Free Wi-Fi is a staple service of public libraries everywhere today. It’s also become a fixture of local debate around how to address homelessness in one pocket of San Francisco.
“We are here, and they feel we don’t deserve to have Wi-Fi because we’re homeless. It’s spiteful, is what it is,” said Hollywood, who didn’t provide his last name and lives unhoused in the area surrounding San Francisco’s Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library.
Hollywood is one of several unhoused residents who frequent the library and connect to the internet inside as well as outside after the building closes. But last August, the branch cut off its Wi-Fi after hours. It’s the only public library branch in the city that discontinues Wi-Fi at night, and the policy continues today, despite a simultaneous citywide push to increase internet access for San Franciscans with lower incomes.
City and library officials said the change was made after neighbors in the area complained that the free Wi-Fi was part of what attracted unhoused people to the area and contributed to crime.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the library branch, pushed neighbors’ concerns forward and requested that the library cut off Wi-Fi in the evenings, email records uncovered by Twitter user HDizz show.
But curtailing Wi-Fi has been only one part of a larger effort to clear sidewalks and discourage unhoused people from staying there.
“Neighbors in that area have been dealing with repeated encampments, open-air drug sales and use, harassment of local businesses and all-around problematic situations going on for a decade at this point,” said Mandelman. “It reached its nadir in the pandemic in 2020. There were encampments on both sides of the street, the sidewalk was impassable, and the historic AIDS mural had been wildly defaced. Neighbors were being threatened. It was bad.”
Nestled between the heart of the Castro and Mission Dolores Park, the Harvey Milk library branch is a gem within San Francisco’s public library system. At the entrance is a fireplace with stylish reading chairs, and beyond rows of books and LPs is a colorful kids’ section where the library hosts story times for toddlers and babies.
Michael Lambert, city librarian, recently wrote in an email to library staff addressing concerns raised about the Wi-Fi hours at the Harvey Milk branch.
He cited “individuals camping on the roof of the Branch, hacking into the Branch’s electrical power, and breaking into a small closet on the exterior perimeter of the building,” among acts of vandalism that led to the change.
But email records obtained by HDizz show that those incidents dated back to as early as 2015, before the 2017 study on crime in the area was released, and that the library for several years pushed back against cutting off Wi-Fi at night.
Lambert wrote that the Harvey Milk branch was the first to bring on a fixed security officer, however, and that other branches have since replicated that practice. He added that the library has worked with the city’s Recreation and Parks Department and Public Works to remove needles and other waste from the sidewalk area outside the library and improve landscaping.
Hollywood said he feels that people like him are being blamed for city-wide problems and punished for using a public service.
He also doesn’t plan to leave the area he’s called home base for several years, despite having a tougher time connecting online there at night.
“I know the librarians here. I talk to them all the time,” Hollywood said. But the decision to discontinue Wi-Fi at night, he added, “doesn’t help anyone. It only hurts people.”
Digital divide
Even in high-tech San Francisco, internet access is uneven. Unlike some rural areas that struggle with connectivity, fiber-optic cables and infrastructure are available here. But for people with lower or no incomes, monthly internet plans don’t always fit the budget.
