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 a Small Grant and a Basement

The Absurdity Hiding in Your Garage

Start with the most quoted statistic in the sharing economy: the average power drill gets used for 12 to 13 minutes over its entire lifetime.

It’s a great number. It’s also nearly impossible to source. When the writer Nicholas Carr went looking for its origin he found a 2007 blog post that said “somewhere between six and twenty minutes” and cited nothing. He called the figure “highly suspicious.”

You don’t need the number. You need your own garage. When did you last use the drill? The tile saw? The pressure washer you bought for one deck?

Now multiply that across 135 million American households. That’s a staggering quantity of equipment bought to be used a handful of times and stored for a decade. A civilization that can land robots on Mars keeps a drill asleep in nearly every garage on the street.

That is a coordination failure, and it has a cheap fix.

Why does this matter for a book about AI and abundance? Tool libraries are proof that abundance economics works today, with existing technology, in your neighborhood. They also show, with receipts, what it takes: a room, a few stubborn people, and a little money.

In 2001 two friends kayaking along the Oregon coast asked a dangerous question: could we start one of those in Portland?

The Experiment That Became a Movement

Tool libraries aren’t new. The first one opened in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in 1943, a Rotary Club project that still lends tools on a library card. But the modern movement crystallized when Berkeley Public Library launched its Tool Lending Library in 1979 with $30,000 from a federal block grant, about 500 tools, and a portable trailer.

Forty-seven years later the trailer is a purpose-built space inside Berkeley’s South Branch library, open six days a week. The program now lends kitchen equipment, air quality sensors, and bike repair kits too.

One of its borrowers was a renter named Jason Hatch, who used Berkeley’s tools to build shelves, garden boxes and a deck at a house he didn’t own. After he moved to Portland he told a carpenter friend, Laura Dalton, about it. In 2003 he walked into the old Kenton firehouse, home of the city’s North Portland neighborhood office, and pitched the idea. Twenty minutes later the director took him down to a dusty basement and asked, “How about here?”

Hatch and Dalton did weekend internships at the Berkeley and Oakland tool libraries, found a nonprofit to sponsor them, and won a $12,000 community development block grant, the same federal program that had funded Berkeley. They recruited two more board members, hired a part-time tool coordinator, and bought and engraved the tools. The North Portland Tool Library opened in October 2004. Sixteen people signed up and about twenty tools left the building. Hatch spent the week wondering whether they’d come back. “They did,” he wrote. “And they’ve continued to return.”

Today the city lists six tool libraries: North, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, East Portland and Green Lents. The county counts a seventh next door in Gresham.

By 2013 the North Portland library was making 7,364 tool loans a year to about 5,000 members, and it estimated it had saved them $447,205, roughly $60 per loan. That’s $60 somebody didn’t spend at Home Depot each time they needed to hang a picture, fix a fence, or tackle the bathroom renovation they’d been putting off because who buys a tile saw for one project?

The environmental math is equally striking. A study of that year’s loans found they offset as much carbon as taking 35 cars off the road, between 143 and 200 metric tons of CO2-equivalent kept out of the atmosphere because people borrowed instead of bought.

Twelve thousand dollars of public money, once. Four hundred forty-seven thousand dollars of household savings, in a single year, nine years later. Keep that ratio in mind.

Edinburgh’s Ten-Year Proof of Concept

If Portland proved a tool library could start small, Edinburgh proved one could scale.

The Edinburgh Tool Library marked ten years in 2024 with some ridiculous numbers: 60,000 tool loans, £3 million saved by households, and 420 tonnes of CO2 prevented, which it reckons is the equivalent of driving around the Earth 180 times. It began in an old police box on Leith Walk. It now holds more than 3,000 tools across four lending libraries and a workshop hub, run by over 100 volunteers and a small part-time staff.

These aren’t economic projections or theoretical models. These are receipts. Edinburgh didn’t replace capitalism. It fixed a specific market failure, where the cost of owning something vastly exceeds the use anyone gets out of it.

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 receipts run both ways, though. In the year to March 2025 the charity spent £207,754 and took in £176,447. In 2026 it merged two workshops into one hub in Leith and moved workshop sessions to pay-as-you-go, £10 standard and £3 concession, to cover rent, electricity and machine maintenance. Tool loans stay free with membership. A library that saves households millions still has to find its own rent.

Toronto’s Near-Death Experience

The Toronto Tool Library shows the same truth from the other side.

Membership costs $90 a year, Canadian, and buys access to thousands of tools for a week at a time; larger power tools carry a maintenance fee of $2 to $10 per loan. The library says it is “funded primarily by member fees, and receives no public funding.” It has a board and two staff.

In February 2018 that model nearly killed it. Rising Toronto rents and permit costs had the five-year-old library in danger of closing its doors, and it had been turned down for government grants. Its members raised more than $37,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to keep it open. It once ran several branches; today it operates from a single address on Spadina Avenue.

Toronto is worth studying precisely because it survived without a subsidy. The lesson isn’t that sharing is fragile. People will pay for it, volunteer for it, and bail it out. The lesson is that the expensive part of a tool library was never the tools. It’s the room.

Why This Model Keeps Spreading

What economists should find interesting: tool libraries spread without a franchise, a head office, or a business model anyone would fund.

They spread the way recipes do. Hatch found his in Berkeley and carried it to Portland. Edinburgh’s founder, Chris Hellawell, started his after visiting the Toronto Tool Library. London’s Library of Things says it was inspired by sharing projects in Berlin and Toronto. Somebody walks into one, thinks we should have this, and goes home to find a basement.

There are networks now: the Tool Library Alliance in the United States, and Scotland’s Share and Repair Network, which grew from 22 projects to 83 between 2022 and late 2024. They trade advice. None of them issues orders. Hatch ended his own account of the Portland library with three words: “Borrow this idea.”

The pattern keeps recurring because the underlying economics invite it:

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 for an afternoon?

Low Marginal Cost: Once a tool library exists, adding another member or another tool costs very little. North Portland went from 16 sign-ups to about 5,000 members without changing what it was, just more shelves and more volunteer shifts.

The Community Resilience Imperative: Climate anxiety, economic precarity, and epidemic loneliness are driving people toward local mutual aid. The tools turn out to be about neighbors knowing neighbors as much as about tools. Hatch tells of two borrowers waiting in line for the same extension ladder who discovered they were both reroofing, shared the ladder, and ended up trading labor. His grandmother had run the prototype in western Pennsylvania: she painted her husband’s tools bright orange and hung a clipboard on the garage door so the neighbors would sign them out.

What It Actually Costs

The most subversive thing about tool libraries is how little capital they need. It isn’t zero.

The East Portland Tool Library opened on July 1, 2023, after five years of organizing. Nancy Arntson, then its chair, told a local reporter how it started: “Because we didn’t have any money, or any funding, we applied for a grant to the Metro regional government, and they gave us a grant that enabled us to buy the shipping containers.” A church lent the parking lot. Neighbors donated nearly all the tools. It had 29 members that September and is closing in on 400 now.

That is the typical shape. When Shareable surveyed 82 Libraries of Things in 11 countries for its Library of Things Toolkit, reissued in March 2026, it found that the vast majority “are fully volunteer-run with annual budgets of less than $10,000 per year,” usually with fewer than 200 members, and that they “rely most heavily on a combination of membership fees, grants, and donations.”

So the honest recipe has four ingredients:

A few people who won’t let it go. North Portland had four board members. East Portland’s core group “waxed and waned between four and ten.”
A room nobody is charging market rent for. A firehouse basement, a church parking lot, a corner of a public library.
A small grant to get over the hump. $12,000 in Portland in 2004. Two shipping containers’ worth in 2023.
Donated tools and volunteer Saturdays. These turn out to be the easy part.

Both the Shareable toolkit and Share Starter’s free tool library starter kit walk through the rest: the waiver, the inventory software, the insurance.

Ten thousand dollars a year is a rounding error in any city budget. It is also the difference between a tool library that exists and one that doesn’t.

The Unscarcity Proof of Concept

For readers of this project, tool libraries serve as empirical validation of the core economic thesis, not just feel-good community stories.

Consider how they naturally implement the Foundation & Frontier 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, a fee, or volunteer hours: an organic Frontier allocation based on demonstrated need and commitment. No central committee decides this; it emerges from community practice.

The funding story is the Foundation argument in miniature. A floor of public money, small and unglamorous, buys a room. Everything above the floor, the tools, the labor, the repair cafés, the ladder shared between two roofers, is supplied by people who were never paid to do it. Take the floor away and the whole structure has to pass a hat for the rent.

The Diversity Guard manifests through geographic distribution. Portland has six libraries, each serving different neighborhoods with different personalities and each independently run. Edinburgh operates four lending libraries with distinct cultures. Monopolization is structurally impossible, because 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. North Portland prevented $447,000 in purchases without $447,000 changing hands. This is the economic signature of abundance: value created outside market exchange when the cost of sharing falls low enough.

Mission-driven coordination explains why anyone shows up at all. Most of these libraries run on volunteers, and the ones with staff have a handful. Toronto describes itself as “on a mission to explore the benefits of sharing resources and skills.” That 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). Hatch built a deck at a house he was renting. The idea that you need to own a thing to use it is a habit, and habits can be unlearned. The Inca ran an empire on the opposite assumption.

The Library of Things Expansion

The tool library concept is spreading to everything else in the garage.

Sacramento Public Library lends telescopes and metal detectors. Los Angeles Public Library offers ukulele kits. Arlington Public Library loans American Girl dolls. Des Moines provides assistive technology. 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.

Progress isn’t automatic. In March 2024 Berkeley’s city council endorsed an expansion into children’s toys, sports equipment, and household items, a vote that was symbolic because the library’s own board decides. Two and a half years later there is no sign of it on the board’s agendas. The question behind the proposal is still the right one: Why does every household need to own what most households rarely use?

Shareable now counts roughly 2,000 formally established Libraries of Things worldwide, plus an uncountable number of informal ones. The London-founded Library of Things, whose self-service lockers first opened in Crystal Palace in 2018, reported more than 40,000 borrowers, 80,000 borrows and about £11 million saved as it opened at the Barbican Library in 2026.

As for the “sharing economy” that market researchers sell reports about: their estimates for the same year differ by nearly a factor of two. One firm puts 2025 at $245 billion, another at $447 billion, and forecasts for 2030 run from $750 billion to $1.4 trillion. None of those numbers measures a tool library anyway. They count ride-hailing, short-term rentals, and peer-to-peer lending. The sector this article is about barely shows up in a market report, because almost no money changes hands. That’s the point.

The Revolution in Plain Sight

What makes tool libraries uncomfortable for economic theorists is that they work without theory.

You don’t need to have read about transaction cost economics or Elinor Ostrom’s commons governance research to run one. The people who start them notice that their neighbors have drills sitting idle while other neighbors need to drill holes. The theoretical framework exists to explain what communities keep doing anyway.

This matters because it proves abundance economics doesn’t require mass conversion to a new ideology. It needs no legislation, no disrupting of incumbents, no seizing of the means of production, no universal basic income.

What it requires is recognizing that in your garage, your neighbor’s garage, and the garages of everyone on your street, you collectively own nearly 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?

Hatch and Dalton didn’t set out to prove economic theory. They wanted Portland to have what Berkeley had. In solving that pedestrian problem, they demonstrated something civilizationally significant: abundance isn’t only a future state requiring fusion power, robot labor, or universal AI. Some of it is a present reality requiring organization, a basement, and twelve thousand dollars.

Your drill is asleep. So is your neighbor’s. Between you, that’s a workshop nobody is using while everyone keeps buying more drills.

The revolution doesn’t require replacing the system. It requires a room, and someone willing to open it on Saturdays.

How Tool Libraries Save $447K/Year: Portland's Sharing Economy