Nikita Price, Session I (Picture the Homeless Oral History Project)

The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Segment 1 Q: [00:00:01] So, good afternoon.

Nikita Price: [00:00:03] Afternoon.

Q: [00:00:05] I'm Lynn Lewis and I'm here with, Nikita Price: [00:00:07] Nikita Price.

Q: [00:00:09] we're in the Picture the Homeless office, it's Saturday, December, 2nd, [laughs as Nikita holds up 2 fingers to let me know the date] thank you. This will be the first of several interviews about the history of Pictures the Homeless. Nikita, can just briefly let folks know where you're from, where you grew up?

Nikita Price: [00:00:42] Well. I'm originally from Rochester New York. I grew up during the '60s and '70s. I was pretty much a good kid, [pauses] average in school. I, at a very young age, was able to venture outside of Rochester and see other parts of the world, which I'm very grateful for. When I came to New York, [pauses] I was a teenager. I said, that's the city I want to live in. I've been to a few places in my lifetime, but I'm just glad that I was able to come to New York and live here. You know it's a struggle.

Q: [00:01:36] What were some other places that you were able to visit before you moved to New York?

Q: [00:01:39] I lived in Boston for a very short time, during the first year of forced busing. which was, oh, it was crazy. I lived [pauses] in New Orleans. I have family in New Orleans. I've lived in New Orleans a few times. I've visited quite a few cities, used to go to Texas a lot. Florida, I lived in Florida very briefly. Yeah, I used to go to Mexico a lot.

Q: [00:02:23] Yeah?

Nikita Price: [00:02:23] Yeah.

Q: [00:02:23] Alright. And so when you moved to New York did you have family here?

Nikita Price: [00:02:32] No, I actually started a family here. When I came here. [pauses] I came here from New Orleans. My middle daughter, her moms and I moved here because I was working in restaurants and like I said, I wanted to always come here. I met someone. I met a chef in New Orleans. He and his wife were on [pauses] on an anniversary and he was impressed with my service. I told them that I wanted to come to New York because he lived and worked here. He said here's my card. When you want to come to New York, give me a call. And so I called him when he got back to New York and he said when are you coming? And I call the company, and they told me get up here. I've been here pretty much ever since.

Q: [00:03:43] Since I've known you, you've always been really good with people.

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Nikita Price: [00:03:46] Uh-huh.

Q: [00:03:50] How did you how did you get to be this kind of person that's really good at meeting folks and building relationships?

Nikita Price: [00:03:57] I think that happened young, when I was young. I grew up in a predominantly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. And I grew up during the '60s.

I grew up during the riots. There was a riot in Rochester and we went through urban renewal. I see it now. There were families that would come from suburbia and always want to, you know take little black kids out of the neighborhood, show them different things. So I was able to, like I said at a young age, go and see different parts of life. In doing so, I think you have to navigate whatever station you are in at that particular time. So, you know it was different when I was at home. It was different when I went away from home. My mother always taught me to be respectful. I grew up in a single parent home. But she taught me to be respectful of my environment and I think, you know, it was and always it is, much easier to be that way. So, you know when you're talking to people you have to be genuine with them, and you respect them and I've always found it's a lot easier to get that respect back.

Q: [00:05:27] You mentioned your mom and I know you've told me a story about your dad giving you your name Nikita. Do you want to share the story of your name?

Nikita Price: [00:05:38] Yeah sure. My father was in two [pauses] wars for this country. He was in World War II and in Korea. In World War Two, he was in the Navy, and in Korea he was in the army. And when he was in Korea, his best bud, from what I understand, was white. Unfortunately this was during the time of McCarthyism and there was no race mixing of any kind. And so my father was kind of headstrong, and I think that's where I get a lot of that from. He rebelled against that sort of belief. He was basically told, there's no race mixing. From the story that I get, he was like this is who I trust with my life. But the military was not buying that. So, he eventually had to take an other than honorable discharge. And when he got out, that was during the time of communism. There was interactions between my family, my moms in particular who was pregnant, and with the FBI. Because anybody labeled a Communist was then investigated for maybe possible affiliations. So my dad, being rebellious, named me out of spite [emphasis on spite} to spite the government, he named me Nikita, after Nikita Khrushchev. Who was, at that time, going head headlong with JFK, during the Cuban missile crisis, all of that nonsense. It was a little hectic for me at a very young age because I grew up during the Missile Crisis when you know [pauses] the relationship between Russia and the United States was very tense, so I assume. I had some challenges going to Catholic school with the nuns.

Q: [00:08:02] Tell me a story of one of those run ins regarding your name.

Nikita Price: [00:08:09] So, I remember, like I said, explicitly during the Cuban Missile Crisis when everybody in this country was afraid, when the missiles were parked in Cuba. My teacher was giving us as a class a breakdown of what was actually happening. So here's where we are in this country. This is what's happening right now. It just so happened that the missiles were parked and there was a back and forth between Kennedy and Khrushchev. And in order to get the children, us, all to

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

understand what was communism I was pointed out. Nikita. That's Nikita. He's named after Nikita Khrushchev, who was then the secretary of Russia. So, I kind of, at that time I didn't really understand it. I mean I'm smiling. I was more sheepish then, but not knowing that I was, you know, I was a physical or visual example of the name Nikita Khrushchev even though I was black; or am Black still. [laughs] Q: [00:09:33] And you were what, 6 years old? Seven years old?

Nikita Price: [00:09:36] Yeah, I had yeah, I think it's seven. I think it was like 7 years old.

Q: [00:09:41] Well, you were a big threat to the State.

Nikita Price: [00:09:43] Yeah yeah yeah yeah. And you know, believe it or not, I think that may have fostered some of what I'm doing now. Because at one point I did want to change my name. Because it was so, you know, looked at so negatively. I didn't feel comfortable with it and I wanted to change my name. And I'm glad it got over it.

Q: [00:10:10] You mentioned being in Boston doing the charged, yeah, politically charged time?

Nikita Price: [00:10:15] Yeah, I just gotten out of, I had dropped out of high school and I wanted to go stay with a friend who had a home in Roxbury, right over Dudley Station. He had a lot of friends and family in South Boston. So he drove, but whenever he wasn't around and we had to go out to visit family, we'd have to get on the bus. That was the first year of forced busing. I had to get down on the floor of bus while I was being stoned by [pauses] poor white Irish people in the '70s during the first year of forced busing. I remember being [pauses] in Roxbury, not actually being on the beach, but there was an incident where there were a bunch of whites screaming on one side and a bunch of poor blacks on the other side and a bunch of policemen on horses separating the masses. So yeah. It just so happened that the day that I left Boston to go back to Rochester, a black bus driver [pauses] who, because they only use black bus drivers to drive you out to the projects in South Boston, was hit in the eye with broken glass when they were stoning the bus. So you know.

Q: [00:11:52] This is a school, you're riding a school bus?

Nikita Price: [00:11:54] No, this was public transportation, like taking a bus going anywhere, like taking the bus going to Brooklyn. You know you catch it at a particular stop but when you got to a certain area close to South, close to the projects.

We are in the Picture the Homeless office and Nikita’s daughters are being picked up, so we pause the interview so Nikita can take care of his girls.

Segment 2 Nikita Price: [00:00:00] Yeah I remember hearing that on the radio when I was on the bus going back to Rochester. You know, I always believed that they didn't know if he was going to be blinded. You know, back during that time medicine was very

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

antiquated so, you know. Yeah man, we had like I said 1977: get down on the fucking floor of the bus, you know? As I think of it now, that was what some 10, 12 years after the '60s? So. [laughs] Yeah.

Q: [00:00:46] We're going to come back to this issue of race, specifically how it deals with what you work on here with Picture the Homeless. So you went back to Rochester. How did that impact you, all that busing and violence in Roxbury?

Nikita Price: [00:01:05] I mean, I don't think it, OK. Here is what was told to me when I left Rochester. When Richie came to Rochester, he saw how different it was because there was, if you want to call it, race mixing. I had a lot of white friends. I met him through a cousin who had a lot of white friends who was married to a white woman. That was different in Boston. In Boston, the color lines were drawn. You know, there you didn't have a lot of blacks with a lot of white friends, or at least in our circle. It was either you hung out with all black people, or white people hung out with all white people, even if they weren't from South Boston. That was just the makeup of the environment at the time. And so when I went, back before I left Rochester, Richie had told me, look if you're going to come - and you can come and you can stay with me for a while - there are no white people. I don't hang out with white people. So you're going to have to make a decision. If you meet white people that's fine. But you know, he pretty much said you know, you're going to have to decide. So for that year that I was there, I didn't have any white friends. You know, any encounters that I had with the whites during that time unfortunately, they were kind of negative unless I went into downtown, the downtown area you know, where I went to clubs and stuff like that and then you would see that. You know there was mixing, but in Roxbury?

No. There was no race mixing of any kind. And so when I went back to Rochester, it was kind of like a relief because then friends that I had, I just rekindled you know old relationships.

Q: [00:03:21] What do you think that made the difference in Rochester?

Nikita Price: [00:03:24] Pardon me?

Q: [00:03:25] What do you think made the difference in Rochester? Why there was Nikita Price: [00:03:28] Who do I think made a difference?

Q: [00:03:29] Or what made the difference there. Do you think there are historical reasons?

Nikita Price: [00:03:33] Yeah I do. I do. The underground railroad came through Rochester during slavery. There has always been a large population of blacks in Rochester because at a certain point during the '50s and '60s, there were a lot of migrant workers there. They had whites that had farms and blacks that actually worked on them. As a matter of fact, my moms used to pick cherries and tomatoes when I was a kid. Aside from that there were, Rochester was somewhat progressive. I guess for being upstate, close to Canada. The whites there were, [pauses] what's the word I want? I don't think they were, they felt guilty or anything like that. It was just, it was a different vibe. You were accepted a little bit more. But then, there were instances where I went out in the suburbs and I had shit thrown at me, you know,

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

called the N word. But was it was different. It wasn't [pauses] all bad. I think I grew up, I'm glad I grew up in Rochester as opposed to a lot of other places in the East where there was a lot of racial tension, and there wasn't when I grew up. I went to a Catholic school. All the teachers were white, [pauses] even in high school. There were a few blacks or stuff like that. But I think people were trying to be very progressive at the time.

Q: [00:05:41] You mentioned growing up in the '60's. We're going to pause.

Segment 3 Nikita Price: [00:00:00] That's all you know getting ready for the Second Avenue train that's getting ready to come through.

Q: [00:00:10] Well, so we're back recording.

Nikita Price: [00:00:12] OK. Q: [00:00:13] So, we've spent some time in Rochester and Boston [pauses] I know you've told me stories about working as a cook and a chef.

Nikita Price: [00:00:34] Never cook. I worked in the, and most people, I don't know why that is.

Q: [00:00:39] Everybody thinks you're a cook?

Nikita Price: [00:00:40] Nothing, nothing, nothing against you. But most people think black people only work in the kitchen. [laughs] But I never worked in a kitchen.

I worked in the front of the house as a waiter and floor manager. Yeah.

Q: [00:00:54] Maybe because you're such a good cook I thought maybe you worked as a chef. [smiles] Nikita Price: [00:00:59] There's a story to that. [smiles] As a waiter, you have to make sure that your guests are pleased. So whenever you get a guest that is not pleased with a particular dish, you'll probably have to go back and deal with the chef or whoever prepared the food. So as you talk about making good relationships, you need a good relationship with the people in the back of the house, in the kitchen. So what I used to do was, I, you know, and it was genuine, hang out with the guys in the kitchen. They worked stupid long hours. So, in order to establish a decent relationship, and mostly immigrant’s work in the back of the house even in the Italian restaurants, guys cooking the food were Mexican or South American. So after work, I'd buy beer for them and that's how you establish your relationship.

Q: [00:01:57] Yeah man, they must have loved you. [smiles] Nikita Price: [00:01:58] So, whenever my food was, for whatever reason, screwed up, the order was messed up, I'd go back. And, of course they're going to be a little agitated. But they knew at the end of the night, there will probably be beer. If it was a really bad night, I'd have to buy extra beer. So I always had a great relationship. I'll be

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

standing there while they're remaking, say another dish. And just like with my moms, you know, I grew up with seven sisters. She was like you're not always going to have a woman to cook for you, so you need to be standing here looking. So I always observe how food was being prepared, whether at home or in the restaurant, and then my passion just grew because living in different places I ate different types of food.

I've always liked experimenting with different types of food. That's why I hung out in the kitchen a lot.

Q: [00:02:55] When you were growing up who were some of the folks that influenced you?

Nikita Price: [00:03:02] I was always impressed with Muhammad Ali. Even though I was not a political type person, I just respected the fact that he told this government no. I was always impressed with [pauses] a major influence of mine, even to today would be Fidel Castro. I appreciated Fidel even though I'm sure there were struggles in his country. You know how many Presidents he outlasted? More than five, I think close to seven or nine. He told America to kiss his ass. [said with emphasis] I respect someone like that. I know that things were not that great in his country and he probably had to keep a tight rein on it. I know how the American influence is, once they get their claws in. We've seen so many regimes across the world go down because they've made a deal with America, and the devil. No I'm not a communist either. But I respected him for standing up. I respected Mohammad Ali for standing up. I respected Malcolm X for standing up. So I would say those three figures were big influences in my life.

Q: [00:04:45] Do you recall a time that, maybe because of your general age range, where they, one or all three of them, kind of got on your radar as a kid and you said, what's that about?

Nikita Price: [00:05:00] Yeah, well [pauses] Malcolm. [pauses] Who probably would have been first? [pauses] I think Muhammad Ali was first. No. No. Muhammad Ali and Malcolm are about the same time. Fidel got on early, probably early because that's where the missiles were parked. But I didn't know that much about him. You know there was always oh, he's killing his own people! Then we went through you know the Marielitos boat, and Elian and stuff like that. But I would say Fidel was probably first. That's also the place that I said I want to go live and that's Cuba. I did want to go before he passed and Raul left. I do like warmer climates. I always said I wanted to move to Cuba and open up a restaurant by the water. I don't know if that's going to happen now this late in life but, it was always a dream. Yeah.

Q: [00:06:18] All righty. Let's come back to the moment when you move to New York. Speaking of restaurants, you started working in a restaurant?

Nikita Price: [00:06:34] When I first came to New York I was working at Pier 23 which is where Chelsea Piers is now. At the time World Yacht was there. World Yacht is [pauses] an umbrella group under, [pauses] I can't think of the name of the boat tour that goes out. Anyway, they would take tours out to the Statue of Liberty, back and forth you know, these dinner cruises. I did that through most of the early '90s. At the time I was staying in Harlem. Thank God it was the end of the crack era.

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Yeah. I was like up around the Polo Grounds, 152nd and Eighth Avenue, 149th Street.

I lived in all those areas up there. [pauses] Yeah. But then again, like I said, I've lived in places where you know, there was all kind of desolation around you. So you know, you adapt. I've been good with that. I've been able to get in and adapt to whatever my environment was. So, yeah.

Q: [00:08:07] When you say desolation, you kind of looked away. Were you picturing something in your mind?

Nikita Price: [00:08:11] Yeah, I remember all of those buildings that were boarded up and abandoned and [pauses] like I said, crack had really taken hold of New York City. The reason why I look up all the time is because whenever I go back to Harlem now, all those buildings have been refurbished, and the [pauses] look of Harlem has changed. When I was living there, it was [pauses] 98 percent black. I remember telling white people when they were [laughs] on the train at 125th Street hey are you sure you're supposed to be on the train at this time?

Q: [00:08:57] [laughs] Nikita Price: [00:08:57] Now, it's a totally different look. [pauses] With the [pauses] what do you want to call it? I don't want to say gentrification because [pauses] when I guess developers and landlords had decided that they wanted to retake Harlem back, people [pauses] don't like to look up and all these buildings were being redone and all these brownstones are being redone. I had the opportunity to buy a brownstone for a dollar, and didn't. I think we don't know what's actually happening on the ground and then you blink and then you've got a couple of buildings that are knocked down. Then these new structures are put up and now there are very few abandoned buildings in West Harlem now. So when I look away, I can still see the building that I used to live in when I was living there. I could see the two buildings on either side of it that were boarded up, or bricked up and they’re not. I was in Harlem a couple of weeks back.

So everything has changed.

Q: [00:10:25] During that time, when the crack epidemic, mostly in the '80s, starting in the early '80s, there was a lot of desolation. But were there things about Harlem that you loved during that time?

Nikita Price: [00:10:44] Yeah, I always liked, I've always been a big fan of jazz. I've always been a big fan of music, period. But yeah, music has always been a part of the culture of New York, of Harlem. I had one barber, Preston, who used to do my hair.

Before I started getting it shaved off, I used to go get my fades and he used to be the barber to a lot of musicians that used to play at the Apollo. I would love to sit in a chair and hear stories about people whose hair he used to cut. He was older then. Then, when I started getting my head shaved, which was before Michael Jordan. [smiles] I still, you know, reveled in, and every now and then, you'd see a musician. I remember, I took a workshop from one of my favorite drummers here in New York. New York has always been music wise, a Mecca. So, yeah I [pauses]. I lost track.

Q: [00:12:07] Things that you loved about living in Harlem during the '80's.

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Nikita Price: [00:12:09] Music, [pauses] also it was centrally located to wherever I wanted to go in Manhattan. At that time, my daughter, who is 26 now, was a baby.

Nikki was a baby. I remember getting her ready and we going down to the Javits Center, going to Central Park. I remember going up on the Hill to Sugar Hill and seeing a building where Duke Ellington lived. Then people were telling me about other areas where jazz musicians used to live in Harlem. You know, you would not know those places were a source of history because at that time they didn't resemble it at all. But when I was growing up in Rochester and being into jazz, you knew these musicians, you know, they used to live in New York and stuff. When I got here, I got a place, a chance to see at least the building. Then you would imagine what it was like for them to have to exist in New York. And so, you know, it was always like, I stood outside the building that Jackie McLean lived in, or I walked down the same block that Elvin Jones lived on. You know, so. Yeah.

Q: [00:14:00] When you left New York, you left New York after that time?

Nikita Price: [00:14:03] I left again, uh-huh, I left again. I left again and went back to New Orleans. I lived in New Orleans a couple of times. I went and I stayed with my sister, my family there. I didn't work that time for a while and had some personal things going on in my life. I was there for a couple of years. That's when I eventually came back to New York permanently.

Q: [00:14:37] Tell me about New Orleans. What kind of, what was life like there?

Nikita Price: [00:14:41] Kickass, kickass, music. Another city that never sleeps. You know. I know in my youth I always liked that type of atmosphere. I think that's what got me. You know when I was in Boston it was kickass. When I was in New York at the time, it was kickass. When I was in New Orleans, it was kick ass. There was always something going on. Always. I've always liked that type of environment.

When I was saying that I had the opportunity to buy the brownstone for a dollar, I decided to buy a house in the Poconos, which was probably the biggest mistake I could ever make because it was so dead. [emphasizes the word dead, and laughs] And all I saw were pickup trucks with fucking [pauses] stars and bars in the back or rifle racks in the trucks. [laughs] I remember I used to drive back. I bought in the Poconos, and for a years straight, I drove back to New York probably four to five days out of the week. I just didn't want to stay there. So. Troubling times.

Q: [00:16:06] All righty, so [pauses] what brought you back to New York after living in New Orleans?

Nikita Price: [00:16:14] So I went back to, actually Rochester, because my mother was, she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and that is a disease in which you can live with a lot of years. It just so happened that she was on her last legs. I think this was her seventh or eighth year of living with Alzheimer's, and her body was shutting down on her. So, I was talking with family, and I was talking with doctors and they were like she doesn't have much longer, she doesn't have much longer and I've been very close to my mother. So I said, I need to go be with her in her in her last days.

Even though she won't remember me. So I came and I spent the last few months with my moms. That was in '04. [pauses] I think starting out '05, yeah '05, because it was at the end of '04, in the

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

beginning, middle, of '05, I got a call from a niece who had told me that she had gotten a letter from my daughter Nikki who like I said, who is now 26, but at the time she was 14. She was trying to get in touch with me because her mother had passed away. She wanted to know if she could live with me. I didn't know where she was in New York because her mother and I unfortunately didn't have a great relationship in the end. So I'm like of course! So now we're trying, I'm trying to find out, where is my daughter? Where's my daughter? It wasn't really clear in the letter. I spent probably a month and a half, close to two months, trying to figure out where my daughter was.

When I found out where she was, I told my employer that I need to go to New York to get my daughter and I would be back. And they said, yeah OK. I worked for the convention center in Rochester and, [pauses] we'll hold your job. Go get her and come back. And when I got here, she was living with her stepdad who lived in, so she was in the same apartment. I met the stepdad. I met the principal at school. I met her teacher, and she was doing so well in school. [pauses] She was going to a Catholic school. I had told them what my plans were, which were to come get her and take her back. She, at this point in time, she was born and raised in New York. She didn't really want to go back. She didn't want to go to Rochester. She didn't know anything about it and she was a B plus student. So I was persuaded to consider staying in New York until she finished her Junior high school year. Then if I decided I wanted to take her back door to Rochester I could. I was offered the opportunity to stay with the stepdad and her at their apartment. I'm going, yeah well, you know. I got a job. I don't have a job in New York. I was trying to get an apartment. Then it was, you know, well you can get a job here, you know. You work in restaurants, not going to be hard. I knew it was going to be easy to get a job here because I had worked here before. So I said OK. Now here's my second time back in New York. Unfortunately after a month, I found out, or we found out. Well, I think Nikki always knew, that her stepdad had a girlfriend. So we were staying there, and then one day we got locked out of the house.

Went home, I picked her up from school, put the key in the door and it would not go in. What's up? The key wouldn't fit. The lock had been changed. So we called the stepdad. No answer. We called the girlfriend. No answer. So I called a friend and said hey look, you know, I don't know what's going on but we're locked out right now.

Until we [pauses] figure out what's going on, can we stay the night tonight? He said yes. Got her ready for school the next day, called, no answer, no answer. I'm like, something's not right now. So that went on for like three days. Then it was eventually like, you know what? Then Nikki started telling me about the woman and how, you know. She knew that he was seeing her. I put two and two together and said you know, she doesn't want my daughter there, because it's not her daughter. So I said well, we got to probably get ready to go to Rochester. I was making phone calls and my employer said yeah you can come back. OK. So I told my daughter. I said well, we can go back because we don't have any place to stay because we were the only two family there in New York. She still awwwwwww! I'm like, well what are we going to do Nikki? We don't have a place to stay. So, the people that we had stayed with had said, well you know if you do want to stay and let her finish out you can go into the shelter. I'm like, I've never been to no shelter. And they said well, this is what you have to do. And then, you know, here's some information. So I start calling and trying to figure out how the process was, what I needed to go into the shelter system. That's how I was introduced to New York City and the shelter system here. I got our identification and stuff together. We went, and did intake at the PATH, and that's it!

Q: [00:23:06] Was it the PATH then?

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Nikita Price: [00:23:07] Yeah, it was the PATH because you folks had already closed down the EAU. Q: [00:23:15] What was that process like, applying for shelter?

Nikita Price: [00:23:19] It's like welfare. You know, it's bureaucratic [pauses] boondoggle. You know, we knew that we had all of our paperwork together but like with anything in New York, there's a line. And you know, that's why when people complain about it, oh the line, oh the wait, the wait. It's New York. There's fricken 12 million people here even though the census says eight to nine. There's 12 million people here! So anything you do here, you're going to wait in line. So, we were told what to do. Pack up a bag, whatever, leave some stuff here. Take all your identification and go and [pauses] get in line! And that's what we did. [pauses] It was an all a day process.

Eventually, that evening, we were put into a shelter, on I think 103rd and Broadway.

A VOA shelter. We were up on the 9th floor, something like that. It was really funny that you had all these black and brown people living in the shelter on Broadway, where when you walk out the door everybody was white. [laughs] Q: [00:24:49] Did you share a room in the shelter?

Nikita Price: [00:24:52] No. Yeah. My daughter and I, we shared a room and it was a bunk bed. She slept on the bottom bunk and I slept on the top bunk.

Q: [00:25:02] How old was she?

Nikita Price: [00:25:03] She was 14.

Q: [00:25:05] How did this affect her school?

Nikita Price: [00:25:10] Luckily, she was on her way, this was getting towards the end of the school year. Here's what affected her. This is what I noticed. You know not right away but, because I noticed that [pauses] the friends that she had, that she knew through her mother, and her classmates that she knew, they didn't know what she was going through then. My daughter wasn't always forthcoming with what her living arrangements were. So I don't know. I don't think she was telling them that she was in a shelter. Because she would be asking me on a regular basis, can I go stay with so and so, can I? I'm like well you can't stay there, because we're in a shelter. The new rules are is that if you're a couple or a parent and a child, you both have to check in that night. So during the day yeah you can go be with them, whatever, and you know, we had curfew. So she was, during the day, after school and stuff like that, she was always going and being part of her peer group. But at night she would have to come back and we'd have to check in. I think she was, I could sense that she was always kind of uncomfortable because she was now in a shelter. I don't think she told her friends. They were always asking, why can't you come stay the night? I think that's one thing that affects a lot of young people that are in the shelter. They're embarrassed by it. I think she was embarrassed by it. So, she wouldn't tell them that she was in the shelter and she had a curfew. She would make up excuses as to why she couldn't [pauses] stay the night.

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Q: [00:27:17] So you're in the shelter, and how did you hear about Picture the Homeless?

Nikita Price: [00:27:25] So. So, the decision had been made that we'll stay in the shelter. I still wanted to get a job in New York, and see about getting an apartment!

So on my own, going out and trying to, while she was in school, trying to you know, get a job now! It just so happened that one of the residents, which was a father a single dad like myself, with a boy and a girl, lived down the hall. And you know my personality, you speak to people and stuff like that, and you go about your business.

We would talk, at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing alright, you know. Where you coming from? You know, looking for a job man, you know, trying to get it together. So if I stay here, I want to, you know, be able to move. You know it's just hard. He was like yeah, [pauses] and I'm like, where are you going? You know I go to this organization Picture the Homeless.

It's just you know, a place where a bunch of likeminded folks that are homeless gather, and we're trying to change the way that homeless people are treated, and the things that we're allowed to do or not do. You should come by.

Then I'm like yeah OK, I'm you know, I'll look into it. But my focus was work and housing. I would say that went on for maybe a month or, a good month and a half, maybe close to two months. Every time I'd see him I'd say Where are you going or where you're coming from? He would mention Picture the Homeless a lot. He was either going there or coming back from there. I thought you said you were going to come by? I'm a get by! I says. My day was filled you know, I was, a lot of times, just drained. Being out, trying to grind and get, get my life together. You know, accepting the fact that I was in the shelter and didn't really have anything because I was really, really considering saying fuck this and going back to Rochester. Because I had a job! I could go back and live with my sister, because I was in the process of getting ready to get an apartment. But my daughter kept saying, I want to stay, so I was really kind of torn. Then, I just needed something to break up the frustration of the day. I finally said let me go by this place and see what they're talking about because right now things are not going all that great. I went by Picture the Homeless one day. I was introduced around. [pauses] I don't have very much memory of the actual first day I was there. But I do know that I saw that there were other folks like myself. Some folks were in the shelter and most of the folks were living on the street. So, [pauses] I said well, if they can do it I can do it because my daughter doesn't want to go back to Rochester. So, how am I going to fit myself into this picture and survive and exist? I knew that in order to do that, I was going to have to be coming back and finding out how best to do that. I've always been good with that. If you want to know how to do something you go to where it's being done and you deal with the people that are doing it. So I did. And I just kept going back to Picture the Homeless and finding out how to navigate the system.

Q: [00:31:39] Where was the office at the time?

Nikita Price: [00:31:42] The office, thank God, was in Manhattan [laughs] in East Harlem, El Barrio, 116th Street, between Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue. Right over a Cuchifritos.

Q: [00:31:59] So, [pauses] you kind of reference somewhat, but when you started

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going, you went the first time and then you kept going back. What kinds of things were you doing when you were in the office? Were you going to meetings? Were you reading stuff? Talking to people?

Nikita Price: [00:32:16] I wanted to [pauses] like I said, what I really wanted to do was to get a job and get a, [pauses] get an apartment. If I wanted to, because I did, like I said, I always liked New York. I knew that if I were going to go back to Rochester it was going to be kind of mundane. So I'm like, well maybe I can get an opportunity to live here again. So, let me see how long I can stick this out. Maybe I have an opportunity and I can move back here. Then my daughter will be happy and I'll be happy. So. There were meetings. There were civil rights meetings and then there was a shelter meeting and that happened to fit because I was in a shelter. The organizer, Tyletha, phenomenal. You know a very big personality. Tyletha was smart and she was loud, but she was very [pauses] what's the word I want to say. Tyletha had probably one of the biggest hearts in a person that I had met at the time. She had a house, she had a place to live and she was still doing this work and she was passionate about it. But Tyletha was no nonsense, this is what we're doing. This is my job. You're not going to fuck it up. [laughs loud] And this is what we're doing. Because there are a lot of people like yourself that are struggling. So. I took to her personality. It wasn't my personality, but I could rock with that.

Here we abruptly pause because someone is knocking at the door and when we resume, Nikita is discussing why a street homeless man is having trouble connecting with services.

Segment 4 Nikita Price: [00:00:00] No because he's threatened people. [laughs] You know he's threatened people and he doesn't like white people. [laughs harder] You know. So everybody at CUCS is afraid of him. Even though they are ready, and he says I'm ready, finally to come off the street. But it hasn't and we haven't found the moment yet.

Q: [00:00:22] They don't have any black people at CUCS? Nikita Price: [00:00:25] Very few you know, now that you mention it. I don't remember. I think I've seen some Hispanics. No blacks.

Segment 5 Q: [00:00:00] We're talking about Tyletha Samuels.

Nikita Price: [00:00:05] Yeah, T.T. Q: [00:00:07] T.T. was the shelter organizer. What were the meetings like?

Nikita Price: [00:00:15] Well, the meetings were from our end, folks that were homeless, were like: this is the shit that's happening where we’re at. It's fucked up. I can't get a place. I've been in a shelter for a while.

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Nikita Price: [00:00:40] There were not a lot of street homeless folk in these meetings that I can remember, even though they were always a lot of street homeless folk in the office. I do know that whenever there was, say an event or a rally or something, there would be a mixture of both street and sheltered folks but most of the folks that I remember were sheltered. So I met a few and they were mostly, if I remember correctly, mostly single adults or couples. There weren't a lot of folks that had families, [pauses] just trying to think. My memory now is fading on me, but I just remember a lot of couples that were homeless, and a lot of street homeless people. So, but in this space we were all you know homeless.

Q: [00:01:56] What were some of the issues at the shelter campaign was working on?

Nikita Price: [00:02:02] Housing. People were, even at that time, and that's what I think made me look at the shelter that I was in, because I would hear all of these horrible stories about shelters. Then I would go to a shelter that was, on, like I said, on a 103rd and Broadway. It wasn't like the shelters that I was hearing about. We had a security person on the first floor. The area in which people’s visitors could come to see you on the first floor was nice and clean. The elevator always worked. I don't even know if it was the old hotel. I don't know what it was. Our room, my daughters and my room, was decent. No A/C, it was hot as hell in the summer. The building was nice. Then I heard all of these fucking horror stories about other people's shelters. So we were doing a lot of work at the time on the City not having a means by which to get people out of shelters and into permanent housing, which made me start paying attention to a lot of the folks that were actually in the shelter. I take that back.

Nikita Price: [00:03:34] My shelter did have families in it. Because I remember on the second floor, there was a woman who had three children, two teenagers and a little girl. The little girl I think was four or five? Maybe six, but she was born in the shelter.

So that meant that she had been in that shelter. That woman had been in the shelter system for like four or five years. That's what made me say, oh shit! I'm not trying to do that. So that made me really like, really latch onto Picture the Homeless, because I saw how long it took for me to realize that there was an organization that was dealing with homeless people, whether they were sheltered or not. A lot of folks did not know about Picture the Homeless. I looked at this woman's plight and it's like four years, five years. That kid was born in the shelter? I'm like, I've got to get out of here! So I kind of snapped out of it and said, OK, what am I going to be able to do to get my 14 year old daughter and myself out of the shelter. And that's why I really started becoming engaged in what Picture the Homeless was doing because now I was more aware of my surroundings now, in the shelter. And I started seeing now, even though the building's structure was decent, but wasn't the best, but the people were suffering inside. And people were caught up in a sense of, [pause] this word I want to use, some, some more complacent and then some were just [pauses] they're very despondent. They were just like. I'm over this. I don't see a way out of this.

Q: [00:05:57] Were you able to cook when you were there?

Nikita Price: [00:06:01] Yeah, actually, yeah. We had a little refrigerator and we had a very, very, this is what made me think it was a hotel prior, because everything was built into the wall, a very small four burner stove. Yeah. I was able to cook there.

There were some people in other shelters that were when I would go out with Tyletha,

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and we would do outreach to these other shelters. They didn't have that, you know. I would see some of these buildings and they would be like, oh shit.

Q: [00:06:39] You were a member, and you would do outreach with Tyletha? How did that happen? What was that like?

Nikita Price: [00:06:46] Well, like I said there were at the time two major campaigns and one was dealing with shelter residents and one was dealing with civil rights; people that were living on the street. I do remember that a lot of our folks were living in Central Park, and so they were dealing having a lot of shit fuckery - as a new friend of mine likes to say now; being messed with in parks and in public space. But we were really focusing on the very shitty conditions in shelters. That's when, that's when I said you’re fucking blessed. You know, where you and your daughter are, you guys got lucky. And you know what? I've been kind of blessed. You know, being in bad environments but always being some kind of way feeling safe and secure because I've seen people in a lot worse shape. Even though we're going through the same thing, my situation always seemed to be just like, maybe a little bit better. I mean, I saw people really getting fucked over and struggling, you know. And even though I was also, the environment wasn't always as bad. And then, I've always been like, you make the best out of whatever the hell it is anyway, you know? So rather than complaining, [voice rises] it was always, what are you going to do to make it better? And I think that's what attracted me to the work that Tyletha was doing, because it was like: these people were really fucked up and this City is saying one thing and we're witnessing a totally different thing.

Q: [00:08:42] Had you ever done any kind of work like doing outreach?

Nikita Price: [00:08:44] Never, I worked in restaurants. I worked in restaurants all my life. I dealt with people that wanted to order food, and in a lot of cases people that had a lot of money. You know, I always had a place to live, no never. So it was a 180.

Q: [00:09:08] Do you remember, or could you describe a time, when you were doing outreach and the people that you talked to actually showed up in the office?

Nikita Price: [00:09:31] No, I can't remember. I'm getting fucking old, can you? [laughs hard] Q: [00:09:35] Yeah.

Nikita Price: [00:09:35] Alright then tell me when it was and maybe that will jar something, the calcium deposits around my brain are like hard.

Q: [00:09:47] When I met someone that showed up?

Nikita Price: [00:09:48] No! That.

Q: [00:09:49] Oh, when you met someone!?

Nikita Price: [00:09:50] Maybe they came to office maybe, maybe I can remember that time, the encounter when I met them.

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Q: [00:09:58] No, I know that the shelter campaign had a small kind of core of people and then there were a larger circle of people that would be more in and out, which is kind of how organizing goes.

Nikita Price: [00:10:18] What was that story behind that girl Lisa and her friend?

Remember Lisa? Yeah, little small slight bright skinned woman and her friend who was like, wow, I won't go into that. But I remember we were doing the sleep out right there on Lenox.

Q: [00:10:38] I see them in La Marketa when they have salsa music on Saturdays.

Nikita Price: [00:10:44] Who? Q: [00:10:45] Lisa.

Nikita Price: [00:10:46] Get out of here! I thought she went back to [pauses] are we talking about the same Lisa? Very small, slight woman, bright skinned and her friend was another woman.

Q: [00:10:59] And she had a mustache?

Nikita Price: [00:11:00] A mustache, yeah, yeah.

Q: [00:11:01] Lisa, that Lisa, moved back to Virginia.

Nikita Price: [00:11:04] Right. Right.

Q: [00:11:05] I don't know anything else about her.

Nikita Price: [00:11:07] I think, at the time, I was more, because I was very new to Picture the Homeless, I was not, I had not come into my own yet. So I was tagging along, and just playing my role as opposed to actually stepping out of a comfort zone, as Sam used to say.

Q: [00:00:00] I have a little story about something I remember, about when you stepped out and stepped up. I'm going to tell a little bit and then you see how you remember it. We had hired Sam, and we were doing the Manhattan vacant property count, the housing campaign. We had a member, Roosevelt, who you were buddies with, Rosie. And Scott Stringer's office called and said that they weren't going to share, we were partnering with Scott Stringer and he had was going to assign 60 staff to help do this block by block count. Then all of a sudden they started saying they weren't going to share the information. And I walked into the office and you were there. Rosie was ther, and I could feel tension. And so, can you tell the story of what was happening?

Nikita Price: [00:12:36] Yeah, I do kind of now remember that. And at the time Scott Stringer was the Manhattan Borough President wasn't he?

Q: [00:12:46] Uh-Huh

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Nikita Price: [00:12:47] Yeah. And we had, Picture the Homeless had been looking at all this desolate property around the city and all these people in the shelter system.

We were actively trying to get some government agency to tell us what the vacant property ratio was like, who owned it, and how much of it was, and nobody had an answer. Then we approached his office and he thought it was a great idea. We were like oh boy we got an elected official that wants to jump on this! And I was then being told you got to be careful, he's, you know, he's a politician. Then you know I remember being in conversations with his office. I remember the initial meeting when we went and he thought it was a great idea. Then, you know, in the follow up phone conversations, that's when things started, like, going the way of politics like. [pauses] They, weren't as interested now. So we had to keep up the energy and then it came to the point where they said, you know, they started giving us really bad news about the whole count thing. I remember we were having meetings amongst members and, of course we're saying no, and I think I was kind of adamant. I've always been kind of like that. It's like, that's bullshit, fuck these motherfuckers, and no you're not going to take our idea. I think, that's when I was being asked to really step up, and you have to take that same energy now and there's nothing wrong with letting them know that you're not going to allow them to steal that from you. And because if they steal it from you they're stealing it from you know other homeless people that were trying to get out here and fight and struggle for. I think that was a sense of [pauses] empowering me to really [pauses] be a voice. That's when it kind of came to me. A lot of these people would not. [pauses] I remember doing a lot of outreach. A lot of folks would say what I was saying in the beginning, [now imitating other people] yeah, I'm going to be there, I'm going to do this. And they really didn't do it. So, [pauses] I was like [he asks if he's touching the mic, I replied, no you're good] I was kind of like if we don't, if I don't step up, then they're going to continue fucking over people. I just didn't feel comfortable with that. In our meetings it was like whoa! what are we going to do? What are we going to do? We're going to tell them, no! We'll snatch this shit away from them! We'll do the count on our own. When he realized that we were going to, in some sort of way, because I was like, yeah we need to threaten him and out him.

Also, we didn't have a very good relationship with the press. But there were all kinds of things that were being mentioned as to what we needed to do to embarrass him and make sure that he did it our way.

Q: [00:16:16] I recall, because I was the civil rights organizer, the street homeless folks that were in the office, that was what was my focus. I had met of course, folks in the shelter campaign but didn't really know you. And I remember that day there was some tension in the air. As it was happening and then it was, somebody needs to talk to go ask Sam. [laughs] So we went in the back and were like what's up. And Sam was saying Oh now they don't want to, they want to still do the count and not share the data. And then I remember your face was like oh hell no! And we did have people that were kind of like, oh this is how they always do us, they always screw us over. It was very uncomfortable for Sam. We told Sam that he had to call them and say that was unacceptable and we stood there. And I remember you being very strong about that. Then when we met Nikita Price: [00:17:33] Because we had a follow up meeting, I think we had to go back to his office.

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Q: [00:17:37] Yeah, because we were demanding a meeting, and they were saying he couldn't be there.

Nikita Price: [00:17:41] Right.

Q: [00:17:42] And we felt like we're getting blown off. And then in the meeting you sat at the head, there was an empty seat at the head of the table and Scott Stringer came and sat there. You just gave him a look. He had already been prepared, and he was like there's no problem.

Nikita Price: [00:18:05] Yeah, the bullshit politician.

Q: [00:18:08] But you gave him a look and as if to say you know we're not going to take it. That's when I first got a sense of you as a person. The vibe in the office at that time you know, what was it like?

Nikita Price: [00:18:32] I think we had, from what I remember, there were a lot of the street folk that were, they were active. They were very active, but they were dealing with, you know their shit that they were dealing with. And the folks that we were trying to generate energy around didn't really understand that. Even though a lot of the messaging was, we're all homeless. But I think there was always that separation between folks that lived on the street and people that were in the shelter. I don't know what my read today is on how anybody felt back then. But I think being involved in this work now for so long, I do kind of know now what I think people think when they think about homelessness, even when they're homeless. I tell people all the time I've been homeless. But I don't know what it's like to be living on the streets. I don't know what it's like to get cardboard. I don't know that, but I do know what it's like not to have a place. And I think [pauses] when folks are talking, homeless people are talking, and you put the two groups together sometimes tension boils because [pauses] people are always like, well you don't know what I go through. But I think we, what I've always tried to say was, we're all fucking homeless. So I always want to like straddle that middle and keep the focus on the fact that we're all homeless. Some of us are doing it differently. I think in the office, because of my personality, I got along well with a lot of the street folk. Whereas, I do remember tension between street folk and sheltered folks. Just like with anything else, just like with race, just like with sex.

Just like with everything else, people will always gravitate to their group. And I've always been one that navigated well between both groups. I can do it. I think because of my personality and because of who I am, and what I have done. It helps to know what the other side is doing. That's why, when I was talking about working in restaurants, knowing what the guys in the back of the house had to go through. That's my personality. So, I had a lot of close relationships with folks that were sleeping in parks and sleeping on the street, just like I did with people that were sleeping in shelters, in shitty conditions. And then I would say to a lot of folks, especially to shelter folks you know, [imitating shelter residents] Oh, like my shelter sucks! and I'm like, and I've always said this, you're not sleeping on the fucking street. You got it good! You know trying to get people to actually realize you know that our plight is one in the same, even though there are different levels.

Q: [00:21:54] In the process of being a member, and really becoming a leader in the shelter campaign, are there actions that stuck out in your mind?

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Nikita Price: [00:22:08] Yeah. I remember we did, this is where I met Turhan, who is a really good friend of mine now. We did the wheat pasting. I remember when we said, you know we're sitting down saying, what are we going to do? How we're going to do this? How we're going to do this? I think the wheat pasting - that came out of the civil rights, right?

Q: [00:22:31] Housing campaign. Describe what the wheat pasting was? What was it?

What did we do?

Nikita Price: [00:22:33] The wheat pasting was, our office was in East Harlem and at the time there were all these abandoned buildings. The thing that, I was made aware of by you Lynn, and Picture the Homeless, was the fact that we were passing by all these fucking stores, that had a, you know, [pauses] the stores were open every day and people were shopping as if everything was fine and then it was like, but look up!

And when you look up on the second floor on up, everything was fucking abandoned. [laughing] It was boarded up [laughs harder] I'm like boy! And those were all apartments. These stores were actively thriving and I don't know what the number of shelter folks was then but it was a high number. And it's just like what the fuck? How are we going to bring the attention to the fact that this city is housing all these people in the shelter and there's all this available land and property and buildings around? I don't know who came up with it. You might have come up with it, but it was like, why don't we let the public know because I don't think the public is looking up either.

Let them know about all this abandoned property. Well, how are you going to do that? Well, we can spray paint on the building. We could do this. We can do that. Or we could put up signs; that this property is abandoned and it should be for homeless people. And that's how we, then we had to design what would that look like. What would this sticker look like? Would it be small, would it be big? I don't know how we came up with the design but we said we could, [pauses] we could silkscreen. I think that was something that was really impressive to me. That's when I started finding out, really putting it together, how homeless people take little to nothing and make it work. You know, you really understood that with street homeless folk, because they take almost nothing other than the elements and they thrive in it. Then we had to, then, how do we do it? We didn't have a lot of money. So, we reached out to someone that could do the screen. Then we bought the paper and we bought the ink. We made fun [emphasizes the word fun] out of getting ready to let the fucking city know that you're allowing people to suffer, whether they're on the street or in the shelter, by having these buildings. That's when I was finding out then, that a lot of these buildings had been vacant, the apartments anyway, for years and years and years and years. And the stores are open, so that made me angry. So it's like, what are we going to do? So now, we've got to go out, we can't put this shit up in the daytime, so how are we going to do this and make this fun, make this exciting, you know? That was the whole sense of, when the sun goes down, homeless people are going to get out. It kind of reminded me of shit you would see in a cartoon. Where people go to sleep and everything is fine, and then when they wake up [both of us are laughing] shits like, where the fuck did that come from?! So you know, I remember us planning this. What are we going to do? These are the people who are going to have the papers. These are the people who are going to have the glue, the paste, or whatever, and this is what we're going to do. We're just going to hit all these buildings and we're going to call attention. And I remember we all met up. I think there was more than one group.

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People had to go scout because we did have to look out for the police. We were in small packs. And I remember, meeting Turhan, who at the time was on crutches. He had a cast or something like that. And you know, I always want to make fun out of whatever the situation is, and I was calling him gimpy, and like you got to keep up.

You got to keep up. Come on. [laughing] Because we were doing shit that probably, we could probably get in trouble for, if we got caught. To see a person on crutches out there doing something like that, I was impressed with that. Now you're Q: [00:28:05] He was staying at Wards Island at the time.

Nikita Price: [00:28:06] Yeah, yeah. We've always been a small group of folks who finally got it, like, if we don't say something or do something, that shit's going to continue. We'd have to go back to our environments and see people that were suffering that had resigned to, well my fate is whatever my fate is going to be.

Whereas, the folks at Picture the Homeless said, my fate is going to be whatever the fuck I want it to be. And, so I'm going to do whatever I have to do to make that. And if I have to step out of my comfort zone, and let it be known and tell you that, then I'm going to do that. I think what Picture the Homeless offers, offered then and offers now, is the opportunity for you to be able to take that anger and that frustration and exhibit it in a way whereas this is the reality of what you're being told.

So when people are saying, well at least people have shelters. Picture the Homeless was able to go and tell you, yeah you have shelters but these are the conditions in the shelters. The EAU was closed before I came to Picture the homeless. When people were saying, yeah well, homeless people can come here and then they go into the shelters and the EAU is nice and clean. You folks had already sent people in with cameras to dispel that myth. And that was big to get the EAU closed. That was before my time. I always liked the fact that Picture the Homeless always pushed back. This is the reality of the bullshit that you're trying to jam down people's throats. I think during that time, we didn't have a big voice but we were consistent and we were not going to back down.

Q: [00:30:24] You mentioned that we had fun during that wheat pasting action. Were there other actions at the time that you participated in?

Nikita Price: [00:30:38] I think later on, the city started going through this whole process whereby, they could not get people out of the shelter because they did not have, the city then, as they do now, don't have a means by transitioning folks from shelters into real housing. So they came up with bullshit vouchers. Vouchers that you would give to a resident and say here, we will pay part of your rent, find an apartment and we'll pay. During that time, it was the HSP, housing stability plus. And I remember being in a couple of meetings with Tyletha and people are saying, I've got a fucking voucher and it doesn't work. Or nobody wants to take the apartment. We were making a joke, they called it housing stability plus and we were calling it housing instability plus [both of us laughing] You know, people were being asked accept this apartment or go get an apartment. And people in the beginning, everybody thought oh well this is great. You know, they're going to pay! And we didn't like the way the voucher worked, because it was a step down. They would pay your rent for five years. They would pay the full amount for the first year and then every year thereafter it would be a step down process.

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Q: [00:32:27] Twenty percent.

Nikita Price: [00:32:28] Right. And, no, it didn't take us long to realize. What the fuck! I'm not going to be able to pay this rent after five years even with the job. That's when the reality came that the majority of the folks that were in the shelter that were members of ours, did not make a living wage then. And with this step down, each year you would have to pay that much more, that much more, that much more, that much more. And we were looking at people's salaries and we were looking at the rents that were being asked, and it's like, no this is bullshit! And that's when we start engaging the city. Like, this is not going to work. I remember us speaking with then folks at HRA and also at DHS, and saying, this shit is not going to work! People are going to be right back in the shelter. And they would not listen to us. I remember us ruffling a lot of feathers at DHS. Maryanne Schretzman, Susan Nayowith, a few other people. Whenever they would see us coming they're like here come these motherfucker's again. You know, what do you want. We gave you a voucher! Well the voucher is not going to work.

Q: [00:33:53] What are some ways, do you have an examples, a story about how we ruffled their feathers, something we did?

Nikita Price: [00:34:00] Yeah. Here is a real quick one. When the city started realizing that they were having problems with the HSP voucher, they set up a, what was that? That meeting that used to have, the advocacy meeting?

Q: [00:34:22] Yeah, they had a task force.

Nikita Price: [00:34:24] Yeah. So Picture the Homeless, we'd get a bunch of shelter folks in, that were getting fucked over by the HSP voucher. We would go up and we would tell the DHS staff how this is not working, and of course what I found, was the bullshit with that. You know, we all get our badges downstairs and go to the whatever floor, and then we'd go into this big room, big table, and you look off to the side and they'll be sandwiches and sodas and all this shit there, you know. And the unfortunate thing is with a lot of people I think, that are suffering, they see that shit, and then they gravitate towards that, and they kind of relax. And that's bullshit because when I go sit down at that fucking table, the same problem I walked in here with is going to be there. The only thing is I'll be a little fuller.

Q: [00:35:22] You'll have a donut in your belly.

Nikita Price: [00:35:22] Yeah. And then I might you know, be a little bit more comfortable. I was never comfortable with that. I always saw that as a way of taking your mind off of what the fuck the issue was. So I do remember, [pauses] dealing with the two main people, Maryanne Schretzman and Susan Nayowith, on the issues of why this was not going to work. I had phone calls with both of them on a regular basis. Whenever there was an issue with the HSP and then, well come to the advocacy meeting bring your people there. I think they regret inviting homeless people up there. [laughs] I remember one of our things was, we were always in the these meetings and would say, okay DHS is here. But DHS is not the entity that's cutting off peoples, [pauses] closing our HRA cases. When your HRA case got closed, they

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stopped paying your rent. There was always this disconnect between, there was a deal made between HRA and DHS where they both somehow would be paying for your rent. But if HRA closes your case, they're not sending any checks out. And then people started being in these apartments and not knowing that when their case had got closed, the rent wasn't being paid. And now you went to all the shit to get your case opened back up but now you're behind in your rent.

Q: [00:37:10] And they didn't pay the back rent.

Nikita Price: [00:37:11] And they didn't pay the back rent.

Q: [00:37:11] Even when it was their fault.

Nikita Price: [00:37:11] Exactly, and now you're getting ready to be taken back to court. That's when we started talking about the revolving door of going back to the shelter. I remember sitting down with the then DHS Commissioner, Robert Hess. This one meeting was, like I said, these fucking people would sit there and just like, Yeah well, uh, it's going to work, it's going to be fine. And we were like, well you're not the people that are closing the cases. Why isn't HRA at the table? And I remember we were struggling, trying to get all of the entities that had something to do with this voucher at the table, and they would always be coming up with excuses. And that's when I really realized how bullshit it was. Because you can't get those motherfuckers at the table, and the Commissioner of HRA at the time was Robert Doar?

Q: [00:38:09] Yeah. We went through a couple. Doar, Hess.

Nikita Price: [00:38:13] No, at HRA. Q: [00:38:16] Oh at HRA? Doar.

Nikita Price: [00:38:16] It was Doar. Because that was also the time in which we were doing a lot of outreach on 125th Street, at the welfare center, Sophie. We’ve got to get in touch with her, Sophie.

Q: [00:38:28] How were you doing the outreach to the welfare center?

Nikita Price: [00:38:32] Oh, that was popping! That was really good. I worked very well with a woman, Sophie, a Muslim sister.

Q: [00:38:43] A member?

Nikita Price: [00:38:44] Yes, a member. She had the brightest personality. This is when I learned also that the shelter population is largely, the largest population is families, single mothers with children. Sophie was an aunt. She had adopted her two nieces. So they were in the shelter. And so it was a single woman with children in the shelter. Her personality was extroverted, upbeat, and she had a knack of being very approachable. Charmel reminds me a lot of her. They could walk up to a person that was really going through it. And at least for that that time period, get them to really open up. So I remember we had to try to go in. We would go into HRA, up the stairs, and try to talk to folks, when HRA found out who we were, they didn't know, we had

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come up with schemes in which to talk to the people sitting there, at this particular place, it was predominately shelter folks that were homeless with the H S.P. voucher.

Then, when we realized that we were being identified. We were being told, you can't do that, can't do that because HRA knew that we were causing a problem. We were exposing them for the bullshit and all these people are now finding themselves back in court, or being evicted. People going in there trying to find out why their cases were closed. We had to then come up with a different way. So we started setting up a table in front of HRA and catching people before they went in. And then they couldn't say anything to us. Security would be looking at us all crazy, and staff would be looking at us all crazy while we were talking. They would know that well, that person is getting ready to come upstairs and give us shit. That got back to DHS, that we were doing that. Then one of the things I think was being said also, at one time I was going over to this HRA office and now I'm going to coming to this one, and now they told me I've got to go to another one. One of the things that we really pushed on was to make all of the shelter residents that had PA cases be consolidated in one area. And we got that done. Picture the Homeless got that done. We kept pushing DHS and HRA. You got fucking people going all over the place and you've got a single mother with children she's going here, she's going there. So we've had to guilt them. We've had to really push them at different times and then we finally got them to use one facility, and that was Park Avenue right?

Q: [00:42:17] For a while, they've moved it a couple of times.

Nikita Price: [00:42:21] Initially, but when we got them to stop, they identified Park Avenue, Park Avenue right?

Q: [00:42:27] Yeah, and then there was the annex.

Nikita Price: [00:42:28] Yeah. Right. But that's when I realized that we had a lot of power. Picture the Homeless had power. If we stayed consistent.

Q: [00:42:41] Do you remember if there was, even was a moment when you went from this is a place I'm going to, to help me navigate, finding myself in a shelter with my daughter to I'm a member of this organization?

Nikita Price: [00:42:59] Yeah, I think so. When I got the HSP voucher, because I was one of the folks that got the voucher. But now I'm a little bit far, I'm a little bit ahead of the curve now as opposed to folks that were actually in the shelter system who were being offered this piece of paper and this a whole process and now saying OK great, but not really knowing what the ins and outs were. You know the importance of keeping your case open. The importance of keeping your kids in fucking school or you're going to get an ACS case, all these things start coming down.

Because there are different factors in the whole homeless plight. You know, a large number of folks had ACS cases. A large number of folks were trying to get a job and if you get a job now you're going to lose your fucking voucher. It was just crazy. It was not thought out by the other side. And you know how do we get them to realize that this is not going to work. I was being encouraged to engage a lot of folks on the other side, as far as the administration goes. I didn't like that because they were always bullshitting me. Which means they were bullshitting people. Which meant

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we're going to have to fucking come see you if you keep that bullshit up! We had already turned out a couple of the advocacy meetings. No. No. Then we had other people that would come to these advocacy meetings.

Nikita Price: [00:44:45] I know they weren't plants, but these people would be up there and they were like oh, everything is fine, everything is fine and Picture the Homeless only was like no, that's bullshit. Everything is not fine. And so you know even though the administration engaged us, they didn't like us because we told the truth. We told them you're going to keep your job and we're still suffering here. And so, even though Susan Nayowith was one who always wanted to be yeah but I understand, then it was like what? Then go tell your fucking boss. This is bullshit.

Then people will try to come off like, well we're only playing this role. Well then, that's the reason why we need everybody at the table. I think that was a way in which I was being told by Picture the Homeless, how are you going to assist us with getting all these people at the table together? I started looking at it, really started looking at it now. How do I fit myself in to be able to speak with members and leaders and come up with a plan in which to approach these folks and be on point with letting them know how fucked up things were. It's one thing to say OK you know we're getting fucked, but we know, we had to come up with, you know, what's the next step? We know what the problem is, so what do you do? How do you fix it? I think that was when we would then introduce the issue of all this abandoned property. And that's when we're also doing our abandoned building count. The City does own some of this property and there are this many people in the fucking shelter and on the street. I don't think the shelter campaign talked a whole lot about street homeless people. We really focused on shelter folks, which was the largest population. I remember one time, sitting down right next to Robert Hess and we were really driving the point home.

You know, it's not about shelters, it's about fucking housing! He turned to me and he told me, basically paraphrasing, we don't do housing, we do shelters. [laughing] I'm like, well then we got a bigger fucking fight because he's exactly right. They don't do housing. So he was basically saying, you need to go talk to whoever you got to talk to about housing, because you're in the wrong place. That was a lesson learned by me.

Q: [00:47:47] We had shut down, members wanted to shut down, an event that Mayor Bloomberg was having when he announced his Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness.

We were flying and causing all kinds of chaos, and a lot of media was there. So first, they wanted to talk to me and I was like, no you have talk to everybody. So then, they got a room. And we were talking about housing and they said the same exact thing. I can't remember who, who some high up at DHS. The mission of DHS is to manage the homeless service system. We don't do housing.

Q: [00:48:23] Right. Hess was, you know, I remember when Hess was hired. Hess was hired out of Philadelphia, right? At the time, he had been, he had done some kind of homeless bullshit in Philly and got all these fucking accolades. And what we were saying was when he came was well that's Philadelphia.

Q: [00:48:48] [laughter] Nikita Price: [00:48:48] But you know what? This is fucking New York. And there are more homeless people here and it's a different issue here. But they came in and they touted all of this bullshit about how he was going to come in and fix this. And

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Bloomberg was blowing smoke up everybody's ass. We were like no, that's not going to work.

Nikita Price: [00:49:07] And then he had the personality when he came in, I remember him, having this personality of I can fix it. I'm like this: I haven't seen very many DHS commissioners. But you don't even have a clue. I was looking at the people that we were dealing with and I was starting to look at all of the abandoned property, and the bullshit voucher that they had. Everybody was disjointed and nobody was talking to the other side. All these people, that's when I really started coming up, and I still use it today with the [pauses] way in which things are done when they're dealing with homeless people. You get all of these electeds and appointeds in rooms, and academics and all these people, and they go in a room, they close the door and they shit in their hand and then they throw it against the wall and whatever sticks is what they're going to come out of that room with, and jam it down your fucking throat. And so we knew from HSP, and all the other big three, big fives, or whatever the programs were, they weren't going to work. And Picture the Homeless was always of the mind, if we're not at the table then what you're saying doesn't include us, now how could you possibly know? You can't learn next shit out of a book. And I've since gone on, someone told me, [pauses] recently within the last year, within the last six months, if you're not at the table you're on the fucking menu! [laughs hard] Q: [00:50:45] I love that. [laughing] Nikita Price: [00:50:45] You're on the menu. [laughs] That has made me really headstrong now with the work I'm doing as far as civil rights goes. But yeah, during that time, we were always saying we need a seat at the table, we need a seat at the table, just so that we could be involved in the process of policy making. That was always our push, for the shelter, was being at the table. They're hearing what we're saying, and the frustration was what we're talking to DHS, we're talking to HRA and I remember I was going to Albany and talking to OTADA. You know, Hanson who is now, [pauses] what is he, ACS now? He's commissioner of ACS. He was a nice guy!

He just had no fucking power. I mean he signed checks, and you know he refused or some kind of way, could not buck the system as far as the way it was laid out, as far as funding for shelters and shit.

Q: [00:51:48] So, during all of these meetings, and all of this Picture the Homeless work, you went from the shelter, you got a voucher, and you got an apartment?

Nikita Price: [00:52:00] HSP. Q: [00:52:01] And you were still active with Picture the Homeless.

Nikita Price: [00:52:04] Uh-Huh. Q: [00:52:09] Picture the Homeless was being challenged by not being able to hire staff who, not just staff of color which was a preference, but staff who had a lived experience of being homeless. Who were, you know, working class people, with working class backgrounds, who could relate to the membership and who members could relate to. And so, we had amazing members like you, and we were like well we

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should hire members who were putting in the work. Which is what we had always tried to do, and so we created an organizer training program. You were in that first round.

Nikita Price: [00:53:02] I believe I was.

Q: [00:53:03] During that time we moved to the Bronx, which is a whole other story I'll talk about. But what was it like for you, to transition from being a leader into being organizer trainee? Did you want to be organizer?

Nikita Price: [00:53:22] I think, I didn't really understand stand what, at the time I did not understand what the difference was between being a leader and being an organizer. Even though folks within Picture the Homeless, you, and Tyletha, and a few other people, probably identified that I had some qualities and I could do that. I think mostly because of my personality. Once I got over the fact that if you step out of your comfort zone, you can still be you. And being you know, basic in my articulation as possible, I did have a way of being able to make folks comfortable with me, and make folks be uncomfortable with me, [emphasizes the word uncomfortable] which is a trait that you need. I think once it was identified, and I was told what the program would look like - and this would be something that you could then take once this is over with. If you choose to be, this could be a career for you. What was not told to me at the time, was that being an organizer is grinding. It's tedious. There are good parts to it, but there are also a lot of downside to it also. You have to be able to get in there, in a way. Your victories with your defeats and your, you're settling. You know all that, you have to do all of that. So you have to be willing to do that. You're not always going to win. You're not always going to lose. Sometimes you're just going to have to swallow a bitter pill and then hopefully on the other side you'll come out and you'll be able to say, what's the word I wanted, to revisit, say a situation that didn't come out exactly like you wanted it to. So I think I had some really smart people talking to me, Tyletha, Sam. Sam was always a person that I could go to and he would break it down in a different way for me. You know, this is what they're saying. But this is how it looks in the big picture. Sam and I have always had a great relationship like that. So then I basically had to ask myself, can you do this? I said yea, I can do this. I can do this. So, that's how I got [pauses] you know, [pauses] I said yeah, OK I can get into that. But even after that, we're not talking about it now, but that led to Tyletha saying I'm leaving and would you be willing to take my position. So that was a whole another step. But yeah, I didn't even think about it. You know when I said I'll get into the organizer training program. I just saw that as an opportunity to push Picture the Homelessness's mission, which I had fully embraced at the time. So yeah, I was fully committed to that, and it went well.

Q: [00:57:08] What were the training sessions like? What did you get out of them?

Nikita Price: [00:57:13] How you have to be organized. It's one thing to know what the fucking problem is. How are you, what are the different ways in which you identify the problem? You talk about solutions. You come up with a viable solution.

And then you get the individuals, or you get the platform to present that solution. Or what you believe to be your solutions to the folks that have the power to change what you've identified as being an issue; something not good. I think in this city, where these folks have bought into this whole at least you have the right to shelters. Yeah,

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you do have the right to shelter. But you have the right to decent conditions also. You have the right to be treated like a fucking human being. And if you don't, how then do we get you to do the right thing? So you've identified that there are, this many thousands of people in the shelter, you've identified that there is this much vacant property. So then how do you, how do you then get, how do you then bring that attention to them and change that?

Q: [00:58:51] How did we?

Nikita Price: [00:58:52] I think we did it in a lot of ways. Even before I got into the organizer training program, doing the actual building count, where we were calling all of these entities, bureaucrats, finding out who owned this property. So what did we do? We went from seeing the plight in our neighborhood, to saying, this is not only in our neighborhood. This is throughout! How then do we get the numbers on this? And I was like, homeless people want to get the numbers? Yeah! Because they’re, we're visually seeing, there's probably enough property there to house, to get everybody out of the shelter and get people off the street. But we don't know the number! Then Picture the Homeless was, well, we have access to these people's numbers but you have to talk to them. I can talk to them as staff, I'm staff. That's when I was really given, I really want to say that right. That's when I was really positioned in a way whereas: you're the one that has to get their attention and not the people that are getting a paycheck because you're the one that's living this. And once you're able to articulate that to them, you do a couple of things. You've identified the problem, you've offered solutions, and you push back against the myth that homeless people are pretty much worthless. You show them that yeah, you have the same worth as anyone else. You have the same intelligence than a lot of cases. Your present situation does not define who you are. It defines the system and what you're caught up in right now.

If you're looking to change that here are viable solutions that someone who you deem not intelligent enough, not having the wherewithal, not having the balls to tell you you're wrong, this is what you need to be doing. This is what we have available. Stop lying to people.

Q: [01:01:26] And so excuse me, a little time check. We're going to Nikita Price: [01:01:30] Excuse me [coughing] Q: [01:01:34] We're going to go up to the Bronx. Which is where, did you come on the staff on 116 or in the Bronx?

Nikita Price: [01:01:43] I came on staff for 116.

Q: [01:01:46] For many years, for several years anyway, there were three paid staff.

You and Sam and I. Members used to do a lot of the work, answering phones, doing all kinds of stuff.

Nikita Price: [01:02:04] Cleaning, everything.

Q: [01:02:05] Everything, and we had three campaigns. The shelter campaign had turned into rental subsidies, of which was you were the organizer. Sam was a housing organizer and I was a civil rights organizer. What was it about Picture the Homeless

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that inspired so many homeless folks, including street homeless folks, to really step up and do all this work - some of which you have been describing?

Nikita Price: [01:02:44] I think we found a way to let folks know that if it was a situation, whereas your issues were shelter, you had to identify what was the whole shelter environment like. The one constant with everything was homelessness. So, that in a civil rights venue it was usually confrontations with law enforcement, or business owners, or something like that. If it was shelter, it was shelter conditions, the lack there of real services, it was the disconnect between HRA and DHS. And I think that is what basically, what I found, was the ability to be able to separate, the individual area in which you existed in and then relate to those issues with those people in that particular situation. So I can't go to homeless people that are living in the park and talk to them about how bad it is, and how shitty the food is in a shelter.

You just don't do that. It makes no sense. It's like get the fuck away from me. I'm digging in the garbage or begging outside of a restaurant. I don't know what that means. You getting a meal. I think I always had to be respectful of whatever the situation was. No, I never lived on the streets. I had to sometimes tell a lot of the shelter folks to be a little bit more respectful of the folks that decided to live on the street, because that took a lot because these people did have the opportunity to live in a shelter and for whatever reason they decided not to live in a shelter. So that had to tell you something. That all the hoopla and good vibes about shelters wasn't necessarily the case because there are a lot of people that are choosing to live on the fucking street rather than live under these conditions. And I knew a lot of the conditions that people were living in under the shelter system. So I think, knowing that, then knowing if I'm talking to a shelter person then you have to focus your attention on you know, the person's conditions. Not only in the shelter but what they have to go through: if you're a single mother, going between HRA and DHS and ACS, and all of these different heads, and then finding the time to sit down and give Picture the Homeless a moment or some of your time, to really expose the system. You know it's hard to get a person, a single mother with three kids and a closed HRA case, a looming ACS case and the ability not to fucking talk to people in your shelter because they mean you no good. It's hard to get them to say okay, I'm going to come and give Picture the Homeless some time, and I'm going to work at changing the system. But that's what we have to do to get people to step up and become leaders and change.

Q: [01:06:51] How do we do that? When it works, how do we do it?

Nikita Price: [01:06:55] You identify all of the issues that the person is going through and you work with them on it. Even though we're not providing direct services, we've been around long enough to identify who they need to be talking to.

What they need to be saying. You sit down and you give them the confidence to go in and say that. You also have to let them know, this is the role that you have to play in this. You can't, you know you have to be, so realistic with people now and say no, no, long gone are the days where you just walk in the office and sit your ass down and say this is my problem, this is what I need, and they just say OK here, and there's a signed check and then boom, there you have it. You got to go through hoops. And so we have to be able to prepare folks for these hoops. And be there for them when they face the reality of the hoops, especially when they say well you told me it was going to be like this. I also told your that, [laughs], you know, if it doesn't go like this, this is what we're going to have to do, go to Plan B. Now, are you still committed to doing this.

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Because if you're still committed to doing this we Picture the Homeless, me Nikita, is committed to sticking by your side.

Q: [01:08:23] We're still in the Bronx now. What are some ways that we built community so people could actually believe that that was true?

Nikita Price: [01:08:41] I want to get, I want to be sure that I understand this. Are you saying now because we moved to the Bronx I mean built community in the Bronx? I'm not really sure how you mean by that because I believe we had built community when I came to Picture the Homeless in East Harlem.

Q: [01:09:04] Uh-huh, oh yeah.

Nikita Price: [01:09:05] It was different when we moved to the Bronx. The community that we built in the Bronx was different because there wasn't a whole lot of street homeless folk that we were actually reaching out to. Or we were reaching out to them, it's just that with homeless folks this is something that I learned: you're going to thrive in your environment. The environment predominately for a lot of street homeless folk is Manhattan because that's where opportunity is. There's not a lot in the Bronx. There are some, but not a lot. There are more restaurants that are more giving as far as food there, and more people, there more people with money, [laughs] if you're panhandling, in Manhattan. So people are going to, people are going to generate in the areas in which they can exist, or with the least resistance. So I think the community that we built in the Bronx, [pauses] let me see that's kind of hard because, OK I get it.

Nikita Price: [01:10:23] One of the things when we moved to the Bronx was the fact that at a certain point in time, and I'm not sure what the number is now, the Bronx had the highest population of shelter residents didn't it?

Q: [01:10:36] Uh-huh.

Nikita Price: [01:10:38] That made our job easier. We didn't have to go to Brooklyn and they hadn't really started this whole shelters all over the place, and, [pauses] we knew where the majority of the plight was with folks that were in the shelter system, it was in the Bronx. Then there were different organizations, I remember having to go, [pauses] also the PATH was in the Bronx. That's where folks did their intake.

Housing court, the majority of the folks that were losing their vouchers, also were in the Bronx.

Q: [01:11:19] Because that's where most of the landlords were that would take the vouchers.

Nikita Price: [01:11:22] Right. Those landlords were predators, predators preying on these people. There were times in which we had to deal with landlords that were asking for side deals.

Q: [01:11:37] Uh-huh.

Nikita Price: [01:11:37] I met a lot of other groups then that dealt with different

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aspects of homeless people. Personally for me, I built relationships with various groups [pauses] that dealt with our issues and I established relationships; it's called Housing Court Answers now. These are the people that you talk to and deal with, when you are facing eviction. You have to go to the courts, and rather than go up the stairs and get shitted [laughs hard] on by a Judge you stop at this desk and hopefully they can help you with your plight. [laughs harder] Q: [01:12:20] Give you some ammo. [laughs] Nikita Price: [01:12:20] Because you're gonna get shitted on.

Q: [01:12:20] Give you a shield.

Nikita Price: [01:12:26] And then there was NYCCA across the street. They would try to [pauses] assist folks. Then, I had to find out that their funding was only for families, you know? Let me see. Now those were my personal relationships that I had developed. As far as an organization? I think that was during the time also in which I was about to leave Picture the Homeless for a brief period of time. So my stint in the Bronx, at that time when we first got there, was short lived. I was going through some issues and then I left.

Q: [01:13:20] Now that was great. Those are great examples of how, as an organizer it's kind of reminding me how you talk about homeless folks thriving where they're at.

A good organizer looks externally, like who's out there? Who can build relationships?

I know some of those folks that worked in those agencies really loved you. They were like Oh Nikita, where's Nikita? I love him! One of the things I was also thinking about with the idea of community building is among members and staff. And so, trying to think of some ways that, whether it was on 116th or in the Bronx, where we build community among members. So that if you say to somebody who's homeless, who's been out there a long time, if you do this, I'm going to have your back. Or if you do this, we're going to have your back. Why did they believe us?

Nikita Price: [01:14:26] There is one time that, and Jean Rice brings this story up all the time, we went from you got a fucked up voucher to you, got a place, [pauses] to they stopped paying your rent and you became homeless again. You went back to the PATH. And they were telling you, no you can't come in! You remember that time when the PATH was turning people away, families away?

Q: [01:14:55] Yeah.

Nikita Price: [01:14:55] It was rampant. That's when we really told them that the chickens had come home to roost with their fucking voucher system. All these families are all standing outside the PATH and being told go live with your daughter.

Put your baby in, and well then there's no room. Put the baby in a dresser drawer.

You remember that shit?

Lynn Lewis: [01:15:17] Yep. Nikita Price: [01:15:17] Put your baby in the sink, all that shit. I remember then we started focusing on all these families that were being turned away at the PATH. We

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started putting a lot of effort into going to the PATH and talking to these families. It had gotten to the point whereas we had to establish a relationship with then, a brand new City Councilwoman, Annabel Palma. There was a State Senator. I met a woman, Price, I can't remember who the senator was. I remember meeting, [pauses] Tommy Lee. Tommy Lee, who now works for the fucking mayor's office.

Q: [01:16:00] He does?

Nikita Price: [01:16:00] Yeah. Oh yeah. You never see him? Oh, then you never go there anymore. Yeah, Tommy Lee, now it's just like, [looks away, imitating Tommy Lee] you know. I remember establishing relationships with elected and appointed officials, that understood. With the limited amount of power, depending upon when you called upon them, they could exact that power and then kind of lessen the fucking pain. When people would see that, that's how we got a few people to stick around a little while. I think one of the challenges with homeless folk is that we're no different than anybody else. We just want the fucking pain to stop so that we can get on with our life. Not everybody is built to be an organizer. Not everybody is built to be a leader. Not everybody is built to be a member. But, for the short period of time in which I can, if you can work with me, I'll do what I can do. So just like there were strengths in me that were identified, you have to identify that in folks also. It might be short lived. And if so, so be it. At least, nurture that and bring that on, so that it really gets the message out. I think that one of the good things about Picture the Homeless is with our membership all constantly changing, the other side never, there are very few people that are consistent. That when they're going to see elected and appointeds, like Jean Rice.

Segment 6 Nikita Price: [00:00:00] So where are we? Establishing relationships.

Q: [00:00:07] So we have internal relationships with members that we establish, and you were just talking about the fact that not everybody is going to be organizer, or not everybody's going to be a leader or even a member for that long. That everybody is just trying to stop the pain.

Nikita Price: [00:00:27] Seek their own level.

Q: [00:00:30] That's not a bad, it's not a bad or a good thing, it's a reality.

Nikita Price: [00:00:37] It's the way it is.

Q: [00:00:38] Do you have an example of somebody who, maybe it was a short time, but during the time that they were involved, were powerful?

Nikita Price: [00:00:47] Yeah, I mentioned her earlier.

Q: [00:00:49] OK. Nikita Price: [00:00:50] Sophie.

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The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project Nikita Price, Session 1, Tapes 1-6

Q: [00:00:50] All right.

Nikita Price: [00:00:51] Very powerful sister. I learned early on in this work, a couple of things. The largest population in shelters are single mothers, with children.

One of the voices that we don't, [emphasizes the word don't] hear about when you talk about homeless people, especially street homeless people, are women. [pauses] And that no matter how bad you might think it is for a man it's ten times harder for a woman, especially a woman of color, being homeless. Ten times harder. Being a single father, having a child, that was then 14. And then going on to get my two youngest daughters, who are now six and eight, out of this - who were born in the shelter - I have an affinity for three groups of homeless people. Children, families, it was at one point in time, just single mothers. But I know there are a lot of single fathers. I've come to meet a lot of single fathers in the shelter also, and veterans. All these people really get fucked over in the shelter system, or in this whole homeless plight. I think that has helped my work, and it has also slowed me down a lot in my organizing capacity. I'm a human being, and I take those three categories to heart.

Sometimes, I might tend to exact a little more attention to those issues than I probably should. When, as an organizer, you want to make the whole system work. I think, [pauses] I know, if I could critique myself and say one of [pauses] the bad things for me, but I think it's much more of my personality, is the fact that that affinity that I have with either one of those three groups, will slow me down with the big picture sometimes.

Q: [00:03:34] When you came back to Picture the Homeless, you came back in as a wellness instructor.

Nikita Price: [00:03:42] [laughs] Picture that!

Q: [00:03:45] [laughs] with the Homeless Organizing Academy, which is a whole other topic for another time. Then you became the civil rights organizer.

Nikita Price: [00:03:58] Yeah.

Q: [00:03:58] I remember you telling me that you didn't know anything about that.

Nikita Price: [00:04:03] Didn't know shit about civil rights. Yeah.

Q: [00:04:08] So, we're not going to go into everything you've learned about being the civil rights organizer, because you are an amazing civil rights organizer, that's a long story.

Nikita Price: [00:04:20] Thank you for that [laughs] Q: [00:04:27] I guess coming back to Picture the Homeless, just to have that be a longer, our ending question. What [pauses] was it that you saw that made you want to come back?

Nikita Price: [00:04:48] You mean come back period?

Q: [00:04:49] Yeah, what was the value? You know what did you see as important

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about Picture the Homeless, and your place in Picture the Homeless?

Nikita Price: [00:04:57] When I left Picture the Homeless, Picture the Homeless already planted a seed that was already kind of sprouting. When I left Picture the Homeless, I went on to become a case manager. When I was a case manager, I was a case manager for families. A large population of those families lived in shelters. So the transition there was really easy. Then when I got custody of the girls, I could not fulfill my duties as a case manager because of the caseload and trying to get custody.

So when I came back to Picture the Homeless and being wellness - I had learned some wellness skills when I was at Highbridge - and [pauses] I saw that some of the things were still the same at Picture the Homeless, and some of the things had changed. So I was pretty much just doing my whole wellness thing. I might sit in on a meeting here or there. But that really wasn't [pauses] my thing. I think what it was, [pauses] when I came back Picture the Homeless, was right in the middle of the [pauses] what's the name of that fucking, Freedom House.

Q: [00:06:26] Uh-huh.

Nikita Price: [00:06:26] So you're dealing now with shelter. You're dealing with fucking, the community, and you're dealing with fucking police, all three of those things.

Q: [00:06:34] In the neighborhood where you were in a shelter.

Nikita Price: [00:06:38] Not far from it, yeah, in upper Broadway. Now these white people were like Eh! Eh! Eh! and the police were doing shelter raids. So the community, the police and the shelter staff were shitting on people with security. So I remember there being a big rally outside of Freedom House. Then I remember us going over to go to the library. Now, I wasn't on staff then. I was the wellness organizer, but then it's just like Oh you're right back in it. Because I'm listening to, I'm listening to the people fucking vamp across the street, the homeowners. Then I'm listening to folks that Ryan had gathered and prepped to talk to the press and then we had to go over to the fucking library and now I'm listening to the NYPD and the shelter folks shit on us. The thing that I think that [pauses] really brought things into a clearer picture for me was the fact that when the police officer, Precinct Commander, whoever he was, started touting the Comstat numbers. I had never really paid attention to Comstat numbers before. I knew they existed, I didn't really understand how they worked, or what it meant. But it became very clear and evident then, that what the people were saying [pauses] what was in the Comsat reports, and what the fucking staff was doing was all three different things, and everybody was trying to, of course, bring it back to homeless people. Homeless people were not committing the larger amount of crimes [laughs] in the area. The homeowners were pulling that NIMBY shit [laughs] and this fucking city didn't have a process whereby of getting people out of this fucking plight into some type of real housing. That's when I also realized that the shelter complex was a business. [pauses] We had gone through a period now where, I don't think there was a viable shelter voucher then, was there?

Q: [00:09:25] No. Nikita Price: [00:09:25] It was no. So people were just languishing then and still

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having to be demonized by these people. You walk out the door, fucking people across the street. The people across the street are demonizing you. You get to the corner, the fucking police are stopping their car asking you for ID. Then you still had to go bow to all of these other agencies. And I think that was, [pauses] that got me just a little bit more intrigued. It just so happened that Shaun, who was the civil rights organizer, was in the process of leaving. I didn't know about it until somebody approached me.

Q: [00:10:14] What do you think is important about Picture the Homeless?

Nikita Price: [00:10:25] I think if this city loses our voice, on a level of civil rights and shelters, we're fucked. Homeless people are fucked here because nobody else is doing it like we do it. We've [pauses] put it on the map that the plight of homelessness is a big fucking deal here. Not only is it money making for the city, there are other groups have decided to focus their attention on homelessness. Some of these groups are fucking getting money and not doing the fucking thing. It's making the work harder because I think everybody starts out wanting to do the right thing. But I also see that when folks get money, [pauses] whether it's an organization or individuals or what have you, that changes people. That changes how, what you're going to do, who you're going to be. But I think Picture the Homeless has stayed consistent. You can edit this part if you want. [laughs] Nikita Price: [00:11:41] Picture the Homeless was very consistent when you were here. There has been a change. Priorities are different now. So I'm like this, I guess you would say I'm really old school. Sam and I were talking about that too the other day, yesterday. I'm really old school, so I know change is inevitable. I think one of my biggest fears is that [pauses] and not to say that I'm the shit, because I know I'm not the shit. But I think if I were to be gone this would be a totally different look for this organization. I'm in there scrapping for civil rights.

Q: [00:12:29] Yeah.

Nikita Price: [00:12:30] I don't see that as being such a priority. The civil rights campaign is the campaign that got this organization started. And I just think that there would be such a dramatic change if there was not a civil rights campaign here, as far as the work that's done, the focus, and what this organization would mean to homeless people in New York whether they're on the streets or are doubled up or in shelters.

Q: [00:13:07] Yeah, yeah.

Nikita Price: [00:13:08] I'm fighting to keep this campaign going. You said something to me. You and Eric said something to me. You said it before you left.

When I was questioning you because I really felt that in order for this organization to stay vital and vibrant, that you needed to be here. You're like, you know I put in my time. I said, but if I left -I thought about leaving - I had questioned my worth here.

You had mentioned something to me and I never like to get big headed. But I do know a lot of shit about what's happening [laughs] with homeless people and I have had to own that. And I think you brought it to my attention first. And J.K. has since really driven that point to me, like Nikita, you've got to stop saying that you're part of the coalition. Picture the Homeless, and you in particular, take lead on a lot of shit,

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whether you know it or not. So I have to own that.

Q: [00:14:19] Yep! Nikita Price: [00:14:20] It's important to me to know that I'm doing something that's exacting some kind of change.

Q: [00:14:28] Of course you are. I was having this conversation the other day. Of course we don't want to be big headed. But, if you get to be our age and you don't know nothing [both of us are laughing] something's wrong with you! So we need to own that we know what we know, right? Right, and we need to know that we're good at what we're good at and that doesn't mean we're good at everything.

Nikita Price: [00:14:55] Right, definitely not.

Q: [00:14:56] Like we know everything.

Nikita Price: [00:14:57] No, because I still call upon you. I call J. K. I sit down and talk to Sam. I have my go tos, because I still have to. Am I staying focused? What should I be doing? You know, that's the thing.

Q: [00:15:15] One of the things that the oral history of Picture the Homeless, we want to really identify, are what are some of the elements that allowed us to not just be an idea, because everything is an idea first. But actually became something that exists, and grows. You moving from being a member, who just like many people, most people, walk through the door like, I need some fucking answers because [laughs] I'm in a bad situation, to becoming politically committed. And then [pauses] getting on staff and being a crucial part of the organization. That's your path here. If that could be replicated, either by Picture the Homeless or other groups, that would be really powerful. So, within your story there's a lot of wisdom that we need to uncover. We need to look at and understand it. Some of it is you, and some of it is the organization.

Nikita Price: [00:16:43] I think there's a mixture of all of it. It's like a gumbo.

Q: [00:16:47] Uh-huh.

Nikita Price: [00:16:47] It's like you have you, your personality, who you are. You have an organization that is fucking rock solid on the issue. No bullshit. And I think a large part of that is because we're not coopted by monies that we get. Which makes our struggle that much harder. Because we don't have the money we have to make do with what we have, and we don't have a lot. I've learned this from homeless people and from Picture the Homeless. You make do with what you've got. Homeless people don't have a lot. Picture the Homeless doesn't have a lot. But what we do have, we make it work. When we do go out, and we encounter these various entities, [pauses] we've always been fucking honest. So we'll be honest, and if we have to guilt you, we'll guilt you. If you are coming to us in good faith, then let's work together. What Picture the Homeless has done is always shown that it's a myth about homeless people. We've gotten legislation - on that fucking board in there - Housing Not Warehousing that homeless people put together. We're part of a coalition where there's two pieces of legislation that should have been passed with some other

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legislation back in 2013, the Right to Know Act. Homeless people are doing this shit.

Homeless people are doing this shit. We're not doing it by ourselves, but we injected ourselves into the conversation. On housing, on policing, your civil rights, your basic rights, your basic needs. And I think that says a lot about Picture the Homeless. I think that brings a lot out of me. I think it has brought a lot out, even with the people that have come in and got a little bit from us, and they left and with that, I've seen people that come back and say, you know this is how we’re doing. They owe a lot of what they're doing going through to Picture the Homeless. You just saw three people walk in this door that were here, left, and came back. That has a lot to say about this organization. If it has a little bit to do with me, then I'm grateful. I'll own that. I’ll own that.

Q: [00:19:21] Alright, so this is to be continued.

Nikita Price: [00:19:21] OK! Q: [00:19:23] OK! Nikita Price: [00:19:24] OK. Good shit. [smiles] Q: [00:19:24] Alright, good shit. [smiles] Nikita Price: [00:19:25] Good shit.

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