The New Yorker:

An ambitious experiment in Minneapolis is changing the way librarians work with their homeless patrons and challenging how we share public space.

By Paige Williams

Andrea Hansen-Miller, a licensed clinical social worker, keeps drop-in hours at her office in downtown Minneapolis. To signal that she’s ready to begin, she sets two chairs outside her door, to create a makeshift waiting room, and turns on the lights. A wicker basket holds free hats, shoes, scarves, and gloves, and cabinets and a wardrobe rack are stocked with donated coats. Regulars often go straight to Hansen-Miller’s stash of granola bars and Tide Pods. “It gets them in here,” she says. “Then I can ask, ‘Where are you staying at night?’ ” Hansen-Miller, a native Minnesotan in her late thirties, played college volleyball, and is recognizable by her willowy height. She has an upper-ear piercing and wears aqua nail polish and fun socks. Once she learns a client’s name, she doesn’t forget it, even if she hasn’t seen the person in a while. The other day, she pressed a packet of Mott’s fruit snacks into the palm of a known diabetic. If someone asks for a transit pass, Hansen-Miller, thinking ahead to morning, may hand him two.

On a recent Friday, Hansen-Miller helped a new immigrant from Afghanistan with some paperwork, then greeted her next visitor, Robert Blood, a skinny, soft-spoken former cook with eyeglasses and a goatee. He had on a puffy jacket and wore a baseball cap over his shoulder-length hair. Blood had been mostly unhoused for about seven years when, last summer, Hansen-Miller helped him land a studio apartment on the tenth floor of a public-housing building downtown, for sixty-one dollars a month. He moved in on his fifty-eighth birthday. “Best present I could have gotten,” he said.

When a homeless person finally gets a place of his own, both sudden solitude and the presence of neighbors can be unsettling. Noise bothered Blood. At the moment, though, Hansen-Miller learned, he was more concerned about a power outage in his building: “I don’t know if everybody’s got their heat all the way up, or what.” It was late March. Forecasters were predicting six inches of snow that night and another foot starting Sunday. Blood worried that his food would be ruined if the electricity didn’t come back on soon. Hansen-Miller said, “The fridge! I didn’t even think about that.”

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