Sunday service suspended at all NYPL locations | Hacker News Reader

Sunday service suspended at all NYPL locations

nypl.org

57 pointsraybb70 comments

Sunday seems like a poor choice. Sunday was always a prime homework day for me when I was in school. Typically not a lot else going on, so there was time for quiet, focused work.

Why not close on Tuesday or Wednesday? Unless it's also about staffing difficulty on weekends.

> Why not close on Tuesday or Wednesday?

Library near my parents' house used to be closed or would close early on select weekdays. It really, really sucked for getting schoolwork/research projects done.

We expect businesses to be open during the workweek. We do not always expect them to be open on weekends.

I don't understand why they don't open late 7 days a week. Who goes to the library before noon? The kids are all at school.

> Who goes to the library before noon? The kids are all at school.

It was a decently common pre-school field trip when I was a kid, though they could easily do those as an 'as needed' and cut hours without a pre-scheduled reservation for those hours.

>Who goes to the library before noon?

Parents with young kids/toddlers. Story Time at my local public library (not NY) is very well-attended.

Well, shit. Guess not all the kids are at school then.

That's right. School generally starts at age 5 or 6 and kids exist before that age.

>Who goes to the library before noon?

I know several older people who use it as an opportunity to get out of the house. They get their coffee and head to the library to read the newspapers.

Our libraries do a lot of activities aimed at pre-schoolers. Those activities are best scheduled during school hours so parents can attend while their school children don't require parental attention.

A library isn't a business, and even if you want to think about it that way, weekday closings for business are not that unusual. Barbers tradtionally take Mondays off. Dentists are often closed on Fridays. There are many other examples.

in NYC, libraries are someplace folks without homes can hang out, use computers, be out of the weather

people work remotely from libraries (free wifi in a quiet environment and you don't have to buy coffee)

libraries offer services as well, especially for immigrant populations

Sunday service has always been particularly important to the New York City public libraries. Andrew Carnegie’s original deal always was, he would find the construction of the branches the libraries would run the branches, and the city would fund the branches with seven-day service. For a while. the Carnegie branches open seven days a week, even as they had to follow through on cutbacks at the non-Carnegie branches.

But that ship sailed long ago. Very few were still able to offer Sunday service before this:

- NYPL (Manhattan/Bronx/Staten Island): 8/92 sites

- Brooklyn Public Library: 8/66 sites

- Queens Public Library: 2/66

(Yes, there are three separate public library systems for New York City. They pre-date the consolidation of the city and no matter how hard folks have tried every study on consolidating the three systems into a single organization, winds up costing significantly more than the current status quo.)

Of course no one is happy about cuts to vital services like the library. But people are also unhappy with a 3% minimum city income tax and a $5 billion budget shortfall.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Well, give more money to the cops. That'll fix everything.

The NYPD is skipping an entire Academy class because of the cuts. It was uniform to every city agency.

Five classes if I remember correctly; there are usually four classes per year.

The police budget is ~6 billion, out of about a $110.5 billion budget

[0] https://www.nyc.gov/site/omb/publications/agency-budgets-pro... [1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/fp11-23.pdf

That's too high for what they do (or don't do)

That's before overtime, which the NYPD routinely abuses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually[1].

[1]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-ov...

great thats a billion dollars left for them after NYC covers the budget shortfall.

Looks like I hit a nerve - Apparently you can criticize working cops, but not illegal immigrants.

In their own words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-dh1waEkrk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvmJjhk6Gsg

Oh man, I didn’t realize it was 3%!

NYC has a ton of people at the top of their fields in a really dense setting. I wonder what city services cause such a big shortfall! On paper it should be easier to finance NYC than any other big city, so I wonder where the money goes.

Or an I incorrect and the city is poorer than I think? Perhaps Long Island sucks more incomes away from the city than I thought?

About $32 billion comes from property taxes and $38 billion from "other taxes" (mostly income tax).

[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/fp11-23.pdf

The mayor of NYC has been talking about illegal immigration scaling up this year costing the city billions.

Everything in NYC is expensive. We spend almost $40,000 per year on each public school student. Construction is hugely expensive. The Department of Corrections has 1.4 corrections officers for every person incarcerated.

Simple solution, imprison less people. NYC prisons are notorious for overcrowding for decades now [1] [2].

It's shocking for me as a German that this seems to have been a consistent fact of life that's just accepted by everyone and nothing is being done - no new prisons are built to offer more space for prisoners, and nothing is being done to reduce the amount of people heading towards prison.

[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/prison-a...

[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/new-york-post-photos...

NYC average daily jail population has been decreasing almost continuously for the last 30 years. Conditions at Riker's Island are much more to do with the problems between the civilian oversight function and the COs unions than they are to do with an actual excess of inmates with respect to cells etc.

Maybe they should figure out how to build a library for less than $2100 a sq ft

https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/118704548054032384...

Surely there are other cuts with less impact. I suspect many more users would rather they redirect the ample Private Foundation funds for "NYPL LIVE" stage events (December: "Lesbian Poetic Traditions") to staying open on Sundays.

But Library management wants to host cool friends AND generate angry voters.

I see this pattern often in government budget showdowns; the tiniest cuts produce outsized service impacts.

Tax the billionaires. Tax the vacant real estate holdings at the high end. Tax short term rentals.

We lost net 10 of them costing hundreds of millions of dollars already. Short term rentals were basically banned outright. Not very many vacant real estate holdings, and how are you going to prove that they were sufficiently vacant -- going to roust them all at night?

City needs to actually get its act together to become more efficient.

> Tax short term rentals.

Careful.

Don't fuck over the transient or temporarily (permanently!) displaced with these broad strokes.

A quick google says the proposed city library budget was $471.5 million and the total city budget is $107 billion.

That's less than half a percent of the overall budget.

Shutting down NYPL on Sunday is almost akin to shutting down homeless and rec centers on Sunday. It only hurts the disenfranchised who need the shelter and resources the most.

Personally I hate the fact that libraries have become de facto homeless shelters. It gives them a constant background noise of danger and a lot of these people just sit around watching softcore porn on youtube. I think you'd see more library attendance if the places felt safer to leave kids at alone

I spent a decade as a public library board member.

I saw every possible combination of anti-social behavior from the homeless that would encamp there. Many times I had to 'assist' asking someone to leave. The librarians _could_ have called the cops and had the violators permanently barred from re-entering but they would rarely do that.

It is 100% scaring away families and elderly.

It’s interesting how we (as a culture) tolerate people who have broken the social contract. As Americans we’ve really let the bottom fall out. They’re so far away from society they do not care anymore about norms. And we do not care to do anything except let them exist in our spaces to the detriment of the public.

The costs they create far outweigh whatever a programme to help them would cost.

We're literally giving up on social activities and safety and trust because we're not willing to meaningfully address the down and outs.

It's a "problem" of a nonhomogeneous populous: the wide range in definition of what maintains the social contract.

For some, if they in particular aren't disturbed from their AirPods, murder or other crime is a-ok.

For others, if you wear the wrong ratty clothes into the library, you're breaking the social contract.

> For others, if you wear the wrong ratty clothes into the library, you're breaking the social contract.

This is a very bad faith re-statement of what I wrote about my experiences with the homeless in my library.

My comment was not referring, nor directed, to you.

It's easy to paint with a broad brush "'the homeless' = bad". That is as casually discriminatory as being antisemitic and is offensive. Perhaps some empathy and nuance would help rather than condemning a group of people for the actions of individuals.

You can broadly say that many homeless people engage in anti-social behavior, and therefore homelessness is a problem we should be motivated to solve even if we have no empathy for the homeless people themselves

Us and them rhetorical nonsense. I was homeless. I didn't flash or piss on the floor indoors. Perhaps you're conflating homelessness for a lack of mental healthcare.

I see where you're coming from and I honestly don't like it either. Some are disruptive, shout, smell bad, ...etc. But of all the times I've been to the library (any maybe I'm just lucky), I can only count a few instances I felt uneasy about the people I was around. Of the few times they did act out or pulled up porn; they were escorted out. I think that's mostly a consequence of how our city deals homelessness and our city should do better, but that's complete tangent.

To me a library is a public service that should serve all. To this day, after a decade living here, I've yet to find a cafe, bar, or any place to get free internet, a laptop, shelter, and a decently maintained public bathroom.

I just want to reiterate I agree with your frustration. I want the NYPL to be better, but it needs to serve everybody.

I agree but libraries are not a daycare either.

A lot of American cities are experiencing budget shortfalls thanks to the WFH trend and other factors, and it will exacerbate problems with many important and popular services.

Here in Boston, we just found out that the estimated cost for fixing the subway system is $24.5 Billion (https://www.universalhub.com/2023/maybe-if-we-held-bake-sale...). It's been neglected and mismanaged for years, and no city or state agency can come up with that kind of money (it's about half of the commonwealth's annual budget).

The NYC subway is in a similar situation, but at a much larger scale. There are similar problems all over the country - see "America’s Trains and Buses Are Speeding Toward a Cliff"(https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/americas-mass-transi...)

Definitely just a lay person but I seriously doubt that figure is as large as a soaked sponge...

Ridership of public transit in Boston has slowly improved but it's still down something like 40% since pre-pandemic. I don't know how much is WFH--auto traffic seems and everyone I've talked to agrees as bad as ever or worse. But it certainly doesn't help on the funding site, especially to the degree that low ridership leads to service cuts which make for even lower ridership.

The NYC subway is run by the MTA, which is a state agency. They aren't included in the city's budget.

(Historically, this has been a large reason why the MTA has been woefully underfunded -- the state has used it as a political lever against the city.)

> no city or state agency can come up with that kind of money

Every major city can come up with that kind of money. Spread it out over 20 years and raise taxes 10%. So sales tax goes from 6.25% to 6.875%, property tax goes from 0.1% to 0.11%. If a city with 675000 people needs to raise $24B, they just raise taxes $3500 per person per year for the life of the project.

You're not going to spend the $24B in a single year, so you don't have to raise the money in a single year.

MBTA claims a daily ridership of ~800,000. Raise the fair $0.25 per ride and you get an extra $50M/year.

I'm not saying you would be popular, but you could raise the money. Shutting down the subway wouldn't be popular either. Aren't those your options? Either it's worth the money or it isn't.

I wish they'd can Wednesday instead of Sunday.

Sunday is when people have time off to use something like a library. If they're going to cut a day, cut mid-week.

New York's budget is a disaster and it's only getting worse. They spent like Covid stimulus would never end, and didn't expect the migrant surge to ever reach their doorstep. Open libraries on Sundays does seem like a reasonable thing to cut. I wouldn't be surprised to see additional cuts or closures in the coming months.

In what way has a migrant surge affected the budget?

Spitballing, but I think they provided shelter for a lot of them. No idea if that would significantly impact NYC's budget

NYC is housing migrants in hotel rooms that it pays for.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20230926176/hou...

Some hotels are charging the city $300 a night.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-09/nyc-migra...

A billion here, a billion there... pretty soon you're talking real money.

Wonder why they don't include AirBnB in that? Oh, yeah, I forgot, they're totally not a hotel, right?

AirBNB is all but banned in NYC.

So the hotels are full of migrants, not tourists, and there are few other options, which further hurts the local economy.

Tourism numbers are rapidly approaching pre-pandemic highs[1], with the main inertia being Asian tourism, not a lack of hotel availability.

The city really shouldn't be attempting to house migrants in midtown Manhattan, but doing so isn't actually appearing to hurt tourism numbers.

[1]: https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/09/05/tourists-china-hotel-rate...

Why does it cost so much? Seems strange that the city is unable to negotiate better rates if these hotels are struggling

Any quick googling will return numerous stories about this. Here is one that estimates it at $5,000,000 a day that NYC is spending.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/03/bidens-migrant-mess-costing-ne...

NYC has a "right to housing" law that requires the government to provide a roof for anyone who needs it, including migrants. With the recent influx of migrants this is causing unforeseen spending that will total $5bn in 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/nyregion/adams-nyc-migran...

> NYC has a "right to housing" law

Not a law, a consent decree, and Adams just suspended it.

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