The library is always there to help.

That’s especially true during Banned Books Week, which kicked off on Sept. 22. The yearly event not only celebrates the free access of ideas, but it also highlights the increasing efforts to ban books – especially targeting titles featuring characters or written by authors who are LGBTQ+ and BIPOC.

This year’s honorary chair is filmmaker Ava DuVernay and its youth honorary chair is Julia Garnett, a Tennessee student and a leader in the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Student Advocates for Speech program who has fought book bans in her home state.

This week, I got on the phone with Cindy Hohl, the president of the American Library Association, to talk about Banned Books Week and more.

“Banned Books Week has been going on for more than 40 years now, and it’s an opportunity for us to bring awareness to the attempts to remove books and materials from libraries, schools and bookstores,” says Hohl. “Even bookstores are being told what they can stock and what should be available to consumers. So this year’s theme for Banned Books Week is ‘Freed Between the Lines,’ and it’s an observance of the freedom we find in the pages of books. And as librarians, we are here to defend that freedom from censorship.”

Librarians’ jobs are more complex and challenging than most of us realize, so I asked Hohl how librarians are dealing the surge in book banning.

“Our goal is to always put books into the hands of readers,” she says. “One of the beauties of being an American is that, should you pick up a book and you don’t enjoy the content, you can certainly place that book down and pick up another one.

“First Amendment rights are for everyone – for youth, for adults. We want to make sure that everyone knows that the public library space and public school libraries are also there for their students, so that everyone has an equal opportunity to access information.”

These attempts to block the availability to books and information are counter to the library’s mission, she says.

“We are public servants, and we go into this work to serve the public good. And so we want to make sure that everyone has the information they need to make informed decisions. We believe that is every American’s right. You have a right to choose what information you want to read, write, listen to, access – both in print and online.

“But you know, we don’t have the right to tell our neighbors what they should read or listen to. That’s really up to them to make those decisions. We absolutely have the right to make those decisions for ourselves and for our families, but it becomes problematic when anyone wants to say that they know what’s best for you, for the rest of the community, that they want voices silenced. And so the role of the information professional is really here to help everyone access the information, and to do so in a way that is supportive in its understanding, and we absolutely hope everyone uses the library.”

And should someone have questions about a particular book, she says librarians are there to help.

“If someone has a concern, we hope that they’ll come in and talk to us and we can have that discussion together. If there is a form already in place, we’ll help you fill it out. If you’re at home and you’re chatting with a librarian online, we’ll link you to the policy. We absolutely are here to help our community access information, whatever that may be,” says Hohl.

Hohl also had suggestions for what readers can do during Banned Books Week.

“Go to the library and check out a book. If you can’t go to the library, check one out online. Make sure that you share your love of reading, of literacy, of libraries. Do a shout-out to your favorite librarian. Do a shout-out to your favorite school library. Make a donation if you can, do what you can to help support readership in America, because an educated society is one that we should all want to live in.”

During our conversation, I mentioned to Hohl that one of my favorite parts of this newsletter is when we ask authors about someone – a librarian, a teacher, a parent or relative – who inspired their love of books and reading. It’s the best.

“I love that,” says Hohl, who is a member of the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska. “Let me add mine to yours.”

And this is what she told me:

“When I was little, I grew up on a reservation, our village in Nebraska, and several nights of the week, we would all sit around in a circle outside, and our elders would tell us stories. And those are traditions of our people. Those are gifts to our people, hearing those stories.

“In an oral storytelling tradition, you live for those moments to be a part of that community. When we moved to the city, it was a very different experience because I was no longer surrounded by everyone I was related to, and one of the first things we did was our mom walked us over to the public library.

“It was the first time we’d been in one. It was amazing that you could sit down and read any one of these books, and it was amazing that you could actually check them out and take them home. I distinctly remember the colorful room where we went to storytime, and I thought it was such an amazing place,” she says. “Even though everything there was different, it was still the same. So back home, our stories lived in our hearts; and in the city, they became alive in our hands as we held the book. And so that’s really the love of storytelling that I’ve held throughout my entire life.”

She added a note in the language of her ancestors, “‘Yawa wiconi,’” she says, “means, ‘Reading is life.’”

For more information, go to the ala.org or bannedbooksweek.org

Tim Walz will attempt to tackle a political football on Saturday.

The Democratic vice presidential candidate will attend the Minnesota-Michigan college football game at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Minnesota governor will attempt to find common ground for his fandom of the Gophers while on a campaign stop in an important swing state home to a fair share of Wolverines fans.

Walz, a former assistant football coach and teacher at Mankato West High School, will meet with students about the importance of voting in the general election on Nov. 5, the Washington Post said.

In 2019, Walz was presented with a game ball from the Gophers’ upset win over Penn State during the U’s 11-2 season. Minnesota head coach P.J. Fleck handed Walz the memento during a presentation in the locker room at Huntington Bank Stadium.

“This state’s values are being reflected in this team. We could not be prouder of what you’ve done,” Walz said at the time.

The current Gophers team is 2-2 and is a big underdog against defending national champion Michigan at 11 a.m. Saturday. The 12th-ranked Wolverines (3-1) are a nine-point favorite at The Big House.

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“Both Moses, the ‘master builder’ of the urban renewal era, and Jacobs, the grassroots champion of small-scale urbanism, have left deep and lasting imprints on our city. But today, the debate over their visions is a diversion from broader truths about New York City’s history and present-day challenges.”

CityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits. Add your voice today!

We just marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker, the epic urbanist history that has helped generations of New Yorkers understand the warring visions of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.

And now it’s time to shut up about Moses vs. Jacobs.

Let me explain.

Both Moses, the “master builder” of the urban renewal era, and Jacobs, the grassroots champion of small-scale urbanism, have left deep and lasting imprints on our city. But today, the debate over their visions is a diversion from broader truths about New York City’s history and present-day challenges.

Why? The Moses-Jacobs clash occurred during the only period in history—going back centuries!—when New York City’s population was not growing. From 1940 through 1970, while these titans clashed over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the number of people living in New York City remained essentially unchanged. In the 1970s, the city’s population plummeted. But since 1980 the number of New Yorkers has been steadily climbing, setting records in every Census since 2000. 

Many consequential decisions about New York City were made through the lens of this uniquely stagnant mid-century period. Moses and Jacobs sparred over how to provide for a city that they figured was pretty much done growing. The authors of the city’s Zoning Resolution, adopted in 1961, agreed—it was the shape of the city, not its size, that they wanted to change. The suburbs were the center of growth and business investment. Thinkers saw the city as something that needed to be either reinvented or salvaged.

So they advocated approaches that modernized or preserved, but didn’t actually make room for more people. Moses could embrace demolishing as much housing as was built to remake neighborhoods; Jacobs could advocate for small-scale changes and rehabilitating existing buildings without mobilizing the massive resources needed to build much more. 

New Yorkers have drawn many lessons from the Moses-Jacobs debate. We have discarded the savage urban renewal of the Moses era and the notion of replacing our historic fabric with new “towers in the park.” We have stitched together the holes gouged into neighborhoods through the disinvestment of the 1970s. 

But economic success and the addition of nearly a million more New Yorkers has changed our reality and burst the seams of that fabric. Our city, always a magnet for opportunity-seekers from around the globe, has never been more unaffordable for people seeking to move or to remain here. 

When the city’s population was flat, sprucing up buildings as they existed without adding more could be construed as bolstering communities and the city’s overall well-being. But in a growing city, it is a recipe for gentrification and displacement.  

Jane Jacobs bought her house in 1947 for $7,000. It sold 15 years ago for $3.3 million, and it’s assessed today at twice that value. Every brick on this block of Hudson Street is precisely where it was when Jacobs lived there. But while she could celebrate the working-class “ballet of the street,” today the only people who can afford Hudson Street are those with season tickets to the ballet. 

The razing of San Juan Hill in the 1950s to build the Lincoln Center neighborhood displaced tens of thousands of largely Puerto Rican residents—a terrible price for “renewal.” But today, every night, there are roughly five times this many New Yorkers sleeping in shelters. We also pay a terrible price for failing to address growing housing needs. 

Recently, we heard home-owning neighbors question loudly why a new building on a large, vacant plot in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn—one of the only lots in the neighborhood where new housing can be built without demolishing existing housing— needs to be significantly taller than the three-story houses that flank it. 

They are asking questions that may have made sense a half-century ago. Why replace the city’s fabric when we can simply stitch it back together? But today, the question is not how to restore a tattered neighborhood. It is how to find places in a crowded and costly city to fit the additional housing we need. How much can suitably be located here, and how much must be placed elsewhere? How can we, as the current administration’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal puts it, add a little more housing in every neighborhood? 

My organization’s research has documented how a series of downzonings, adopted over decades with the goal of slowing change, has made it virtually impossible to increase housing options available in New York City’s low-density neighborhoods. They have become the epicenter of our housing shortage, adding less new housing per capita than Detroit or Long Island. And as with Jacobs’s Hudson Street house, keeping the buildings the way they are has fueled escalating unaffordability, leaving residents skeptical that they or their families can afford to remain in their neighborhoods. 

We can learn from looking further back in our history, to a time when the city embraced the challenges of growth. In the 1920s, New York City faced a severe housing shortage amidst a booming economy and surging population. A combination of flexible zoning and tax incentives kicked off the biggest building boom in the city’s history. To this day, more New Yorkers live in housing built during the 1920s than in any other decade. 

So by all means, read about Moses and Jacobs (and watch West Side Story!). But when it comes to finding solutions to New York City’s present-day challenges, it’s well past time for us to turn the page.

Howard Slatkin is executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a nonprofit policy research organization, and former deputy executive director for strategic planning at the New York City Department of City Planning.