Buffalo has a lot of houses that need fixing up. Whether they’ve been beaten down by scores of harsh winters or simply left empty to languish by a lagging housing market, there’s a lot of work to do. These homes are often found in borderline, hard-luck neighborhoods, where proud but cash-strapped citizens are reluctant to pick up the phone and hire a contractor. They don’t have the tools to get the job done themselves, or the money to rent them. Imagine the service that such people could get from a tool lending library?

That’s right, a library that lends out tools for fix-it jobs around the house…free of charge. As a matter of fact, there are more than a dozen tool libraries spread around the country, the most famous and extensive of which is the Berkeley Tool Lending Library. That library opened in a trailer in 1979 with $30,000 of HUD block grant money, which bought the city 500 tools. Since those days, the inventory has grown to include more than 5,000 tools of such a wide range that you could certainly find anything you’d need there to build a modern house. There are tools for carpentry, concrete and masonry, floors and walls, electrical work, plumbing, drain cleaning, digging and gardening, among others. To give you an idea of the range of tools available, here’s a quick and random list of tools for borrowing: hammers, soldering irons, drywall screwguns, jackhammers, drill presses, bolt cutters, table saws, post hole diggers, drain snakes and extension ladders. Don’t know how to use these tools? No problem, the tool specialists who staff the library give instruction freely.

Since the tool library is part of the larger library system, Berkeley citizens/landowners must own a library card, addition to proving their residency through a number of methods. Late fees can be steep, too, ranging anywhere from $1 to $15 per day. Such measures help guarantee that the valuable tools don’t walk away. Depending on demand for specific tools, lending periods vary between 3 days and a week. So the system is relatively simple, and the people who consistently benefit from it are homeowners (though the library lends to anyone, including contractors). For nearly 20 years, Berkeley’s tool library has been funded by a voter-approved library tax. While the word “tax” is anathema here in Buffalo, there are countless other successful models for setting up and funding a tool library.

The North Portland Tool Library (Portland, Oregon) is as idealist as the four ambitious young people who founded the nonprofit in late 2004. Its mission statement says, “The North Portland Tool Library (NPTL) is a community resource dedicated to building community and fostering sustainability by providing residents with tools and the power to use them.” Like Buffalo’s endless list of nonprofits, it operates on grant money and whatever private donations it can gather from its members and private companies.

The ToolBank in Atlanta, Georgia loans its tools only to nonprofit and other community-minded organizations who are performing volunteer and facility maintenance projects. Individuals aren’t allowed access to its considerable inventory.

Grosse Pointe, Michigan’s tool library, the nation’s oldest, has been lending tools since the 1940s. It was able to expand with a grant from the local rotary club, and now has over 2,000 tools available to Grosse Pointers…if that’s what you call residents of Grosse Pointe. That library is now maintained by a rotary club memorial fund.

In other words, there’s no blueprint for setting up and running a tool library, but there are clear benefits to having one. Interestingly, this idea isn’t entirely new to Buffalo. About four years ago, the Olmsted Parks Conservancy was working to set up a tool lending library with a gift from Home Depot. The idea was to assist park volunteers with cleanups, landscape improvements and tree plantings. Formerly, volunteers had used their own tools when working in the parks. At press time, it’s still unclear what happened to that initial effort. The only clear information regarding it is that it no longer exists for one reason or another. At the time, however, then Conservancy director Deborah Ann Trimble said, “The tool lending library will bring us closer to our goal of providing the public with resources to fulfill community-based projects.” Maybe those efforts were swept under the rug with the Erie County budget crisis of 2005.

Other cities that have tool lending libraries include Wichita, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, Missoula, Columbus, Austin, Burlington, Seattle and even our next-door neighbors in Rochester. For more info, visit northportlandtoollibrary.org or berkeleypubliclibrary.org.