Educating Our Allies

Joo-Hyun Kang (January 1, 2019)

The issue of folks getting arrested for shit that are not crimes, quote-unquote, by the criminal legal system, was an issue that most people hadn’t really thought about before.

Joo-Hyun Kang (January 1, 2019)

I experience, a rigor that Picture the Homeless members brought to meetings or actions or things that I was out with them, that is not always present. It’s a gift. It’s not always present with a lot of organizations. It’s a gift that doesn’t just arise organically in some romanticized ways. It’s cultivated. It’s developed. It’s supported.

Lynn Roberts (January 6, 2023)

I knew that if my students heard from them firsthand as opposed to me trying to describe the work at Picture the Homeless, that it could really make a difference in their understanding of grassroots organizing, but also the plight of people who are homeless wasn't about them, you know, living in SRO’s and shelters and getting handouts, but it was about them being able to determine their own solutions.

And this is all before the community land trust work and all those campaigns. Like every one of your campaigns that you could mention, I felt like, I witnessed from a relative distance. But still, each one of them just blew me away! And I just knew it could open my students’ eyes to things, you know? I didn't know how strategic you could be with organizing, until I encountered Picture the Homeless.

Kazembe Balagun (June 4, 2019)

One of the things I really appreciate about Picture the Homeless was the intellectual rigor, and the fact that you all would like, publish reports, and did a lot of that work. It seemed to work so seamlessly and endlessly and so effortlessly with the broader left intellectual community, and it really not just held its own but actually created that space for intellectual work to be happening in the city.

Excerpt from Banking on Vacancy, a participatory action research project of the PTH Housing campaign. 2012

Joo-Hyun Kang (January 1, 2019)

In 2014, the MTA declared that they were going to sweep homeless people of the A, C, E trains, and Picture the Homeless really led a fight at that point to make sure that didn’t happen. One of the things that I learned during that fight probably from members and Sam [J. Miller], it was really you all did political education, for the rest of us. It was easy to get groups to support that fight and to try to get cop watchers and other people to show up that night when we went to the train when they said they were going to sweep everybody off and stay there.

I think some of it was a good learning for me around how to publicly frame the issues around it. Sam was really patient and helpful about being clear with us and our comms team at the time that people who are homeless don’t want to be on the fucking trains all night either!

And to reframe what this was, and that they had paid their fare, so why shouldn’t they be able to be on the fucking trains? So, I feel like it was a different way to think about the issues, but also to really respect the agency of people.

Shaun Lin (October 12, 2019)

There was a moment in which the NYPD had this was during when it was really cold in the wintertime, which is the time when there’s most often homeless folks who sleep on the train. The NYPD began to announce that they were going to run sweeps to either arrest or, at least take people off the train. So, we organized a bunch of cop watch at the end of train lines that we thought would be over policed, and then also passing out information about what people’s legal rights are on the trains… And then also did a bunch of media stuff too that kind of publicly brought attention to the fact that the police were doing this in ways that that they ended up not arresting people off the train.

PTH Civil Rights campaign flyer to mobilize for overnight defense of homeless folks on E train. February 2014

Shaun Lin (October 12, 2019)

I remember the one bill that really resonated with folks was around the profiling bill, which initially started as a racial profiling bill if I remember correctly. Picture the Homeless fought really hard to have language around profiling of homelessness or perception of homelessness included. And if it wasn’t for Picture the Homeless’ participation in CPR, I don’t think that that language would have even been obvious to people that was important.

Ryan Hickey (April 25, 2019)

So for example, like when we were writing Gaining Ground. I remember we had Val in the room. We had Ken in the room, and we had Harry in the room, and we were just talking about what ways could we get cluster sites out of this program. Because they didn’t know anything about it. Our members were teaching them about it, and we were having multiple discussions and then we were just like, “Okay, we’re going to use eminent domain.”

Ryan Hickey (April 25, 2019)

So, I think allies were really important in that because we built really diverse strong allies and we went to their actions, we did political work together with CPR and in our housing stuff. It’s just it was really, really good for kind of breaking down a lot of stereotypes that people had. But also on their end, too. I mean, I’m sure a lot of the people had stereotypes about homeless people and then working with homeless people they’re just like, actually, this is kind of like fucked up and they reanalyze what they were thinking.

Jean Rice (October 20, 2017)

One of the main impediments that Picture the Homeless had when we tried to secure public space for our unhoused sisters and brothers who were New York City citizens, was this broken windows policing concept. Even well-intentioned so-called liberal allies, they seem to think that broken windows operated in the common good, and it was okay.

Picture the Homeless, along with a few other allies, were quick to point out that when you start a police state, you always start imposing these draconian policies against the people at the bottom of the socio-economic strata. I mean the Jews in Germany is a good example! First, the vagabonds and the hobos, then the intellectuals, and so on, and so on. And then, as the poem goes, when they came for me there was nobody to help me. *

Kazembe Balagun (June 4, 2019)

I looked at Pathmark on 125th Street, way different than when I met Jean. I used to just walk through 125th Street and not even think about it. But then when I met Jean and I heard him talk, and I heard him talk about canning and stuff like that it shifted the way I thought about the street. You know what I'm saying? Like, I tell people all the time, “You don't need Google glasses if you just listen to people.

Maria Walles, Salaam Ellis, Red, Lynn Lewis, Arvernetta Henry with PTH Civil Rights campaign, kicking off Days of Rage with Community United for Police Reform, in the Bronx, December 17, 2014

Shaun Lin (October 11, 2019)

I think in all actions it was both the specific incident of what happened, but Picture the Homeless members do a really great job of historicizing what’s happening. So, it’s not just, “We don’t want police to be over policing the subway at night, but that this is part of a larger issue related to Broken Windows policing, related to the criminalization of poverty and homelessness, in ways that I think really resonated with folks. *

Rob Robinson (November 23, 2018)

We raised awareness around the issue, and we showed the possibilities that could be happening. It’s up to the rest of the movement to pick up the baton and run with it, right? We created the model, so to speak. This can be done. We’ve done it. You want to know how? Come see us!

Rob Robinson (May 7, 2018)

We learned that we can bring people together around an issue to support us. And we learned the power of spectacle. We knew how to make a presence around the building as if we occupied the building. To be able to react on the fly I think, was incredible.

Betty Yu (January 20, 2023)

It was the first time that I had even thought about to be honest personally, was a powerful moment for me because when you think about homeless folks when you talk about organizing and I've been very familiar with organizing and analysis around organizing and power mapping, all these things. But homeless folks, who are so marginalized, often like sex workers and other folks who are at-the-margins-of-the-margins are often never thought about. We often don't think about them being agents of change themselves.

And I have to say that that's something I never really thought about deeply, until I encountered the organization, and reading about the organization and then meeting you all, meeting the folks. It was very impactful for me. It definitely left me with a really powerful impression of the power that folks have, particularly homeless folks, to really organize and demand policy change and demand change, right?

Kazembe Balagun (June 4, 2019)

Pointing at the vacant houses that exist in the city, is the most intrinsic critique of capitalism that you can do without even telling people that, “This shit's about capitalism.” And that shit is so slick and so smart that people don't understand they're talking about capitalism, because it's like, “Yeah! Look at all of us homeless people and look at all those empty houses. You make that connection.” And folks are like, “Damn!” And I felt like Picture the Homeless put that on the map, you know what I’m saying?

Shaun Lin (October 11, 2019)

I really loved the mural that we painted in Harlem. I love that because it was such a learning process for all of us. So, that started with members of Picture the Homeless just kind of studying together. We had begun to read The New Jim Crow with each other and begun to talk about the issues that PTH members were organizing around, around policing and civil rights in the context of what Michelle Alexander was writing about in The New Jim Crow. And those conversations eventually led to a lot of visioning for what a mural could look like in Central Harlem. I think what I really appreciated about that was just the process, and the dialogue and us all very seriously taking our own political education to envision this mural happening. So, it wasn’t so much even how much fun it was to paint the mural. It was fun to paint the mural, but I think what I most fondly remember is the study sessions, the visioning sessions, just the input that Picture the Homeless members had in shaping what we ultimately painted on that wall.