Brian Lee-Mounger Hendershot is the managing editor for Western City magazine; he can be reached at bhendershot@calcities.org.

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Here’s a radical idea. What if there was a place where anyone could find an answer to almost everything, learn how to play the ukulele, get connected with public services, do their taxes, or find a job? What if that place even lets people borrow tools, books, or seeds? What if it was one of those fabled “third spaces,” places that foster community?

But why stop there? Why not lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and laptops — an expensive necessity in our modern society? Or prepare teens for adulthood and the workforce? Or help distribute lunch to needy kids? And do it all for free.   

Even here in California, such an idea seems laughable. “If you walked into somebody’s office and said, ‘I have this great idea: libraries.’ They’d laugh you out of the place,” said Greg Lucas. “‘Wait, wait, I forgot to tell you — if they find something they like, they can take it with them, based on their word of honor that they’ll return it in a timely manner?’ Yeah, right.”

Greg Lucas is a bit biased. He is the Californian State Librarian after all.

But so am I. As a kid, I had no running water, electricity, or heat for many years. But I always had my local library. It was there I discovered my love of reading, which morphed into a love of writing. My local library is how I found myself in the California State Library two months ago, 1,787 miles away from my hometown.

Seriously, go visit your local library

According to Lucas, on any given day, public libraries offer around 100,000 different programs — from tai chi to disaster assistance. These programs are often tailored to their communities. Long Beach, which has the largest concentration of Cambodians in the country, built an index for what has become the largest collection of Khmer books in the U.S. In Shafter, the library serves as a space for college classes, festivals, art nights, and more. And in Santa Fe Springs, the library serves as the city’s go-to institution for culture and entertainment.

Apart from negotiating statewide contracts for local libraries and offering grant funding, the state library offers its own set of services. It partnered with CalMatters to create a resource library on wage theft, mental health care, renters’ rights, and other common issues. The state library also recently rolled out a statewide eBook library and maintains a downloadable braille and audiobook collection. (I can confirm that people do indeed read certain magazines for the articles.)

But Lucas, a self-described “old stodgy guy,” has a lot of ambitious ideas. Maybe it’s the former reporter in him, who cut his teeth covering politics and policy in the Capitol for 20 years at the San Francisco Chronicle. Take incivility.  

“Look, if we’re all going to sit around and whine about how we’re living in a polarized society, the greatest way to unpolarize a society is to make everyone go to the library because you’re going to see people that ain’t like you.

“There’re little kids who don’t look like your little kids. There’re old people like me who are in there. There’re veterans. There are all these different kinds of folks that you may or may not encounter on a daily basis. Without you even knowing it, that builds community cohesiveness.”

What if libraries could help solve California’s biggest problem?

Here’s another big idea. What if libraries could help end homelessness? It’s an idea with merit. Some already have social workers on staff. But librarians, he posits, are well-positioned because they interact with some of their community’s most vulnerable residents daily.

“It surprises me that for all the money that we’re spending on trying to address homelessness, there isn’t a penny that the state sends to libraries,” he said. “How much money would be saved by tapping into that knowledge that just comes from being in the same place as somebody all day long?”

It’s not like the state hasn’t launched similar, ambitious programs in the past. To hear Lucas put it, many libraries’ technology services consisted of little more than a cup and some wire over a decade ago. But then, policymakers decided to fund a broadband network that now connects around 1,000 of the 1,127 libraries in the state.

“Show me another government-paid-for entity that’s as nimble or as responsive or as flexible as a library,” Lucas said. “There are none. It’s because the community walks in the door and says, ‘Here’s what I’m looking for.’ And you can’t ignore that if your purpose is to meet the community’s needs and satisfy their expectations.”

The $266 million drop in the bucket

Like all good ideas, this one might require us to fundamentally rethink a few things. Like federal funding.

“$266 million. Seriously? That’s what the richest country on Earth spends to support 17,000 libraries in 50 states,” Lucas said. “$266 million out of a $6.75 trillion budget. That’s less than 77 cents per American citizen. That’s a crime. Doubling it, they wouldn’t even notice it. Tripling it, they wouldn’t even notice it.”

Libraries need every penny of that $266 million. A few years ago, when California was flush with cash, it gave out $500 million to libraries. “I was hoping we were going to build all these cool Scandinavian libraries — steel, glass, and saunas for everyone,” Lucas said. “But the list of the projects that came back and it’s like: ‘Our roofs going to fall down and crush the little kiddos during story time.’”

It’s not just a problem at the federal level either, he argued — the state’s tax system creates winners and losers. And that makes it harder for cities to control their own destiny. “The power of the purse strings is here across the street,” he noted. “Do they know what’s working?” 

To put it another way: If you live in a part of California with limited financial resources, you’re not going to get a world-class library.

Yet it’s precisely those communities that stand to gain the most from well-funded libraries with diverse programming and resources. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that neighborhoods with libraries are more likely to recover faster from disasters than those that didn’t, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Libraries are also undervalued economic drivers, with every dollar invested in a library yielding between $2 and $10.  

Yet, libraries now find themselves doing more with less and less. For example, during the pandemic, libraries pivoted to digital services.

“[Libraries reopened] after COVID-19,” Lucas said. “Now it’s the same amount of money — or less — because they got their budget cut, because all the revenues went through the floorboards because of the pandemic, and so now they’re trying to meet this higher expectation of service digitally and do all the stuff with the doors open.”

Can libraries endure?

Lucas and I chatted a few days before he flew out to D.C., in an attempt to save federal library funding. If you’ve been following the news, you know how this story ends. He was unsuccessful.

In early April, the federal administration unilaterally terminated grants to libraries and attempted to shutter several agencies — including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The California State Library expected to receive $15.7 million in funding — a drop in the bucket once you consider the millions in deferred infrastructure repairs needed to stop the aforementioned kiddo crushing.

Those cuts won’t just affect some of the state library’s programs, like its audio and braille book program. Most of that money goes to local public libraries.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and state attorneys from 20 other states sued to block the move. A few days later, Lucas put a statement out on social media that read in part, “Libraries have endured and will endure because they quickly respond to what their communities need. Centuries of history, good and bad, have rolled by and libraries remain thriving more than ever.”

Yet as I read the news, I couldn’t help but think of one of the final things Lucas said to me. “It always astounds me how hard libraries work, and usually on a crappy shoestring budget. Their usual response [when] you cut their budget by 20% is, ‘It’s going to be super hard to keep doing this with 20% less money.’ It’s not like, ‘Screw you, I’m walking off the job.’”

I hope he’s right. Not just for the kid from Wilburton, Oklahoma. But for all our sakes.