The slow decay of the American library
HOUSTON — Danielle Lavoy and Kaci Cox sat on a familiar sidewalk, watching their kids — each on the cusp of their 6th birthdays — race against melting scoops of ice cream.
Drip, drip, drip. Lick, lick, lick.
The ice cream was free on this sunny Saturday afternoon, courtesy of food carts parked in front of the Heights Neighborhood Library, where residents celebrated the Italian-Renaissance style building’s 100th birthday.
Lavoy and Cox love this library. Come here often. Want to see it at its best.
But despite being one of Houston’s most popular libraries, the Heights branch is not at its best, hasn’t been at its best in a long time — and, according to city budgets analyzed by Straight Arrow News, isn’t likely to be at its best for several more years. At best.
“I mean, it would be great if the windows were replaced,” Lavoy said. “Just like walking through the children’s area would be nicer, but I don’t know how that would happen. Who would fund that?”
That is a multi-billion dollar question being asked in communities across the country. A landmark report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed nearly 16,400 U.S. public libraries. The findings describe a system in a state of “benign neglect” — a term for facilities ignored until they become too expensive to save.
An estimated 38% of public libraries have building systems — HVAC, plumbing or the roof — in “poor” condition. And 61% have features that pose potential health or safety concerns, according to the report.
“These buildings are aging,” David Marroni, a director at the GAO and lead author of the December report, told SAN. “The average age of a library in this country is more than 40 years old at this point. And as buildings age, their systems degrade. You have to keep up maintenance and repair to keep them going.”
But that can be expensive. And once something becomes too expensive, it can be deemed impossible.
The $22 million backlog: Why do library repairs cost so much?
“If you defer maintenance over time, it can be even more expensive to do so, and that can create a backlog of cost that’s really hard to fund,” Marroni told SAN.
According to the GAO, 70% of libraries have a backlog of deferred maintenance. That same percentage expects their backlog to either hold steady or grow in the next three years. In 39% of libraries, the cost of these respective backlogs exceed $100,000.
Houston is a prime example: An SAN review of 15 years of Houston capital budget documents found that the Heights library first requested a roof replacement and an upgrade to the building’s exterior in 2014. That year, the library system received a $450,000 budget allocation to keep the library “safe and easy to use.” It wasn’t yet an immediate need: The line item was added to the final year of the five-year budget request. It stayed there, in year five of five-year budgets, over and over again.
By 2026, the city budget declared the “Heights Library is in need of a full restoration,” for an initial $2.5 million cost in 2030 — more than a dozen years after the city had first promised to start fixing a much cheaper problem.
But that $2.5 million won’t be enough to fix the library, even when it does come to fruition: Mary Benton, a spokeswoman for Houston Mayor John Whitmire, told SAN that money is only for design work. Construction funding will be proposed beginning in 2031, Benton said.
City Council Member Abbie Kamin, who represents the Heights neighborhood, told SAN the full cost is “projected to be over $22 million.”
That $22 million price tag is driven in large part by the building’s pedigree. As both an officially designated local landmark and a member of the National Register of Historic Places, the Heights branch can’t be “fixed” with off-the-shelf parts.
The library hasn’t gone completely unfunded in recent years. In February 2025, city council voted to spend $79,000 on emergency repairs after a roof damage from a 2024 derecho “allowed intrusive moisture to damage interior ceilings, archways, plastered walls and carpet on the main and loft floors.” After the vote, Kamin attempted to sound the alarm.
“This will do some of the repairs specifically from the storm,” Kamin said. “But I do want to bring attention to the needs of the library as listed as one of the most critical needs in the library system.”
The Heights library has a “facility condition index” rating of 59.1%. An FCI rating is a report card for a building’s health, calculated by taking the cost of necessary repairs and dividing it by the total cost to replace the building entirely.
In civil engineering, an FCI rating under 10% is widely considered “good,” while anything over 30% is considered “poor.” Crucially, 60% is the tipping point for an FCI rating, where municipal planners often consider a building a total loss.
The Heights library is 0.9% away from this point. And, city documents show, it’s not even the worst: Four Houston Public Library branches have FCI ratings above 60%.
The tipping point: What happens when a library is a total loss?
About 400 miles east of Houston, in Jackson, Mississippi, the Eudora Welty Library — the crown jewel of the Jackson Hinds Library System — finally gave up in 2023.
“The roof was leaking and by the last couple years, ceiling tiles were falling down. We were hanging onto the building because people really loved it. The location was great, and there was a lot of stuff going on down there, but it got to the point where they just couldn’t keep it up,” said James Hampton, a reference librarian who worked at the downtown branch for several years. “It took a toll on morale in general. It was rough.”
And it was one of several building failures in a row.
“We used to be a 15-branch system, but we’re now a 12-branch system,” said Jeanne Williams, executive director of the Jackson Hinds Library System in Jackson, Mississippi.
“We had another very busy, very needed library called the Richard Wright Library that closed, and then another busy library, the Tisdale Library, also closed over the last five years,” Williams told SAN.
All three are planned for eventual replacement, but shovels have yet to hit the ground.
Morgan Hedglin began working for the Jackson Hinds system in August 2023.
“It was right about that time that our Richard Wright Library in South Jackson, we had to evacuate all of our materials out of there,” Hedglin told SAN. “What started off as a tiny leak over there and a plumbing issue, because the city took so long to fix it, we had to close that branch.”
The trouble didn’t stop with closing the building, said Hedglin, who is deputy director of the library system.
“Once the building was empty, we really had a hard time keeping the building secure,” she said. “Some people were stealing the copper out of the ceiling.”
Beyond the building: What does losing a library do to a community?
The plumbing leak started as a small problem, said Hedglin.
Drip, drip, drip. Leak, leak, leak.
“If the leak and the plumbing had been fixed right then, it would have been expensive,” Hedglin said. “But now we’re looking at a $6 million building that’s completely destroyed with really no hope of getting that back.”
And hope is desperately needed in that neighborhood.
“When the Richard Wright Library closed, that is a very economically depressed area,” Williams told SAN. “They’ve lost most of their grocery stores, drugstores. They are an area that sorely needs a library that does not have one at the moment. So the community impact is devastating.”
While Mississippi’s reading rates have skyrocketed from 49th in the nation in 2013, into the top 10 in 2024, those gains have been unequal. Mere steps from the shuttered Richard Wright Library, Key Elementary School still lies on the other side of the coin. While more than half of Jackson Public School third graders met state requirements for reading in 2025, Key Elementary had the lowest pass rate in the district — and even across the entire state — at just 31.9%, according to state data. For every third grader at Key who met state standards in reading, two did not.
Finding the funds: Who pays for library repairs?
Jackson is a stark example of what can happen to a system when maintenance is deferred past a breaking point. But it is far from an outlier. According to the GAO report, in about 54% of library systems, “the condition of at least one of their building systems poses a risk, or potential risk, to their collections.” The GAO found that 22% of libraries reported risks to their collections because of the conditions of mechanical systems like HVAC or plumbing; another 19% cited concerns with their buildings’ exteriors, including roof and window issues.
Librarians in Jackson lamented that they do not have control over the capital budget that funds city facilities like public libraries. In Houston, too, it is the city, rather than the library, that makes the final call on capital spending.
The GAO found that an estimated 90% of public libraries must rely on local revenue for repairs.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary federal agency charged with supporting the cornerstones of American literacy. In fiscal year 2024 alone, IMLS distributed $211 million in grants to libraries. But there’s a catch: By law, IMLS funds cannot be used for construction or repairs. While federal money can fund a new digital literacy program or a summer reading initiative, it cannot be used to fix the very ceiling that might be leaking onto the new computers.
That could change in the future. Marroni told SAN that his GAO report was the first of its kind, commissioned by Congress to assess the state of the nation’s libraries.
“The purpose of this study was to help inform Congress as they decide what to do going forward,” Marroni told SAN. “Should they alter what grants can go to library and museum purposes or not? And this was an important piece of information they were trying to gather to support that consideration.”
Of course, waiting for Congress to act won’t bring instant relief. With 71% of libraries citing construction costs and funding issues as key obstacles to maintaining their buildings, the line for funding requests is more than 11,000 libraries long.
The nature of ‘support’: What does it mean to ‘invest’ in a library?
History suggests that in Houston, library infrastructure often requires a crisis to prompt action. The Eleanor Freed-Montrose branch sat in a state of advanced neglect for years, largely ignored by city officials. It was only after an act of investigative journalism highlighted the facility’s deteriorating conditions that the city sprang to action.
The Heights branch could be different. Circulation data obtained by SAN shows that while many libraries struggled to recover visitor numbers post-2020, the Heights branch has seen increased use, with circulation numbers up 37% since 2018, even as the building’s physical health declined.
“Libraries are an indicator of investment in a community,” Houston resident Britney Ramirez told SAN during the centennial celebration. “Whether or not people feel like ‘Oh yeah, this is a space for me’ says a lot about how we make decisions surrounding public amenities.”
The “investment” required now isn’t for new books or shiny tablets. It’s for unglamorous, expensive line items like HVAC systems that keep children safe from Houston’s triple-digit heat and roofs that protect a century of history during hurricane season.
Williams, in Jackson, offered some advice to folks in Houston: “The best way you can support your library is to use it,” she said. “Just being there shows the city that this is a needed community space.”
In the Heights, the community is still showing up. The toddlers are still reading, and circulation numbers continue to increase. But as the FCI ratings climb toward 60%, the question remains: How much longer will the building be able to show up for the community?
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
