Picture the Homeless first learned of the abusive conditions in Emergency Assistance Unit through desperate phone messages left on our office answering machine when we were still at Judson Memorial Church in the winter of 2002. Women crying and yelling: “We’ve been sleeping on the floor in here for days and my kids are sick” or “They keep denying me (shelter) saying that I have somewhere else to go – if I had somewhere else to go I wouldn’t be here!”

So we decided to go up to the S. Bronx to the EAU and find out what the hell was going on. It felt like a volcano about to erupt. Hundreds of families, over a period of a few months all reported the same horrible conditions. We conducted surveys to document what we were hearing and held a town meeting at Hostos Community College, up the street from the EAU, on Mothers Day 2002 to gather enough families together to try and develop a plan of action.

Our work around the EAU has always been driven by the concerns expressed by families who have risked their eligibility for shelter by smuggling cameras inside to document filthy conditions, who have spoken out publicly and even organized from within a massive walkout of over 200 families in August of 2003, demanding an improvement in services saying that they would rather sleep in the street with their children that continue to put up with their kids made sick by spoiled food, abusive staff, vermin and dangerously overcrowded conditions.


Picture the Homeless is the only grassroots organization working to move the city of New York to improve the conditions in the Emergency Assistance Unit (EAU) in the South Bronx. Families with children, the majority of who are headed by single African American and Latino mothers, who become homeless in any of the five boroughs of NYC, must go to the EAU in the South Bronx to apply for emergency shelter. We also launched a Shelter Campaign to address the separate issues of shelter conditions and the process by which homeless families move out of shelter and into housing.