Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

The Tool Library Revolution: How Neighbors Are Hacking Scarcity with $0 and a Garage

The Absurdity Hiding in Your Garage

Let’s do some quick math that will make you question everything.

The average power drill gets used for 12-13 minutes over its entire lifetime. That’s not per year—that’s total. Your drill, which cost $80 and occupies prime real estate in your garage, will run for less time than it takes to watch a sitcom episode.

Now multiply this across 110 million American households. That’s billions of dollars in drilling equipment sitting idle 99.98% of the time. A civilization that can land robots on Mars is simultaneously hoarding enough duplicate drills to give one to every human who has ever lived.

This isn’t a market functioning efficiently. This is a market failure so spectacular that future historians will study it alongside tulip mania and Beanie Babies.

The fix? Ten neighbors in Portland stood in a garage, looked at their collection of cobweb-covered power tools, and asked a dangerous question: What if we just… shared?

The Experiment That Became a Movement

Tool libraries aren’t new—the first one opened in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in 1943, when lending your neighbor a wrench was called “being a neighbor.” But the modern movement crystallized when Berkeley Public Library launched its Tool Lending Library in 1979 with a $30,000 federal grant and 500 tools stuffed in a portable trailer.

Forty-five years later, that trailer has evolved into a dedicated building. The program now includes kitchen equipment, air quality sensors, and bike repair kits. And it’s spawned hundreds of imitators worldwide—none of which needed a federal grant.

Portland perfected the garage-to-institution pipeline. The North Portland Tool Library started with neighbors pooling their idle equipment. No investors. No business plan. Just a spreadsheet and someone willing to open their garage on Saturdays. Today, five Portland tool libraries serve the metro area—North, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and the newest East Portland location.

The North Portland Tool Library alone grew to over 5,000 members and logged 7,364 tool loans in a single year—saving members an estimated $447,205, roughly $60 per loan. That’s not theoretical savings. That’s $60 people didn’t spend at Home Depot each time they needed to hang a picture, fix a fence, or tackle that bathroom renovation they’d been putting off because who buys a tile saw for one project?

The environmental math is equally striking: one year of NPTL lending offset the carbon equivalent of removing 35 cars from the road—between 143-200 metric tons of CO2 that stayed out of the atmosphere because people borrowed instead of bought.

Edinburgh’s Ten-Year Proof of Concept

If Portland proved tool libraries could start from nothing, Edinburgh proved they could scale.

The Edinburgh Tool Library celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024 with some ridiculous numbers: 60,000 tool loans, £3 million saved by households, and 420 tonnes of CO2 prevented—the equivalent of driving around the Earth 180 times. All from a volunteer-run operation with 2,000 donated tools across four locations.

These aren’t economic projections or theoretical models. These are receipts. Edinburgh didn’t replace capitalism—they fixed a specific market failure where the transaction costs of ownership vastly exceeded the utility of occasional use.

The library’s evolution tells its own story. What started as basic tool lending expanded into repair cafés, a volunteer-run Cycle Kitchen, the “Retrofixers” program for home improvement skills, and partnerships like “Making With Pride” with LGBT Health and Wellbeing. The infrastructure grew with community needs—living systems, not static warehouses.

Toronto’s $32,000 Nail Gun

The Toronto Tool Library offers perhaps the single most elegant proof of abundance economics hiding in plain sight.

One nail gun—a $299 retail item—got borrowed 108 times. That’s $32,000 in member savings from a single tool that now lives in a library instead of 108 separate garages. Multiply this across TTL’s 3,500+ tools across two locations (Parkdale and Spadina), add 3D printing and laser-cutting services, and you have a community infrastructure that costs $90/year to access.

Here’s what makes Toronto’s model instructive: the $90 annual membership isn’t a barrier—it’s a proof of value. You could join free at many tool libraries, but Toronto discovered that a modest fee signals commitment and sustains operations. The library breaks even while saving members thousands.

The inventory itself reads like a catalog of the sharing economy’s potential: automotive tools, bike repair, carpentry, electrical, metalworking, plumbing, yard and garden. Every category represents a class of products that most households buy, use rarely, and eventually discard—the treadmill pattern applied to power tools.

Why This Model Keeps Appearing Independently

Here’s what economists find puzzling: tool libraries keep emerging independently in cities that never communicated with each other.

Portland didn’t copy Berkeley. Edinburgh didn’t study Toronto. Grosse Pointe certainly wasn’t reading academic papers about the sharing economy in 1943. When you place humans in neighborhoods full of idle resources and unmet needs, they keep inventing the same solution.

This isn’t coincidence—it’s convergent evolution. The pattern emerges because the underlying economics make it inevitable:

The Death of Ownership Ideology: Generations that grew up with Netflix, Spotify, and Uber intuitively understand access-over-ownership. Tool libraries extend streaming logic to physical objects. Why own what you’ll use 13 minutes?

Zero Marginal Cost Distribution: Once a tool library exists, adding another member or another tool costs virtually nothing. Portland scaling from 10 neighbors to 5,000 members required no fundamental restructuring—just more shelf space and volunteer shifts.

The Community Resilience Imperative: Climate anxiety, economic precarity, and epidemic loneliness are driving people toward local mutual aid. Tool libraries aren’t just about tools—they’re about neighbors knowing neighbors. Edinburgh’s volunteer programs, Portland’s skill-shares, Toronto’s community workshops all point to the same insight: the tools are an excuse for connection.

The $0 Startup Secret

The most subversive thing about tool libraries is what they prove about capital requirements.

The East Portland Tool Library opened in July 2023 with borrowed space and donated tools. No grants. No crowdfunding campaign. No equity investors expecting 10x returns. Just people with stuff and people who needed stuff agreeing to share.

This scales. The Tool Library Toolkit documents dozens of successful launches following the same pattern:

Week 1-4: The Garage Collective

Find 10 neighbors (a Facebook post works fine)
Inventory what you collectively own (you’ll discover 50-100 tools minimum)
Pick someone’s garage, a church basement, or an unused corner of a community center
Copy the liability waiver from an existing library (they’re freely shared)

Week 4-8: The System Build

Google Sheets for inventory (free)
Shared calendar for scheduling (free)
Or MyTurn’s free tier for automated management
Saturday morning shifts, 2 hours, 2 volunteers

Month 2-6: The Growth Path

“Spring Cleaning = Tool Donating” campaigns
Monthly repair cafés (broken tools get fixed)
Skill-shares (members teach what they know)
Hardware stores donate returns and clearance items

Month 6-12: Formalization

Nonprofit status (opens grants and tax-deductible donations)
Permanent space (many cities provide free/subsidized community space)
Paid coordinator around 500 members
Second location or mobile library

The critical insight from 40+ libraries studied: Start where you are, not where you want to be. West Seattle’s Starter Kit emphasizes beginning with actual community needs, not an idealized model. Toronto notes that “standardization isn’t the goal—community is.”

The Unscarcity Proof of Concept

For readers of this project, tool libraries aren’t just feel-good community stories—they’re empirical validation of the core economic thesis.

Consider how they naturally implement the Foundation & Ascent framework:

Basic tools (hammers, drills, saws) function like the 90% Foundation—freely accessible to all members. Specialized equipment (a concrete mixer, an industrial planer) might require additional training, deposits, or volunteer hours—an organic Ascent allocation based on demonstrated need and commitment. No central committee decides this; it emerges from community practice.

The Diversity Guard manifests through geographic distribution. Portland has five libraries, each serving different neighborhoods with different personalities. Edinburgh operates four locations with distinct cultures. Monopolization is structurally impossible—the model requires local operation and local governance.

Post-monetary value creation is the headline story. Edinburgh saved residents £3 million without generating £3 million in revenue. Portland prevented $447,000 in purchases without $447,000 changing hands. This is the economic signature of abundance: value creation outside market exchange when transaction costs approach zero.

Mission-driven coordination explains why anyone shows up at all. Volunteers staff these libraries for purpose, not pay. Toronto’s stated mission—“building community resilience through sharing”—is Impact economics in embryo.

And tool libraries embody Fundamental Freedom on both dimensions: freedom FROM (the burden of ownership, the cost of rarely-used equipment, the waste of duplicate purchases) and freedom TO (build, create, repair, learn). Members consistently report that borrowing tools they couldn’t afford opened possibilities they never imagined—woodworking projects, home repairs, garden construction.

The Library of Things Expansion

The tool library concept is metastasizing.

Sacramento Public Library lends fishing poles, telescopes, and metal detectors. Los Angeles Public Library offers ukulele kits. Arlington Public Library loans American Girl dolls. Des Moines provides adaptive technology for differently-abled patrons. Augusta Township in Ontario lends kayaks, golf clubs, and badminton sets. Music Broth in Glasgow has 3,000 musical instruments available—from guitars to ouds to dulcimers.

Berkeley’s 2024 proposal to expand into children’s toys, sports equipment, and household items follows the same logic that birthed tool libraries: Why does every household need to own what most households rarely use?

The sharing economy’s market size tells the financial story: projected to grow from $150 billion in 2023 to $794 billion by 2031—a 32% compound annual growth rate. That’s capital recognizing what Portland figured out in a garage: idle resources represent a massive arbitrage opportunity.

The Revolution in Plain Sight

Here’s the thing about tool libraries that makes economic theorists uncomfortable: they work without theory.

No one running the North Portland Tool Library reads papers about transaction cost economics or Elinor Ostrom’s commons governance research. They just noticed their neighbors had drills sitting idle while other neighbors needed to drill holes. The theoretical framework exists to explain what communities keep inventing on their own.

This matters because it proves abundance economics doesn’t require mass conversion to a new ideology. It doesn’t require legislation. It doesn’t require disrupting incumbents or seizing means of production or implementing universal basic income.

It requires recognizing that in your garage, your neighbor’s garage, and the garages of everyone on your street, you collectively own everything you need. The infrastructure for abundance already exists. It’s just badly organized.

The question the Portland model forces: If this works for tools, what else could it work for?

The neighbors who pooled ten drills in a garage didn’t set out to prove economic theory. They wanted to borrow a tile saw. In solving that pedestrian problem, they demonstrated something civilizationally significant: abundance isn’t a future state requiring fusion power, robot labor, or universal AI.

It’s a present reality requiring only organization.

Your drill is running 13 minutes in its lifetime. Your neighbors’ drills are running 13 minutes each. Between you, that’s hours of drilling capacity sitting idle while everyone keeps buying more drills.

The revolution doesn’t require replacing the system. It requires opening your garage.

"The Tool Library Revolution: How Neighbors Are Hacking Scarcity with $0 and a Garage"