* CANNERS' ECONOMIC JUSTICE

* EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE

* POTTERS FIELD

* RENTAL SUBSIDIES

CANNERS' ECONOMIC JUSTICE:

The Canners' Campaign grew out of our Civil Rights Committee.   The difference between the cost of renting an apartment or a room, and how much money poor folks have in their pockets, is the biggest determining factor in the ever increasing numbers of homeless New Yorkers over the past 30 years.   Many members of Picture the Homeless are subsistence workers: street vendors, day laborers and canners.  Many of them describe how, back in the day, they could rent a room with the income from canning or other subsistence work.  Today, they are squeezed out of even the cheapest end of the housing market.

Canners pick up the discarded cans and bottles that the New York State Bottle Bill requires vendors to accept: basically carbonated beverages like beer and soda.  Gentrification has led to the closing of the large redemption centers below 125th St in Manhattan, where canners used to be able to cash in unlimited quantities of cans and bottles, forcing canners to cash in at supermarkets and small stores.  If a store sells the product (like Pepsi), they are required by the NYS Bottle Bill to accept empties in exchange for the 5 cent deposit – up to 240 per day per canner.  By law canners can redeem up to $12.00 of cans or bottles at each store, but they are forced to push their loads long distances, often in shopping carts, from store to store, to cash in their empties.    Many of our members identified police harassment of canners and the refusal of supermarkets and other stores to allow them to redeem their empties as major issues impacting their ability to earn a living.  The indignity of store violating the law and refusing to allow canners to cash in their cans was a catalyst behind our Canners campaign.

The Picture the Homeless canners campaign won the support of the Department of Environmental Conservation and then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in our fight to force supermarkets to comply with the Bottle Bill.  We partnered with the canners group at St Mary’s Church, the Redeemers.  We utilized multiple strategies – including outreach, know your rights training, direct action, documentation and participatory research – identifying the three top offending supermarkets that violated the NYS Bottle Bill.  One store manager actually stated to Picture the Homeless over the phone, “these people are crack heads and have diseases and I have children – do you want me to take some disease home to them?” when confronted by Jean Rice back in 2001.    Pressure from the Attorney General’s office led to greater compliance of supermarkets.  A successful offshoot of our canners campaign was the formation of a cooperative endeavor run by canners on the far west side of Manhattan, led by PTH leader Eugene Gadson, that evolved into a canners run not for profit, Yes We Can.

EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE:

Soon after we moved into our first office space at Judson Memorial Church, and got a phone number and answering machine, we started getting calls from (mostly) moms stranded at the EAU, who had been determined ineligible for shelter, their belonging in garbage bags on the sidewalk, not knowing where to go.  What this means is that workers determined that families requesting shelter “weren’t really homeless” and really had somewhere else to go. The fear and outrage in their voices was palpable.  Some of the most critical issues were that families were continuously denied shelter and told to return to unsafe, overcrowded and even abusive conditions, including domestic violence survivors.  Children weren’t able to attend school, and conditions inside the EAU itself were filthy, dangerous, and excruciatingly uncomfortable, with the serving of spoiled food commonplace.   The building itself violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.  We held organizing meetings in the corner McDonalds and a nearby park, and one summer, over 200 families decided to walk out and march – saying that they would rather sleep in the street with their children than stay in the EAU.  Their demands included an EAU in every borough, and improved conditions for families seeking emergency shelter.  

What was perhaps most shocking to members of the EAU committee was how homeless families were treated by the Department of Homeless Services, and the complicity of the media in both the application process and the physical conditions of the building.  Families risked expulsion from the EAU building itself themselves and their children, itself for taking photos inside of the EAU, and smuggling out spoiled food.  Families were consistently portrayed as abusing the system by the administration, and staff at the EAU and rarely did reporter verify these claims.  Picture the Homeless produced our own participatory research report on conditions at the EAU, and collected video and photographic documentation.

POTTERS FIELD:

One of our earliest actions was trying to get onto Potters Field to memorialize homeless folks buried there back in 2000.  This is the final resting place of many of our members and their friends and loved ones and homeless and poor folks that we don’t even know, but whose humanity we acknowledge.  As often stated by Picture the Homeless members, it is a prison for the dead whose only crime is being poor.  In August of 2004, Picture the Homeless received the devastating news that one of our organization’s co-founders, Lewis Haggins, who had been missing for months, had been buried in Potter’s Field on Hart Island.   His body lay in the city morgue from December 2003 until February 2004 and during that time, no fingerprints or attempts to identify his body were made, so he was buried as a John Doe. 

Members of Picture the Homeless, the Haggins’ family and several faith leaders met to dissect the many concerns that we all had regarding how poor and homeless New Yorkers are buried at Potters Field.  Our Potters Field campaign grew out of that meeting.   Under the initial leadership of Charley Heck, street homeless for 27 years, a Vietnam Veteran and veteran of rescuing other homeless deceased from the indignity of burial on Potters Field, Charley vowed to gain access to Potters Field to hold a memorial for Lewis within the year.  We accomplished that and much more.  Over that year, as we reached out to leaders of every faith, including those who provid services to homeless New Yorkers, many did not know the burial practices on Potters Field.  Some of those faith leaders formed Interfaith Friends of Potters Field in support of our campaign and crafted collectively a process to hold interfaith services on Potters Field every other month. 

We discovered that 150 poor, unidentified or unclaimed persons who die in New York are buried in “common plots”.  1,000 babies are buried in those common plots - that our members called mass graves.  There was no effort to accommodate possible religious or cultural components that would have been important in the deceased’s life, and that those left behind could not access Hart Island for closure unless they had a burial license.  Moreover, records did exist in city records that would have been identified had missing person’s made an effort.

First Picture the Homeless made a trip City Island on Nov. 2, 2004, the Catholic Feast of All Souls to document the unsuccessful attempt to gain access Hart Island for closure.  Then, Picture the Homeless, Interfaith Friends of Potters Field and the Haggins family approached Deputy Commissioner of Thomas Antenen to demand regular access to Hart Island for homeless New Yorkers who lost friends and for clergy of all faiths to provide for the deceased’s remembrance.   In 2006, the new Deputy Commissioner, Stephen Morello, arranged for a memorial gazebo, with a park to be built on Hart Island as a stable, dignified space for the memorials.

In August 2005, we met at our office with members of the NYPD’s missing persons squad to begin successful discussions about implementing more efficient and helpful approaches to identifying missing persons prior to their burial in Potter’s Field.  Finally, in 2006, Lewis Haggins’ family succeeded in removing his body from Hart Island and we were able to join the family in giving Lewis a proper burial in Trenton, NJ on October 27, 2006.  There are now regular memorial services on Hart Island six times a year, and homeless people are free to go to Hart Island to participate in those memorials, which are coordinated jointly between Picture the Homeless and Holy Apostles, a founding member of Interfaith Friends of Potters Field.

RENTAL SUBSIDIES:

Since their introduction in 2004, Picture the Homeless has been fighting to fix Bloomberg's flawed rental subsidies for homeless people. In 2007, the Administration bowed to pressure and abandoned the most problematic of these subsidies, "Housing Stability Plus" - only to replace it with another bad program that keeps homeless people in substandard, overpriced apartments. The “Advantage” programs are administered jointly by the city's Human Resources Administration (HRA) and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), leading to bureaucratic ineptitude that constantly subjects subsidy recipients to the risk of eviction. DHS refused to acknowledge the plan's failures, and the Mayor continued to get good press for his homeless policies, so our members decided to prove them wrong.

Working with graduate students in urban planning, they developed a comprehensive survey to document the problems people have faced as a result of these subsidies. Then they took to the streets and surveyed more than 400 homeless and formerly homeless people, coming up with some truly staggering evidence – for example, 70% of people who received a housing subsidy had been to housing court because of problems with that subsidy, and 41% had been in rent arrears due to the city's failure to pay its portion of the rent! In 2009, we released the results of these surveys in the groundbreaking report "Time's Up: Homeless New Yorkers Demand Alternatives to Bloomberg's Failed Five Year Plan."