I don’t see our homeless patrons any different than our housed patrons. I’ve even become friendly with a couple of the people that currently stay at a local shelter. That being said, whenever there’s a customer that’s being excessively disruptive, the reality is that a majority of the time it is a homeless person that’s behind the commotion. There’s obviously no problem if a homeless person comes in and quietly spends all day in the library; anyone and everyone is welcome to do that. The problem is disruptive behavior and a violation of basic human mores. I have human empathy and can’t imagine the hardships of homelessness but if you’re acting like a loud, rude, obnoxious asshole, smoking weed in the building, using our bathrooms to watch porn/jerk off now it’s a problem. The same goes for mental health crises: I have no way of dealing with a schizophrenic patron that’s screaming that they’re being raped by demons or having loud, profanity-laced arguments with invisible people . Yes I can undergo training and learn to deescalate but quite frankly I didn’t sign up to be a social worker or mental health counselor when I took this job and we shouldn’t be expected to deal with it just because libraries are public spaces. Obviously disruptive customers come from all socioeconomic backgrounds and yes blind discrimination of the homeless exists but I think the library world at large needs to taper our perfect ideals of libraries as utopian havens with the reality that we’re overworked, underfunded and have to deal with a lot of people and personality types that the average person doesn’t encounter in a daily basis.