[ahoy]

As other users said above, libraries are a huge deal in poor communities. People use them to search for jobs/fill out job applications. These are tasks that are onerous to impossible on a low-end smartphone, if you have one at all.

I live in a gentrifying area of NYC. There's a public library branch a few blocks away from me that sees lots of visitors every day. I rarely walk by it and don't see people coming and going.

[0x4f3759df]

If these people are there for the space and the Internet, and not the books, that seems like an argument for a new type of institution that has a lot of computers, rather than an argument for libraries.