Public Libraries

New Yorker - Andrea Hansen-Miller, a licensed clinical social worker who helps homeless people, runs her office out of the Minneapolis Central Library, offering visitors snacks, warm clothes, assistance finding housing, and mental-health support. “The police regularly clear the city’s streets of encampments, but officers don’t run unhoused people out of Central,” Paige Williams explains in this in-depth, on-the-ground report from Minnesota. “As long as they follow the rules, any patron—and everyone at the library is called a patron—can stay all day, every day.”