2012 COUNTING VACANT PROPERTY DEMOCRATIZING LAND USE PLANNING

PTH’s Community Land Trust (CLT) work takes off. PTH codesigned a class and participatory research project on housing policy and community land trusts at City College of New York. The first meeting of what would evolve into the New York City Community Land Initiative was co-convened by PTH and met in October 2012.

2012: CLT STUDY GROUP

Ryan Hickey: They fucking put us on a really concrete roadmap that just transforming New York City housing, and everybody’s talking about CLTs now and it would not be the case if homeless people did not do that.

We developed a curricula based on brainstorming sessions, and we had weekly study groups where we were talking about community land trusts, really getting into the nuts and bolts, looking at case studies, we were reading reports and we educated ourselves based on the knowledge that we already had but we also looked at other resources, as well.

We tapped into those resources, and we started forming this common language around land trusts and mutual housing associations and home ownership and equity and all this really complicated terminology that was used to other homeless people in these conversations, in these policy questions.

And I think people just made a conscious decision. We’re just like, “No, that’s not going to happen anymore. You know, we’re going to be part of these conversations. We’re going to be leading these conversations.” That’s when NYCCLI was really taking root and that’s when the study group morphed into the Education and Outreach Workgroup, where the coalition was looking to Picture the Homeless to like ingest the material and digest it and see what comes out in terms of like how do we talk to people about this really complicated stuff.

2013: MAKE IT COUNT!

PTH published a field guide to counting vacant property, a companion to Banking on Vacancy: Homelessness and Real EstateSpeculation. From the introduction:

“Picture the Homeless counted enough vacant buildings and land to house just under 200,000 people in 2012 in just a third of NYC. Our vacant property count proved that the housing crisis is not about a shortage of space, it is about who controls those buildings and that land. Homelessness is a manufactured crisis that lots of folks are making money off of. An inventory of vacant property can be a first step to reverse this process. What follows is a step by step manual of our process, your process may have variations based on your local circumstances.”

PTH builds out CLT work, thereisenoughvacant buildingsandlandto houseeveryhomelessNew Yorker and then some and there’smoneywastedon thesheltersystemrather thancreatinghousingfor poorpeople.