Homeless people primarily wanted conversation, not books, from a street library

Evidence

In an unexpected way, BachTroy’s dim, thumping, crowded, synchronized Attention Activism is a lot like the work of Laura, a writer in Portland, Oregon. In 2011, Laura started a public art project to serve the city’s unhoused population. It would be a library, she imagined, but mobile, nimble, on wheels. It would serve precisely those folks who were most likely to feel unwelcome in the city’s public library system. It would function as a kind of mobile “attention sanctuary” protected from the fracking of digital spaces on the one hand and the steady drain of poverty and precarious housing on the other. So Laura tricked out a front-loading Haley Tricycle with a wooden box that opened from the top and from a sliding drawer. She filled the library with her favorite titles, painted Street Books on the side in elegant Metropolitain lettering, and set out pedaling. The people she found sleeping in tents by the Willamette River or sitting on the curb at the highway’s edge were eager to read, but more than anything they were eager to talk. So she would stop, hand out library cards, and chat awhile. Soon these people became her friends. Nearly fifteen years later, Laura’s still at it, although this time with a fleet of bikes and a team of Street Books volunteers, many of whom were among her first unhoused patrons. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 403

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Street Books is a concrete attention sanctuary serving the unhoused — a case study supporting the three-part program of sanctuaries named in the reading purpose.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s attention-sanctuary theme and the library-as-place idea in The Library: A Fragile History.