The Only Way Things Will Change Is If We Organize

Andres Perez (August 7, 2019)

This is the way I always tell my fellow members. I always tell them, “This is our safe haven place here. Without this place here, we would be nothing. We’ll be out here struggling. The system would have a better advantage over us. We need a place that we’ve been having that we can put a stop to a lot of this nonsense that we have to deal with in our everyday life. If we don’t stand up strong and fight against the system, and stay together as members and families or whatever, we’re never going to get anywhere. We’re going to be out there worrying about what’s going to happen each day.

So, Picture the Homeless has always been that safe haven place for me. It’s always been a place that I get my knowledge and my energy. I mean, extra knowledge, and stuff. I’m able to do things and everything. I’ve learned a lot from Picture the Homeless, and I’ve learned a lot from the members I deal with. I also feel that other members appreciate the stuff I’ve done for them, as well. So, being part of Picture the Homeless, I’m going to stick and stay, stay strong, and fight this battle, and stop this nonsense that’s going on.

James Tracy (December 2, 2018)

I noticed as Picture the Homeless interacted with different formations in New York, political formations, is that even with really, really enlightened people who care really deeply about social justice and a better world that the idea of homeless people being in an organization and doing it for themselves and being fierce and strong can still be a little bit surprising for them.

Ultimately, most of them welcomed it, but at first, they were like, “Oh, wow! These people can speak for themselves.” I think that that’s one of the things about Picture the Homeless, the smaller impacts that are still really profound. I remember marching alongside the immigrant rights group with you guys and you could tell that they weren’t used to working with homeless people or marching along with homeless people, but once people got over the initial cognitive dissonance about what they thought was possible, often times it was very welcomed. So, like making that space for homeless people to be part of a movement was something that was really evident out there. Picture the Homeless has made that space. *

Joo-Hyun Kang (January 4, 2019)

One of the things that struck me about Picture the Homeless, which I think is a discipline, because it doesn’t exist with all organizations, grassroots or otherwise, is that PTH members in meetings tried to be clear about when they were speaking for

Picture the Homeless versus when they had an idea themselves. And that’s a practice of accountability that I just don’t think is as common as we would like it to be. We want it to be more common, but, you know, it’s just not that common.

But it’s also part of what makes Picture the Homeless’s practice around movement-building so important. Picture the Homeless doesn’t speak for just one or two people. It speaks for members. The conditions that members face change at different times, so what might have been true a year ago is not true or might be different, two years after that depending on what the actual conditions are.

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

Moved Ideas and Won Policy Change that was Shaped by Homeless New Yorkers

Nikita Price (2017.12.02)

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 three, there’s two pieces of legislation that should have been passed with some other 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’ve 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. That has a lot to say about this organization and if it has a little bit to do with me, then I'm grateful. I'll own that. I’ll own that.

Jenny Akchin (2019.06.05)

Picture the Homeless was in their own category. It was just like, “This is an organization that’s super-down, that does direct action, that is in all the movement spaces and engages in this radical way.” And maybe I’m just projecting my like current experience on like the thoughts what I knew about Picture the Homeless at the time.

But I do people would talk about Banking on Vacancy and how amazing it was. That people went and just counted, right? Because people talk all the time about data, right? And like, “Oh, we need to get this data. Oh, we need to get that data.” And like, yeah you all just did that! And I think that was really attractive to me at the time. Seeing groups that actually do and show up in that way was like really, really cool.

Lynn Lewis (from interview with Kazembe Balagun)

People told us that, “That’s not an issue anymore, that was in the '70s.” And we, said “It's an issue, but the difference was that in the '70s people abandoned property, and the city took it over. And so, we're in the '90s and the 2000s, and there's lots of vacant buildings and lots of vacant land, but most of it is privately owned. We had all these people telling us that that wasn't an issue anymore.

First they would say, “There isn't any vacant property.” And PTH members were like, “what are you talking about? There are vacant buildings everywhere.”

Then we started doing sleep outs and we did this Manhattan count, and we were all proud of ourselves, and we get these housing activists in a room, and then they're kind of like, “Okay, but so what? They're privately owned, and they pay their taxes.” And our members were like, “Unjust laws are made to be broken, and slavery used to be legal!” A lot of shit used to be legal!

So then Chino [Garcia] had the idea and Valerio from Cooper Square, they said, “Well, you could tag the buildings and claim them.” And so, then that's when we did the wheat pasting. We kept engaging with vacant buildings and vacant lots in all these different ways, and members sometimes also were squatting.

So it was at the center of Picture the Homeless discourse from the very beginning. People were like, "I ain't got nowhere to live, and there's empty apartments.” And if they're in the street, they’re getting arrested. If they're in a shelter the shelter is getting thousands of dollars a month for them to live in a jail environment. And so, where do we go from here?

But it took years to move other folks to that. So then it was counting the buildings, but not just to count them but to actually tell everybody, “Look! There are a lot.” And then it did wake a lot of people up. Then the next move was, “Well, let's decommodify the land.” And people actually use that language. So, you don't walk up to people on the street and be like, "Hey, you want to decommodify some land?" But you had people like Jean using that language.

James Tracy (December 2, 2018)

You know, when people think about housing that it’s not simply a tenant’s right issue, even though tenant’s rights are enormously important. If we had better ones, we would have less homelessness in the first place. But the homelessness question is part of the housing question. And it’s just so weird that at the core, homelessness… Sorry, rather the word homelessness means you don’t have a house, right? It’s like home-less-ness, but it’s still really surprising how so many people even really smart and compassionate and politically astute people attach so much other stuff onto it.

It still comes down to the housing question, at its core. Yes, people’s experience of homelessness can be intensified and worsened if they’re also struggling with an addiction, right, or also struggling with a mental health issue. But to be boil everything down to mental health and substance abuse is really disingenuous when, really at its core… It’s the fact that every human being doesn’t have the right to housing. That’s something that Picture the Homeless reminds people of. Sometimes, it’s a gentle reminder and sometimes it’s a loud reminder.

Kay Samuels (December 6, 2019)

It maybe might be in a funky way, but it’s effective. Sleeping outside that guy’s building was pretty funky, and for them to realize they couldn’t move anybody. I don’t think a lot of people know that you can sleep on the street in New York. I don’t think people really know that.

Shaun Lin (October 12, 2019)

I think it must have been either Rob [Robinson] or Jean [Rice] at that action saying something about, “What role does land play? Should land serve a social good in terms of housing people, in terms of giving people a safe space? Or should it serve the role of real estate, and be treated as a commodity?”

And I think the action of breaking into private property and trespassing on private property and then thinking about what is private property, what is this thing that we’re upholding that we that others would kind of clutch their pearls at, you know that cutting the locks, going into a vacant lot. And then really thinking through what is land? What is our relationship with land and what is its value? Is its value making money for somebody, or is its value in providing shelter, space, homes for somebody? That I think really like fundamentally kind of made me think about capitalism in a different way.

I think from that moment on, I always looked at Picture the Homeless as an organization that was willing to kind of push the envelope in terms of what type of organizing was happening, willing to break the law if it felt it was necessary to do so, and also pushing consciousness, you know? Like forcing us to think about the political issues of homelessness, not just like we need shelters for homeless folks, but like we need to think about, how we think about land in the city. And that was really powerful to me.

Kazembe Balagun (June 4, 2019)

I think that there was also this level of coalition building from the bottom up that allowed people to create a network. And that to me is an interesting thing. So, I think that seed that I think PTH has created has also been able to expand itself into this kind of like, network of ideas and network of sensibility that can really build out from underneath it, you know? I think that building these networks are going to be crucial, and that's the dreams that I think people are having right now. They're like, “Oh, this is really possible. These are real tools. We can do this.”

Betty Yu (January 20, 2023)

I remember we got feedback from folks about PTH's [video] pieces quite a bit, because I don't think people are used to seeing homeless folks in that way, right? So you have a stereotype, right? That they look a certain way, they talk a certain way. so on, so forth. And to show folks in this light of like extremely smart and thoughtful and actually critiquing the system and understanding the conditions and what has to change in order for folks to achieve the goals and to change the system end homelessness, and all that. Like, understanding it systemically.

I think folks were like, “Wow! This is like the first time we've actually seen this.” I mean like, more than once even within the staff of folks, like within MNN. I mean, even outside because folks are used to, “Okay, there's Coalition for the Homeless…” And there’s these organizations, advocacy groups. Of course, there's a place for advocacy groups, but this was very different. And so I think people were really, really inspired by PTH and the work they were doing because it was so unique. Something we've never I've never seen before, you know?

Joo-Hyun Kang (2019.01.04)

Another memory, is when the Community Safety Act got passed. What was it, like two o’clock in the morning or some shit? And Picture the Homeless members who were there, who were clear, they’re like, “We did this.” Which I was so thankful for because I feel like that was true, and it’s too often when legislative victories happen that grassroots organizations or directly impacted people don’t own that victory and Picture the Homeless had not only fought for, but really led that fight.

* Shaun Lin (October 12, 2019)

I remember the one bill that really resonated with folks was around the profiling bill, which initially started as a racial profiling bill if I remember correctly.

And Picture the Homeless fought really hard to have language around profiling of homelessness or perception of homelessness included in that to protect people from I forget exactly what the legal term was but that that inclusion of that language was really important.

And if it wasn’t for Picture the Homeless’ participation in CPR, I don’t think that that language would have even been obvious to people that was important.

*

Paul Boden (December 4, 2018)

The building count shit I thought was fucking brilliant, you know? Like, nobody had any idea there were that many empty fucking buildings. But everyone has seen an empty building, you know? So, like as you guys would develop these campaigns, and I really liked the direct actions that you did. I just thought they were creative, and they were fearless of the cops. And the cops would show up and none of the organizers would freak the fuck out.

Rogers (January 18, 2018)

The rules that get in the way of putting together people who need a place to live and vacant places to live, a child could tell you, “Duh! Those two things belong. They can serve each other.” That fight up and down Third Avenue, identifying buildings, trying to get the city council members to see what is all so obvious, that we have vacant spaces enough, sufficient to house every person who’s in the shelter. We are the children saying to the emperor, “Hey, you’re out there naked. You should know better.” And like the children who say that, we have often been dismissed.

It is a wonderful thing that some members of the city council, pushing past several mayors because we’ve been down this road with several mayors have gotten to the point where they have identified, not only the existence of vacant spaces, but the ease with which homeless people can be domiciled. And more and more and more we have to continue pushing so that the vacant spaces are not only identified, but that they become occupied by the sixty, seventy, eighty thousand people in New York City who are homeless.

Ryan Hickey (May 22, 2019)

Nobody was talking about vacant property as being a problem. And Picture the Homeless was, even before I got there long before I got there, since basically the beginning was talking about vacant property and we were just kind of asking ourselves questions, you know?

There’s an affordable housing crisis, there’s a lot of vacant property, why don’t we just open up this vacant property and put people in them? Flat out. Right? And then a lot of other questions started bubbling up, you know? Who owns these properties? Where are they? Are they located more densely in another area, or whatever?

I mean, this was something that we were asking ourselves that was politically unpopular, even though it shouldn’t have been unpopular. It was unpopular because nobody wanted to think about it. It was unpopular because people always said, “Oh, that’s not a problem.” That was the answer, right? “This is not a problem, like you think it is.”

But our membership was like, “No, every time I walk in my neighborhood, every time I walk in East Harlem, every time I walk here, I see boarded up housing, boarded up buildings, and then I see somebody sleeping on the street right next to it.” That is just not just. That is not right.

Kazembe Balagun

(June 4, 2019)

The Vacancy Count felt like such a vanguard issue. Pointing at the vacant houses that exist in the city, is the most intrinsic critique of capitalism that you can do without even telling people that, “This shit's about capitalism.” And that shit is so slick and so smart that people don't understand they're talking about capitalism, because it's like, “Yeah! Look at all of us homeless people and look at all those empty houses. You make that connection.” And folks are like, “Damn!”

Jean Rice (October 6, 2017)

The things that mean the most to me are not the individual accomplishments, like helping to be a founding member of the Picture the Homeless board, helping to be a founding member of our civil rights committee. What I get the most satisfaction from, is the victories that Picture the Homeless has achieved that affected multitudes of homeless people.

For instance, defending the Better Bottle Bill, and getting it expanded to where it includes plastic water bottles. And when I walk down the street people that [smiles] don't even know me, they don't even know Picture the Homeless they're lined up at these reverse vending machines, that I could remember when they weren't available. And they are getting revenue without confrontation, without being dehumanized. And that gives me great satisfaction.

So, I mean, when you look at major structural changes that have happened since 1999. Globally! Globally! Picture are Homeless seldom heard of, but often our footprint is there. From Istanbul where people that are trying to reform a process that is not in the common good, when the people that fell between the cracks, where people end up being criminalized or vandalized having their rights, basic human rights trampled upon... When they come all the way from Istanbul to New York City and seek Picture the Homeless out and use us as a model. When the Shackdwellers from South Africa come to Picture the Homeless and use us as a model! I mean, I sometimes get that Urkel complex and say, “Gee! Did we do that?!” It's unbelievable that where God and this chain of events has led my organization and I'm proud to be part of that.

Ryan Hickey (April 25, 2019)

So, the finished product was Gaining Ground where we specifically looked at, five, six, seven cluster site buildings and we did value assessments on them, and we said the government should take this over through eminent domain.

And a lot of people who we asked to sign on to Gaining Ground did not like that. And they specifically said, no they weren’t going to sign on to it because it said eminent domain.

We were told, “It would never be done!” ANHD told us that. Even the people we were working with, they were like, “This is not going to happen but put it in there.”

And we were just like, “No, fuck you. We’re going to put it in there because we know it’s important, we know it’s the right thing to do.” And also, you don’t organize for what you can get. You organize for what you want, right? And we wanted eminent domain.

We wanted these buildings taken out of these peoples’ control, preferably for no money, but we soon learned that that wasn’t possible, because that’s not lawful. And then fast forward whatever, a year and a half, two years later after Gaining Ground. That’s when Mayor de Blasio announced that actually they did like the eminent domain question, and they were going to implement eminent domain on the Podolsky portfolio. And I remember that day being like, “What the fuck is this?”

You know nobody else was pushing this except us. We were the only ones knocking on doors in cluster sites. Even one of our members, we got her whole family housing because we knocked on her door. She was in a cluster site.

Charmel was really the one member who was knocking on doors, I mean consistently, and building relationships with people. And I just said to the mayor, “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these two people, Lisa, and Charmel. Like, you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us because I don’t know if you know but we’re the ones who put this plan in motion. We’re the ones who gave you the statistics. We’re the ones who gave you the facts. We’re the ones who gave you the framework to work with and then you’re just ignoring homeless peoples’ work.” Which the city often does and always does and hopefully they won’t continue to do that. It turns out eminent domain wasn’t such a bad idea after all, and the city really liked it and that was because of us. For the record that was because of us.

Charmel Lucas (November 21, 2022

The landlord was playing the shelter issue people against the paying tenants. That was a big thing.

Don't tell me that you're not gonna pick up my trash because we got shelter people here! You got shelter people. Okay. Don't tell me you're not going to fix my door because you got shelter people here for six and five thousand dollars and the ones with the kids, ain’t no telling. They had to make close to ten thousand. It still has to be lose to $10,000 a month! Ten thousand dollars a damn month. So, that was the most impactful. Just because you money hungry.

Jean Rice (November 10, 2017)

As we sit here nearing Thanksgiving, we're already preparing for our December, Longest Night commemoration. We always return to Judson Memorial Church on the Longest Night of the Year to commemorate those undomiciled New Yorkers who have passed on during the last twelve months. So when we do that, I can't help but reflect on our humble beginnings which makes me appreciate how my organization has evolved. And it always brings warmth to my heart and a smile to my face to think that I've been part of that evolution and that Picture the Homeless is still going strong.

We have a lot of more work to do. But we have a lot more assets, and I don't just mean financial. We have name recognition. We have allies, globally. These are assets. We have assets in human resources. We have social capital. How do we transform that to make a difference in the struggle for global economic and social justice? And I guess that's part of what keeps me alive. Every day that I wake up, after I prioritize about life sustaining assets what I need for that day, to get through that day, my second agenda item is, how can I contribute to make social and economic justice a global reality?

List of narrators

Andres Perez Anthony Williams Arvernetta Henry

Betty Yu Charley Heck Charmel Lucas

DeBoRah Dickerson Floyd Parks Frank Morales

James Tracy Jean Rice Jenny Akchin

Joo-Hyun Kang Kazembe Balagun Kay Samuels

Lynn Lewis Marcus Moore Nikita Price

Paul Boden Ryan Hickey Rob Robinson

Rogers Sam J Miller Shaun Lin

Tyletha Samuels Willie Baptist William Burnett

List of Supplementary Tools

1. Legal Decision in support of First Amendment right to “sleep out” on public sidewalks as a form of protest

2. Gaining Ground: A Homeless-Led Housing Plan to Ensure Affordable Housing for All

3. Homeless People Count (Manhattan vacant property count)

4. Banking on Vacancy (City Wide vacant property count)

5. Field Guide to Counting Vacant Property

6. Sample of Community Land Trust Pop Ed Materials

Listening to the Complete Interviews

The quotes included in this zine include the date of the interview. The full audio recordings and interview transcripts are available on the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project website.

They Said We Couldn’t Do It is one in a series of skillsshare zines from the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project. The PTH Oral History project is a work in progress. Email us if you would like to stay in touch!

pth.oral.history@gmail.com