Picture the Homeless

Recently, Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York City will be accepting applications for Section 8 again, through NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority). Unfortunately, there is a great deal of misinformation circulating in the homeless community about Section 8, and many of our members have reported getting false information directly from Section 8 workers. Small mistakes in dealing with the Section 8 forms and the offices that give out those forms can prevent you from getting your housing voucher. Our Frequently Asked Questions was exhaustively compiled by leaders of our Housing Campaign, who went around to three different Section 8 offices to ensure that we have accurate information regarding the application process for Section 8. We set up this webpage to help answer some questions you may have, and to create a forum for homeless people to report lies, inaccuracies, and misinformation given out by case workers!

There is a cloud of indifference hovering over New York City, but Picture the Homeless, a grassroots group of homeless folks organizing for justice and respect, is poking a long protest stick deep into its cumulus belly in the hopes of emptying a deluge of awakening onto the citizenry of the Big Apple. The dark and ominous cloud is affordable housing and the lack thereof.

In a sleep-out protest action organized in partnership with groups in over 30 cities nation-wide, on the eve of April Fools’ Day, Picture the Homeless attempted to bring awareness to a sleeping city in the midst of a massive housing crisis. The message: affordable housing is not only a poor-person problem. Landlords are hoarding vacant/abandoned buildings, while local government seems to be playing ‘hot potato’ with the issue at hand. Renters are screaming over the ever escalating price of living in New York.

On 3rd Avenue, just north of 43rd Street, stands a huge abandoned building—a surprising location, considering that it is right in the heart of the city’s affluent business community. Forty homeless people and their allies chose this spot for their protest.


“We are here to bring awareness to the unaffordable housing issue, that there are people sleeping on the streets while there are abandoned buildings like these everywhere and in all the boroughs” said PTH press spokesman Roosevelt Orphee, as he pointed out the numerous unlit or cinder blocked windows of the building. Aside from stores occupying the ground floors of this vast expanse of building on this side, all the floors from 43rd and 44th street were empty—five buildings with at least five floors each.


“This is in the spirit of the sit-ins from the Civil Rights Movement,” Roosevelt said. “But despite all the progress that was made in that era, the atrocities facing people of color today are even more extreme—you have tens of thousands of people living in shelters here in NYC, and 90% of them are African-American or Latino! Are they trying to run us out of New York?”

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.

In the past two years, leaders of our Housing Committee:

• ♥ Moved Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to back us in developing and executing a historic count of empty buildings and vacant lots in Manhattan. This successful initiative led to widespread public acknowledgement of the extent of the problem of building vacancies.
  
  
• ♥ Exposed the absence of participation of homeless New Yorkers in the Mayor’s newly released 5 Year Plan to End Homelessness, forcing high-level officials from the Department of Homeless Services to meet with us on July 1st, 2004, to discuss our involvement in the planning process. The pressure we brought moved the Department of Homeless Services to convene workgroups to oversee implementation of the Mayor’s 5-Year Action Plan—and secured homeless involvement in those workgroups.
  
  
• ♥ Developed a legislative platform to address the tens of thousands of units of housing currently lying empty and abandoned in poor neighborhoods. We also secured a commitment from a City Councilmember to introduce anti-warehousing legislation based on this platform, and pressured the Commissioner of DHS to back this plan as “a good long-term goal.”
  
  
• ♥ Convened representatives from 27 NYC community groups that work on issues pertaining to housing and homelessness to plan an advocacy agenda to fight the federal government’s proposal to destroy funding for Section 8 housing vouchers. Our informal NYC “Save Section 8” group carried out an exciting demonstration at the local offices of HUD, which garnered favorable coverage in a major New York daily paper. As part of a dynamic nation-wide network of advocacy and activism, our work resulted in the threatened cuts being removed from HUD’s budget proposal.
  
  
• ♥ Moved shelter staff to support the organizing agenda of homeless families when the Bloomberg Administration announced they were cutting the homeless priority for access to Section 8 housing vouchers (which happened as soon as we won the fight to keep the federal government from slashing Section 8)!

When our committee first started meeting regularly, homeless people set out the following demands as our main concerns:

• ♥ Money for housing, not shelters
  A home is an absolute necessity to building a stable, dignified life. Current policies that prioritize shelters are not helping homeless New Yorkers move out of poverty. Nor is supportive housing accessible to many homeless people who do not fit into one of the “problem” boxes such as mental illness, substance abuse, etc. In the words of Picture the Homeless leader Charlie Heck: “With supportive housing, they got all these categories. Substance abusers and the mentally ill and people with AIDS… I don’t see any category for decent human being.”
  
  
• ♥ Lower rents, raise wages
  While “homelessness prevention” is said to be a priority for the NYC Department of Homeless Services, there is no work being done to address the rising rents and lack of jobs that are the main causes of homelessness. Without lower rents, higher wages, and decent-paying jobs, the homeless population will continue to skyrocket.
  
  
• ♥ HPD: Take advantage of underutilized housing stock
  Many buildings still in the hands of HPD or warehousing landlords can and must be used to create housing; in a housing crisis an abandoned building is completely unacceptable. If private landlords are unwilling or unable to renovate their buildings and make them accessible to the very poor, there must be a way to make it possible.
  
  
• ♥ HUD: Current “affordability” guidelines are not working
  In a city like New York, where the median income is $60,000, it is absurd to base guidelines of affordability on the median income. For the hundreds of thousands of people living below the poverty line, “affordable housing” is not affordable! Re-evaluating “affordability” boundaries around the realities of poverty is essential if poor people are to have access to housing.

Every neighborhood in the city is full of unoccupied, boarded-up buildings. Abandoned buildings are an emblem of urban blight, drive down property values, and increase the tax burden on everyone. These properties are also an underutilized asset, and rehabilitation of buildings into housing is an incredible potential boon to communities—it is estimated that for every dollar invested in housing, $9-27 are generated in the community where it is spent. The City’s current prioritizing of a $700-million-a-year shelter system does nothing to build communities, nor does it enable homeless people to move out of homelessness and into stable homes.

After months of issue identification, interviews with housing and legislative experts, and collective problem-solving, members of the Housing Committee at Picture the Homeless developed a plan—a comprehensive legislative platform to address the rehabilitation of these buildings into housing for very-poor New Yorkers. The demands of this platform are as follows:

• Declaration of a “Housing Emergency” by the Mayor and a commitment to identifying solutions within the Implementation Task Force framework—and the use of his position to stigmatize empty buildings and apartments, not homeless people.
• Active lobbying by the City for a redefinition of HUD’s “affordability” guidelines to prioritize families and individuals making $11,000 a year and under as “extremely low-income” for purposes of eligibility for “affordable” housing.
• Establishment of a no-interest revolving door loan fund (“NYC Homeless Housing Fund”) to allocate funds for landlords who demonstrate willingness but are unable to fix up their buildings or pay steep fines.
• Creation of an independent “Homeless Housing Trust” (HHT), including homeless and formerly homeless New Yorkers, to oversee implementation and funding of this plan.
• Creation of a Dedicated Revenue Stream to funnel tax-derived money directly into the Homeless Housing Fund.
• Empowerment of NYC Department of Buildings to expand the Building Code (Section [643a-13.0] 26-127 ) concerning “nuisance” buildings, to declare specific unoccupied boarded-up buildings “nuisances” on the grounds that they are “detrimental to the life or health” of the community at large, including homeless people. In such cases the DOB Commissioner is already empowered to “order or cause any excavation, building, sewer, plumbing, pipe, passage, ground, matter or thing or the lot on which it is situated to be purified, cleansed, disinfected, removed, altered, repaired or improved”—In practice we would like to see the Commissioner begin using that authority to actively force these underutilized units to be converted into housing for homeless people and extremely poor.
• Empowerment of NYC HPD to levy an annual fine against non-compliant landlords in an amount equivalent to the cost of bringing the building online—with a corresponding commitment from DOB to actively assess identified properties for the cost of bringing them online. In addition to penalties, there should also be mechanisms within the NYC Homeless Housing Fund to provide incentives and rewards to participating landlords.
• As part of downsizing the shelter population, and funneling resources from shelter to housing, DHS should develop a mechanism by which shelter residents can “opt out” of their shelters, with the money currently being paid by the City to their shelter being transferred into the NYC Homeless Housing Fund.
• Empowerment of HPD’s Division of Alternative Management Programs (DAMP) to mandate a meeting between the HHT and the landlord/landlord’s rep.
• Perhaps most importantly, the establishment of extensive private funding streams, including active rallying by the Mayor to raise funds from banks and corporations and other private sources for the NYC Homeless Housing Trust Fund.

Homelessness in New York cannot be separated from the issue of housing. The city’s best hope for reducing and preventing homelessness is a commitment to addressing the skyrocketing rents and general housing shortage that plagues New York and drives New Yorkers by the thousands into homelessness.

Through our Housing Campaign, homeless people developed a comprehensive housing platform to address the policy and program changes that would need to be enacted to really create housing, on a large scale, for the poorest New Yorkers—while at the same time challenging underlying causes of the housing crisis, developing communities, and building jobs.

The Housing & Jobs Platform calls on DHS and HPD and other city agencies to start taking active steps to force landlords to develop self-managed, tenant-owned housing for homeless people out of these buildings. Given the magnitude of the current crisis, the rights of landlords to keep tens of thousands of units off the market indefinitely must be weighed against the human rights of homeless people forced to live on the streets and in shelter and on the floors of family and friends, as well as the rights of communities to develop economically without the blight and devaluation that boarded-up buildings bring.

In order to build the political will necessary to move elected and appointed officials to back this agenda, we are focusing on grassroots organizing and mobilizing, as well as political education, to build a critical mass of concerned citizens who will join us in demanding real change around the issue of residential properties being kept empty.

We need help! To endorse our platform, or invite us to address your group, or to find out how else you can work with us to develop our communities and create housing and jobs for homeless people, email Sam or call us at 646-314-6423.