ON A RECENT Friday afternoon, Joe Bank makes his way quietly through the stacks in the San Francisco Public Library’s main branch. Books aren’t on the 33-year-old’s mind. He’s on the lookout for people in need—people who might need the same social services he once did, when he was homeless and living in a city park.
Bank isn’t just a concerned fellow citizen—though he certainly is that. He’s also on the job, as part of the country’s first in-house, library-specific social work team. Officially, he’s known as a HASA, one of six Health and Safety Associates employed by the library in partnership with the San Francisco Department of Health. The public library HASAs are all formerly homeless, thereby possessing an innate ability to notice the telltale signs of unhoused people in need of a helping hand. Bank’s boss is Leah Esguerra, the country’s first full-time psychiatric social worker employed in a public library.
Esguerra’s small outreach team is tasked with more than answering questions or offering help to clients who need assistance locating or securing social services. HASAs also train library staff on how to respond to patrons in need and how to diffuse and de-escalate tense situations with calm, collected compassion. Furthermore, working as a HASA is a six-to-12-month vocational training program, after which the outreach workers can graduate to other social service jobs. (Bank is currently the only HASA who has stayed on longer than a year.) Esguerra says that because her staffers are all formerly homeless, they find a special purpose in their ability to give back to people in situations similar to their own. “They love the routine and their contribution,” she explains.
As the only other long-term SFPL outreach staffer besides Esguerra, Bank has been able to help countless people since becoming a HASA. He says his job isn’t just a job, or simply a way to pay the rent. “It’s a pretty magical thing when you see someone you helped from the start come back, now housed,” he says. “They always come back to say thanks. Always.”
YOU MIGHT SAY libraries are one of the last truly public services, offering patrons almost limitless information in every medium, from dusty print volumes to online resources just a cursor click away. But anyone who has visited an urban (or even suburban) public library in recent decades knows these hallowed literary spaces also often double as shelters on blisteringly hot or blustery cold days. Libraries are also generally safe, a serious concern as rates of hate crimes against the homeless have spiked in the past 15 years. And they have another even more basic necessity: public restrooms that are, indeed, open to the public.
For perhaps obvious reasons, quantifying homelessness is difficult. But government agencies and nonprofits agree on one thing: Since the 1980s, homelessness rates in the United States have skyrocketed. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that there are currently more than 600,000 people homeless every night in the U.S., including both homeless families and individuals.
San Francisco has an estimated 7,000-plus homeless residents in a city of more than 825,000. It isn’t the country’s most urgent housing and poverty crisis. But in the context of yet another technology sector boom fueling the city’s hypergentrification, and in a nation still emerging from a deep recession, San Francisco’s homeless are one of the most discussed and visible unhoused populations in the country.
The San Francisco Public Library main branch is located in the Civic Center district, in the shadow of the city’s government buildings, at the geographic heart of the rising tensions around housing and homelessness in San Francisco. The Civic Center is part of the larger Tenderloin neighborhood, a historically poor area with high crime rates and a dense concentration of homeless residents. It’s also an area filled with single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs, a low-rent residential option a step up the food chain for the previously unhoused.
The Tenderloin, or what locals call “the TL,” is especially well known for its odd geographic location, bordering tourist mecca Union Square and at the crosshairs between tony Nob Hill and the rapidly gentrifying South of Market district. Travel forums and TripAdvisor ratings are littered with (often unsympathetic) accounts from unsuspecting visitors who wandered too deep into the TL and happened upon stereotypical signs of life on the streets: people sleeping in doorways, public urination, and, sometimes, drug use.
In 2004, the city launched a 10-year plan to eradicate homelessness. A decade later, it’s hard to see that anything has changed. But despite this rather depressing civic backdrop, the San Francisco Public Library has provided a blueprint and some much-needed inspiration to other North American libraries seeking to assist the homeless rather than shut them out.
Inspired by the success of the San Francisco program, in 2011 the public library in Edmonton, Alberta, launched its own social service program, hiring three full-time outreach workers. In January 2012, the main library in Tucson, Ariz., hired a public health nurse to handle outreach at six branches. Splitting 40 hours a week across multiple locations was too much for one person, though. Six months into the pilot program, five nurses were hired to share the workload. In May 2014, Jean Badalamenti became the Washington, D.C. public library’s first health and human services coordinator, only the second in the nation after Esguerra. Esguerra and Bank also note, with measured pride, that teams of researchers and students from as far away as Japan and the U.K. have visited the SFPL to better understand homelessness in the U.S. and what some public agencies are doing to help residents in need.
Lovingkindness and civil rights in action can be messy business. It’s especially challenging for a public sector institution tasked with providing resources to every potential patron, housed or otherwise. It’s important to note the assistance available at the San Francisco Public Library isn’t a free-for-all. Patrons who have housing may misunderstand or complain about how the homeless use the facilities, but the library still has a basic code of conduct. Most libraries set their own rules, following the 1992 circuit court ruling that libraries are a limited public forum, meaning available for set purposes such as reading. At the SFPL, for example, sleeping isn’t permitted. If a patron repeatedly breaks the rules, he or she will be asked to leave the premises for up to three days. Seattle, another city where the public library is at the heart of the homelessness debate, also limits sleeping, large bags, and alcohol consumption on the premises.
When Esguerra took the job six years ago, she knew she’d be working within the confines of the city’s unique socio-geography but with the advantage of leaning on its historically progressive values. Previously, she worked in a more general capacity with the mentally ill and chronically homeless at the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, a multidisciplinary collaboration between the city’s Department of Public Health, Human Services Agency, and Community Awareness and Treatment Services Inc. At the SFPL, she says she wanted to challenge others to consider “a different face of homelessness.” Esguerra met with every library department to clarify expectations and ask what department heads most needed.
She isn’t just there to assist the homeless. Her job is to better train everyone on staff to ensure that every individual gets to truly enjoy and benefit from the library’s extensive resources.
Bank joined Esguerra’s team three years ago after getting off the streets and getting clean. His hair is buzzed close to the scalp, and he speaks softly and deliberately. When he hears a commotion near a bank of elevators, he walks quickly but quietly toward the noise, cautious but open-minded and ready to help. Bank survived several bouts of homelessness in Oregon and northern California before landing in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which has doubled as a crash pad for the country’s disaffected and disadvantaged youth since at least the 1960s.
If you know to look for him, Bank is easy to spot in a button-up flannel shirt, a black nylon backpack slung over one shoulder. Inside is a shiny, overstuffed black binder, an impressive toolkit of his own creation. In a sea of high-tech devices, many patrons’ faces illuminated by smartphone screens, Bank’s binder of lo-fi solutions seems decidedly disruptive. It’s also practical. When you live hand-to-mouth, you tend to need a flyer, maybe a map—not a URL. Bank is constantly updating his labeled files. He knows when and where the next free STD screening will be. He can point anyone toward the closest free meals program in town, or a pick-up spot for free toiletries. If you need a safe, quiet place to nap during the day, Bank will point you to St. Boniface, a Tenderloin congregation that opens its sanctuary pews for sleeping every day from 6 a.m. until 3 p.m. If there’s a 30-day bed open in a shelter, he’s the guy who can direct you toward it.
Esguerra says that in their line of work, there’s no hard and fast definition of success. Homelessness can be a revolving door—and the library is one, too. Providing long-term care to the city’s most needy residents is a nuanced accomplishment, and one often without a tidy, linear narrative. She recalls a situation from a few years ago that, despite its lack of storybook happy ending, showcases what her program can mean in an individual’s life.
For nearly 20 years, a chronically homeless man had come to the library. Mostly, he stayed out of trouble. The security guards all knew him; everyone did. He was a worn, tough guy—“but deep inside, a marshmallow,” Esguerra remembers. Because the library staff knew him, they were able to spot when his health seemed to suddenly decline and get him into a clinic for a much-overdue checkup. A cancer diagnosis gave him a few months to live. But when he passed away a year later, Esguerra says, he wasn’t alone, out on the streets. Instead, the people who had watched over him for the past two decades surrounded him. A blessing is a blessing, no matter how small.
Bank is the first HASA to work at other library branches in town—including two days at Park Branch, next to his former home in Golden Gate Park. The main branch offers a lot of open space in which to have a conversation and maintain confidentiality. By contrast, the Park Branch is small with a community room in the basement. It’s also an area where Bank’s gentle instincts are especially needed. “We all have our own style,” he says.
Bank has basic guiding principles, such as trying to never make assumptions and to never pester or embarrass anyone. If he senses there’s a particularly sensitive situation, he’ll find a quiet, neutral space and ask a client to join him there for a confidential chat.
Bank never imagined he’d end up as a social worker. But the job suits him so incredibly well, he’s pursuing certification in social work. “This is righteous,” he says. “This is what I want to do.”
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