “The lady was hacking my phone”; “I turned my sister’s ex-boyfriend in for murder.”
Hansen-Miller searched online for a bed. Clocking that C. disliked the “atmosphere” at one shelter, she asked which part of town she preferred. “Not North Minneapolis,” C. replied. “And I hate St. Paul. I’m done with St. Paul.”
“Any changes to your health?”
“I’ve got my appointment for my breast cancer.”
“Any changes to your substance use?”
“I slowed down. I’m getting better.”
“What substances are you using now?”
“Just meth and alcohol, when I do,” C. said. “I’ve been trying to stay sober, though. I mean, I can stay sober. I just need a stable place.” She added, “I got my pills for my P.T.S.D., so I’m not flipping out so much.”
“Where are you going to go now that the library is closing for the day?”
C. sang her answer: “Anywhere I go, life goes on without me.”
An exceptionally tall man swanned into the atrium one morning, wearing an ankle-length cape and a feathered fedora. He ascended, by escalator, to the second floor. Beneath the cape, he wore steampunkish embellishments. The neon-blue dot of an electronic headset glowed in one ear. Lurch was his name. He and Robert Blood, the former cook, stood together by a balcony railing, waiting to rehearse a play in the library’s auditorium. They belong to the zAmya Theater Project, a nonprofit troupe for adults who are unhoused or used to be.
Libraries continually debate strategies for remaining, as Yetman puts it, “a durable public good.” The number of visits to U.S. libraries has steadily dropped since 2009, but more patrons are using libraries than ever before, often through digital materials and programming. The zAmya group had performed “A Prairie Homeless Companion” and “The Survival Report,” and was now preparing for a production of “Living in America.” Blood and Lurch invited me to watch them rehearse. Lurch said, “It’s a very welcoming room.”
Patty, a regular, had on a tie-dyed T-shirt and a glittery-gold headscarf. Linward, a newcomer in a black watch cap, carefully followed instructions, and later told me, “I think this is the beginning of something good.” Alejandro, a Honduran who came to Minneapolis for college in the early nineties, wore a burgundy T-shirt that said “This is what an HIV advocate looks like.” For a recent World AIDS Day benefit, he had recruited members of the library’s craft club, of which he is also a member, to make the raffle prizes. Every crafter had donated something—a knotted pearl necklace, a crocheted purse. Alejandro explained, “Some people living with H.I.V., they don’t get Christmas presents. Their families push them away.”
In the front row of the auditorium, Esther Ouray, a veteran theatre teacher, read aloud from the script, an impressionistic survey of a century of American housing policy. When she came to a line referencing the era of “white flight to the suburbs,” the performers “flew” offstage, cheeping and peeping. Alejandro, who is slender, with Bob Dylan hair, waved his arms gracefully and honked like a goose. Ouray said, “Good exit.”
“Six years after segregation becomes illegal, funding for public housing is withdrawn,” Ouray went on. “Funding instead begins to go toward emergency shelters instead of permanent housing.” She looked up from the page and said, “Everybody comes back on and makes the shelter scene.” The cast returned to the stage and pretended to be sitting around or talking on phones. “1981. Funding for mental-health facilities is majorly cut. Where can people turn for help?” The performers wandered around the stage, looking lost.
Everyone debated how to depict the next big obstacle to affordable housing: zoning laws. Shannon, an artist who sometimes wears a mohawk, suggested attaching tiny tents to a sheet of cardboard, to illustrate the era of mass encampments. The performers were unsure of how to represent the Faircloth Amendment, which in the late nineties limited the construction of new public housing. Reading everyone into the twenty-first century, Ouray said, “Poverty increases. Some are drowning.” Everyone practiced lining up across the stage in profile and turning their heads to the audience in unison to say, “Sorry, the waiting list is full.” As they all filed offstage, Alejandro ad-libbed, singing the “Heigh-Ho” song from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Another cast member improvised: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, we’re hoping for a home!”
Blood quietly hit his marks—he often practices them alone in his apartment. He had been staying at a Salvation Army shelter when he first heard about zAmya, in January of 2018. He went to check it out “just to get away from where I was.” At the time, the troupe was doing “Second Chance,” a collaboration with the Minneapolis playwright Carlyle Brown. Blood played Ralph the Accuser, a villainous member of the “Council of Second Chances.” Lurch played Mister Mayhem. When Ralph denied public services to someone in need, the audience, to Blood’s delight, booed. “That meant I did a good job,” he told me. The shelter had led him to zAmya, which had led him to the library, where he had met Hansen-Miller, who had helped him get an apartment. The library was now such a regular part of his life that he dreaded the five-week break between theatre workshops.
The day after the rehearsal, Blood and I went to Mocha Momma’s, a coffee shop in the library’s atrium. “Performing relaxes me and helps me with my mental-health issues,” he said. “I like the fact that we’re teaching people what it means to be homeless—by people who’ve been there. When you’ve got that kind of voice, you’re supposed to stand on the tallest mountain you can, and yell it out. And that’s what I feel like zAmya’s doing. We’re standing on this mountain and yelling, ‘Get your shit together and get these people off the streets.’ ” Outside, we could see 365, a thirty-story luxury residence with sleek balconies and a rooftop pool. Blood said, “You know how many people that would hold?”
Blood serves on the library’s advisory board on homelessness. It was in this capacity that he suggested creating early-morning programming for patrons who were waiting for the library to open. Around 8 A.M. one recent Thursday, Hansen-Miller and a colleague, Chris Ruiz, placed a whiteboard that said “Coffee & Conversation” in the Commons, the room next door to Mocha Momma’s. They moved four long tables into the shape of a communal square and set out three boxes of fresh coffee. Ruiz had brought several books: “Aesop’s Fables,” “55 Slightly Sinister Stories.” The day’s theme was “Flash Fiction.”
Half a dozen men and women were soon sitting around the table: an old guy in a bolo tie, a twentysomething in a drab-olive coat and an American-flag hat, a lean middle-aged man in a wrinkled button-down shirt. Ruiz handed out copies of “Solar,” by April Yates, from an anthology of hundred-word horror stories. The story involved a space crew that had dwindled to the narrator and a mutated cat. The man in the button-down observed, “The cat is a metaphor.” The guy in the bolo tie said, “There has to be a reason why she saved that damn bloody cat. It obviously means something to her.” A poised young woman sitting next to him, her black coat zipped all the way to her chin, said softly, “Maybe she wanted a companion.”
Ruiz handed out blank slips of paper and golf pencils and asked everyone to write something of their own, on a prompt: A guy just took off with your backpack—what happens next? A retiree named Anna had joined the table. She lives downtown and visits the library daily, on her walker. “It’s how people know I’m alive,” she likes to tell the staff. She summarized her piece: “Jumped him, pummelled him. True story.”
As the group disbanded, a garrulous older man dropped by for a last-minute coffee and a hand-knitted hat. Hansen-Miller complimented him for choosing one that matched his orange Harley-Davidson T-shirt. As he left, she reminded him that Mending Day was coming up. Once a month, patrons can get their damaged clothes repaired for free. Over his shoulder the man called, “What about a hole in your heart? Can you fix that?”
Clients find Hansen-Miller by word of mouth. Her services are not advertised. “The whole point is that I’m serving the naturally occurring patrons of the library,” she said. One afternoon, a youngish guy she’d never seen before showed up carrying milk, strawberry cereal, and other groceries in bedraggled sacks from Target and Trader Joe’s. He wondered if Hansen-Miller could tell him his “options.” She listened as he described a conspiracy involving Google, the phone company, the city, and his relatives, and said that he needed help from the Attorney General, the inspector general, the U.N. “Evidence is everywhere,” he explained. “Across the world, from the World Health Organization all the way down to individuals.”
It is important to Hansen-Miller to acknowledge a patron’s struggles without participating in any delusions. The next number that she calls depends on her ability to distinguish substance abuse from mental illness, though the two are often intertwined. She asked the man, J., “Where are you staying at night?” He replied with a story about the suburbs, a death in the family, “a setup murder,” and “stocks and bonds.” He said that he’d once had his own business, installing seamless gutters: “I can work. I know how to make money.” Did he have a caseworker? A doctor? J. replied, “There’s nothing that I can do to find any sort of help.”
Hansen-Miller has a deft way of refocussing a rambling patron. Learning that J. had not recently visited the Hennepin County Behavioral Health Center, a walk-in facility for those experiencing a mental-health or substance-abuse emergency, she said that she knew someone who could pick him up at the library and drive him there.
J. said, “Whatever you think. Let’s do it.”
“They even have a crisis residence,” Hansen-Miller said, explaining that J. might be able to spend the night. J. said, “I’m so down for it, I’m so down for it.” Hansen-Miller made the call. Moments later, she walked J. outside and across the street, to a van marked “Downtown Improvement District.” The driver and a colleague loaded up J.’s bicycle and drove him away.
Hansen-Miller was barely back in her office when a man in his fifties stopped by, frustrated that he had not received his public-assistance swipe card. He said, “I put the last of my clean clothes on. The bus drivers are giving me crap about bus fare. I’m just—” He sighed. “I lost my damn glove somewhere. And a guy died at the shelter this morning. Some young guy with an artificial leg died in his sleep! I was just talking to him last night and he dies in his sleep! I don’t want to go back there tonight.” He said, almost to himself, “I got myself into this shit, but I sure would like a chance to get back on track.” Hansen-Miller soon sent him off with the right address and a new pair of gloves. ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/not-your-childhood-library