While your educated upper middle class white guy probably doesn't see much use for a large library there are a lot of people that do.
I recommend you go to a small town library and see how it's being used. My wife is a librarian at our local library, and I'm always surprised how many people are there when I go in to see her. There are kids using meeting rooms for school projects, people using the computers to fill out applications for jobs, and there's always at least a few people interspersed between the racks just browsing or even sitting on the floor reading something they've found. The local knitters club meets there once a week and last I checked there were about a dozen volunteers for the literacy program teaching people to read at various times of day depending on when their "student" is available.
Fortunately, our community values our library so she gets a lot of local support, but I'm sure there are people in our community like yourself who see something that they don't/won't use as a giant waste or prime real estate or something...
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie