I'm encouraged by the stores people have left about the role the library functions in their own community. I bring my kids to the branch libraries in San Francisco regularly, and I'd like to reassure people that they are generally safe and clean places for kids and other members of the community.
However, my response to this article was "Let's just get rid of the things." An unsafe library is a useless one.
Now, we don't know the actual breakdown of that 2/3s group, and there certainly are homeless people (including homeless children) who are not addicts and benefit immensely from the public library system. But it's not a great sales pitch to tell people that children's story time will be colocated in an area populated largely by "current and receiving addicts", and people who are 100% in favor of paying for meth addiction treatment centers may reasonably question why we'd store our large and expensive public book collection there.
Keep in mind, if libraries feel unsafe (perhaps because they are unsafe), wealthy people will find somewhere else for story time and books, it's the low income populations that will be denied this essential resource.
This is partly why, in my previous comment, I wanted to emphasize that many of the branch libraries around SF absolutely do feel safe, and are very welcoming and clean places for kids.
While this didn't mean adults couldn't go in these areas, it just wasn't set up in a way any adult would rather spend time in compared to other sections. This sort of a problem can certainly be solved.
Also I'd add on to the fact that the sorts of people who spend their day in a quiet place like a library, even if they are homeless, are almost certainly harmless. The strong economy has lead to an increase of rent seeking behaviors that have put working class people on the street.
Citation needed.
> Some two-thirds of my patrons are homeless or struggling with addiction