Why librarians love the homeless

Part of their metrics involves counting the number of people who come in. This data is used to justify funding. 

An ordinary person might visit the library once every 5 years, or never. The homeless come in day after day and a single homeless person might be worth years worth of statistics and revenue equivalent to some other person. That bum is probably 20 times more valuable to the library than a middle class user, and librarians need to justify their existence and keep their jobs. They need to keep branches open even if those branches would otherwise be empty. One might kick the homeless out and hope that normal people will return but that's a gamble with everyone's jobs. There are multiple industries that are like this. Liquor stores make all their money on alcoholics, and dispensaries make all their money on the 20% of users who smoke chronically. Without the addicts they would go out of business. And so it is with libraries, which are now de facto cooling off stations whose primary clientele are transients.