Picture the Homeless

Educating homeless people about causes and consequences of the crisis of housing:
Leaders of our housing committee have set up workshops in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and public parks on the issues of housing and homelessness, abandoned buildings, and the human rights framework for fighting for housing for all. In addition, members do outreach every week to talk to shelter residents and street homeless about the issues. Outreach not only brings us into contact with new people, letting us spread the word about our work and educate it lets us know what’s happening on the ground in different shelters. Are shelter staff doing everything they can to get people into housing? Do people know about abandoned buildings in their neighborhoods?

Direct Action:

• “If we don’t raise a ruckus, they won’t talk to us.” –Hugh Pressley, Picture the Homeless
  
• “Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.” –A. Philip Randolph, founder, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters."
  
• “Act up, act out, til we shut them out.” —Mohammad Siagha, Picture the Homeless
  
• “Power never concedes anything without a demand; it never has and it never will.” –Frederick Douglass
  

We can write letters and make phone calls and send emails all day long, but the powers-that-be don’t respond to our demands without pressure. We’ve successfully occupied the lobbies of public agencies, sung “homeless Christmas carols” at Rockefeller Center, built a cardboard box city at the State Capital Building in Albany, embarrassed the Mayor at major photo ops, and lots more. Our actions are fun and powerful, and give an opportunity for members to step up and take on leadership roles: shaping our messaging, doing press work and security, writing chants, raising hell!

Civil Disobedience:
Housing committee leaders supported Picture the Homeless’ Civil Rights Campaign when it led our organization in its first arrestable civil disobedience action. Since our committee’s work is based on challenging some of the most deeply-held assumptions about property rights and the power of the real estate lobby, we know that we’ll need to be as aggressive in our tactics as landlords and developers are in theirs. When leaders went to Brazil in 2005 for the World Social Forum, we were inspired by the radical work of Latin American movements like the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Landless Workers Movement), and since returning we’ve been strategizing around how to branch out into more confrontational means of challenging power.

Research & Documentation:
The city won’t admit the extent of the problem of abandoned buildings languishing in the hands of private landlords. As homeless people, we knew that if we wanted to be able to prove how much property is being kept off the market, we were going to have to hit the streets and document it OURSELVES. Leaders put together a survey and we went out in teams tracking buildings, then we took our findings back to our office and researched who owned each building, how much was owed in back taxes, and so on. Now we can take this information to public officials and say, “what are you going to do about that?”

When we started laying out the ways we could create jobs for homeless people by renovating empty buildings, we kept coming up against the public’s ignorance: “but what job skills do homeless people have?” We knew there were tons of skills in the homeless community, and we set out to document them. In three months we surveyed 500 homeless people and built a database of some of the amazing skills folks have, and kept track of people’s contact info so we could start hooking them up with jobs once our Platform gets put into place.

Public Education:
In addition to building power and knowledge among homeless people, educating the public at large is a key component of our Housing Campaign’s work to end the warehousing of empty apartments and create housing for all New Yorkers. We need all sectors of the population to back the work of homeless people in fighting for HOUSING AS A HUMAN RIGHT. To that end, we’ve taken our workshops to lefty bookstores, university forums, communities of faith, and lots of other venues in an effort to get people talking about the problem—and about the solutions homeless people have developed.