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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
(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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Firstly; that would be a Federal problem, not something that the City can do anything about. Secondly; even if they were illegal immigrants (which is undetermined at this point; most of them claim asylum and have had no determination made for their case) they would still have had the right to shelter under City law.
I'm saying that the arrival of a large number of people, who are legally unable to work, and who have no support system from families, and whom the City is legally obliged to house is a problem.
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.
Good thing that libraries also provide digital information services, including digital book rentals and digital records and academic publication searches.
As well as facilities to access those services if you do not have an adequate computer, internet connection, or subscription access to these resources at home.
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’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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why not close on Tuesday or Wednesday? Unless it's also about staffing difficulty on weekends.