Rob Robinson (Interview 1)

[00:00:00] Greetings and Introductions.

[00:00:25] I was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island. I come from a working-class family. We moved in the early sixties and settled in a seaside community called Freeport, on the south shore of Nassau County. I was five years old when we moved to Long Island.

[00:01:31] Life has taken away some of them, but we grew up with a family of three boys and three girls. We were a restaurant family. My dad was a chef in a kosher delicatessen and restaurant on Long Island, I learned to cook there. My other two brothers also did some cooking there, but went on to formally be trained at Johnson & Wales.

[00:02:56] I can't stand baking. I don’t like the feel of flour on my hands, I've turned down some great jobs because I refuse to touch flour. I worked for a long time at Tavern on the Green in New York and Sheraton Hotels, I got an interview at The Water Club in Manhattan for an executive chef's position, one of the hottest jobs in New York.

[00:03:39] I said, "I don’t think I can take the job." He says, "Why not?" I said, "It involves baking." He says, "Yeah. Well, my chefs have to bake." I said, "Well, that's just a part of the job that I can't take. I don’t like the feel of flour on my hands."
 
[00:04:54] I started going to work with my dad at nine years old, I was basically running a kitchen at ten, my dad would leave me in charge, and I'd have to tell these adults what to do because I was the son of the chef, right?

[00:05:55] I watched people take advantage of a system when they could. Everybody got a certain amount of break, and guys would go into the back dining room and go to sleep for two hours. It made me think about how adults act later on in life.

[00:06:34] I read people's expressions, and people ask, "How did you know that?" I watch people, how they react, and somehow, I know something’s not right or something’s going on with them, so I always press them, people's facial expression and body language tells you a lot.

[00:07:05] Thanksgiving; all the males were cooks and chefs and had a bit of a skill, Mom was a great cook without any formal training, we couldn’t wait to have that meal. Some of my family experienced a lot of illness.

[00:08:12] I have a disability with my hip. I hurt myself playing football in high school and college, I underwent fourteen surgeries. There are a lot of medical issues in my family, a lot of time spent in hospitals and doctors' offices, it sort of dictated our lives.

[00:09:27] It was always important to me that I not be intimidated by folks, and maybe that's where some of my activism came from. I'm just as smart as everybody else in the room. I can figure stuff out.

[00:10:09] Thanksgiving dinner, the best part of that was Friday, the refrigerator was full of food, if you adjusted your schedule right, you can go in and make a plate the way you wanted to without anybody saying, “You’re taking too much of this, or you're not going to eat it.”

[00:10:38] Grew up in a house on Long Island, my parents bought the house in 1962 but had some trouble, this African American couple, they'd have their eyes on a particular house, and were told, "It's not available any longer.” One of my dad's comrades at work went to a real estate guy after my parents were turned away and told it wasn't available, and found out that it was available, then he came with my dad, and he sort of threatened the real estate guy and the guy worked out the deal.

[00:11:50] Until I started working with my dad, I didn’t see him a lot as a kid. He probably got a predatory loan through that situation because some things were still happening at the time. The family got away from Brooklyn, relatives always saw we were the rich family.

[00:12:56] We all bought into this narrative that homeownership is the way to wealth in this country, I recently visited my brother, and he was telling me about the struggle to pay the taxes on the house. I said, "Well, you know on Long Island, all of the property taxes you pay, a majority of it goes to the school tax. How many people in this house are in school?"

[00:13:21] Homeownership is a way to perpetual debt. You will always be paying into the system and not getting much out of it. I understand the family worked hard to get it, but at this point, is it really worth it to struggle the rest of your life to keep it?

[00:14:13] We were in the Roosevelt School District, an underfunded school district on Long Island and my parents realized we weren’t getting the best education. They purchased a house in the Five Towns that they rented out, just to have an address, so that we can go to a different school district. I tried out for football in tenth grade, but dislocated my hip from playing football and had to go to surgery.

[00:15:49] To play sports in high school, you had to get a permission slip signed by both parents, dad signed it, and I forged mom's signature, played football in my junior year in high school, broke the hip again and broke the pelvis, and ended up in the hospital for about eight months.

[00:16:44] I got back onto the football field in my senior year in high school, convinced my mom that it was a way to a future education for me, both mom and dad signed. I injured my hip again, went to Maryland on a college scholarship, two weeks into the season playing against North Carolina, broke my hip and that was it.

[00:17:48] I was able to get a college education, the first one in my family to graduate high school, graduate college. But with that degree came a lot of baggage, "Well, you're the one with the education, you need to help us figure this out."

[00:18:47] I've gotten a lot of resentment which caused some friction, later on in life. It started with a lot of my younger brothers and sisters having some of the same teachers coming through school and having to face, "Well, if you don’t understand it, ask your brother. I taught your brother. He was pretty smart."

[00:19:28] Later on in life, it caused bigger problems after you start to make serious family decisions, family wasn't prepared for a lot of that.

[00:21:05] When it came to burying my mom, I had to make decisions that family just weren’t prepared to make. I was working for ADP at the time, so I took a loan from my 401(k) to charter a bus to bring people from South Carolina to New York and I got a lot of pushback because my brothers and sisters for not waiting.

[00:22:20] There was a refusal to deal with all of the issues involved and to make some decisions and then when you make them you get pushback.  It always comes back to education. No, you realize the urgency of making a decision, and if nobody is willing, somebody has to step up.

[00:23:09] My dad wasn't the greatest dad, a lot of womanizing and things you see later on, and you realize how it affected the family. I had a mom who was happy she lived on Long Island but always wanted more, worried about things she couldn’t control, which leads to heart disease.

[00:24:13] They referred to me as a goody-goody because I always prioritized education, I had a couple of teachers in ninth and tenth grade in the English subjects that we took, so they were constantly pushing books in front of you, and I gravitated towards it.

[00:25:20] One thing I would do every day is read two or three newspapers, growing up in the restaurant business, there were always newspapers around. I was absorbing knowledge starting at a young age and I would beg my dad to go to work when other kids were out playing and out in the park.

[00:26:05] People laugh at me to this day because I carry around a radio. When I sit in the office, I'm constantly listening to that old news station over the internet. When I went to work with my dad, the radio was on in the car. When I went to work with my dad, the radio was on in the kitchen.

[00:27:12] Life transformations, the biggest thing is I faced homelessness in the early 2000’s. I had to shift careers because of my hip, I eventually shifted to office-type work, around the mid-eighties, or late eighties when I got a job in an insurance company that did assigned risk auto insurance.

Robinson: [00:28:16] I thought it was a dirty business. It was assigned risk. If you're a male, and you're licensed in a household, you may not even have a car, but your mom and dad are in that car, and you have an insurance policy with us, we're allowed to put him on your policy. Now it's like three-thousand dollars a year because of an underage male.

[00:28:56] When you quit, you go right back to the same company that you were assigned to. So, you pay a cancellation fee, then you have a restart fee, it's more money. I come later in life to understand how capitalism works. I was in the middle of it, but I was rebelling against it at the same time.

[00:29:30] I eventually landed a job with ADP, the payroll company, I think about the day that I was hired, three of us were hired for that position on the same day, a Latin American woman, an African American woman, and Rob Robinson, an African American male. So, I always had in the back of my mind that they had to meet some quota.

[00:30:20] I worked as a teleservice rep, taking payrolls in a computer terminal over the phone but doing the customer service work after the payroll was delivered. I worked my way up through the system, and moved to supervisor and then eventually a manager.

[00:30:52] I would take payrolls on this terminal and learned that if I hit certain keys by mistake, it would bring the computer system down. I started circulating the information that I could bring the system down, and people would laugh.

[00:31:38] I convinced the general manager that I could bring the system down, he thought it was a joke. I opened up and hit Alt, Insert, and Delete, the guys come into the computer room and said, "The system is down, we're going to be down for a few minutes." I got called to the front office, and asked if I wanted to go into IT. So I said, "Yeah."

[00:32:38] They sent me to an ADP school, and I took courses while still working. I worked my way up to a project manager, we're coming up on the year 2000, everybody was freaking out, computers are going to stop. I got paid incredible sums of money to spend twenty-four hours, for four straight days to sit there and basically monitor any computer.

[00:33:37] That pushed me further up into the IT stratosphere. I start to work on this piece of software, and become the most proficient user and it gave me the opportunity to move to Florida. African American, a worldwide company with sixty-thousand employees, very few in upper-level management, so very little notice, in March 2001, picked up my life, and moved to Miami, Florida.

[00:34:53] Four months later, I was told, "There's no more money in the company for your position. We're going to have to let you go.” Miami was going through tough economic times in the early 2000’s. I paid off my lease and expired my savings. Then I started tapping the 401(k), and before you know it, I'm broke, and my lease is up.

[00:35:51] I ended up on the streets of Miami, two and a half years trying to figure stuff out, I eventually found my way to New York. That experience and ten months in a New York City shelter, transformed the way I look at the world. There were a lot of things I learned about this issue of homelessness, that I had to unlearn.

[00:36:38] We paint homelessness with a broad brush. There were the top four or top five, “You're homeless because you don’t want to work… You're homeless because you don’t have an education… You're homeless because you have a chemical or an alcohol addiction, or you're homeless because you have mental illness.”

[00:37:01] We shouldn't just cast off people who have mental illness. We should try to help them through that situation. I started to look in the mirror and say, "Well, wait a minute. I worked thirty years before I went homeless. I have a college degree, so working and education aren't the issues. Never diagnosed with a chemical addition or an alcohol problem, and I don’t have mental illness."

[00:37:36] "This is a lot of BS! I have to be very vocal and public about this, and then I have to find other people who went through the same thing that are in the same situation because they’re labeled." It's been a mission and when I say transformed me, we have to change that narrative.

[00:38:01] This is a country and a world where we absorb narratives, and we live with them. Some of us directly affected by those narratives still absorb them, we're somewhat complicit in our own problems, I was determined to push back.

[00:38:40] We're going to have to change this whole narrative, it's my mission to get people to talk about it and open up about it because I think storytelling dispels the myths and the rumors and creates the real narrative. You should be able to tell that story to those who are behind you so that maybe whatever story you share with them prevents them from going down the same paths.

[00:39:18] The shelter that I was in in New York was a drop-in center called The Open Door. I said, "I'm going to go to the library. I worked all my life, so I have to be in a routine." Even when I was homeless, my hours for panhandling were ten in the morning until eight at night.

[00:40:16] I went to study this thing called gentrification, and came up with this theory, "Gentrification leads to displacement, which leads to homelessness, which leads to criminalization." There's a predetermined path for some people, disproportionately, people of color.

[00:40:53] It makes me look back on the history of this country, from its very beginning and we've never really gotten to the root cause. We've always come at that problem by removing it from vision. “Let's put them in shelters, it goes away.”

[00:41:38] Those two and a half years on the streets of Miami and then ten months in New York City's homeless shelter changed me. I don’t believe in a lot of things that I was taught, and I've been able to create a real narrative of what really happened.

[00:42:19] Going down the street as a kid, with your dad and there's a man asking for a quarter. You say, "Dad, give me a quarter. I'm going to give the man." "He's a bum. He doesn’t want to work." But, I bring a little humanity to this issue having lived on the streets of Miami, people in the street are hungry. Let me show some humanity.

[00:43:27] Big differences between Miami and New York. Miami is a huge city in the U.S. It is not the size of New York, but there’s a few million people living in Miami. Two shelters in Miami, we have almost six-hundred here in New York, right? Different populations, but not that much of a difference.

[00:43:51] I'm not a big fan of the service model, but at some point, people do need some fresh clothes, toiletries, food, and you couldn’t find much of that in Miami, like you can in New York. If you're street homeless in New York, the supply of that stuff is all over the place, in Miami, I had to basically beg, go to the backdoor of a restaurant, "Look, man, I'm hungry."

[00:44:35] I remember in fondest terms of Miami, and this is what I don't see in New York, is individuals supporting one another.

[00:45:29] The young man in Taco Bell gives me a bag with twenty steak tacos, and a huge soda, I fed like ten homeless people that were in the area. He said, "You pass this window, and you're hungry, you let me know."
 
[00:46:43] I always look at the social issues that are behind homelessness, big tension in Miami during the times that I was homeless between African Americans and Cubans. I’ll say this as an African American man, the Cuban people were very kind to me.

[00:47:42] One lady engages me in dialogue, we have a great conversation for about half an hour. She says, "My sons are going to come see you. I think they can learn from you." The kids bring a folding table and a home-cooked meal and sit down, and they sat there and talked to me for about two hours. Every Sunday they would come and sit down with this meal and talk to me.

[00:48:49] It's very hard to share in some of the debates that were happening amongst African Americans and Cuban people, the economic struggle. “They're coming over and taking the jobs.” It doesn’t only happen in Miami. It happens here in New York. I learned about humanity, I can't believe the narratives that everybody tells you.

[00:50:24] New York had the infrastructure to deliver services to homeless people, Miami had compassion and humanity that didn’t exist in New York. The services that existed in New York didn't exist in Miami for the number of people that were homeless.

[00:51:02] In Miami, two blocks from the south of Biscayne Boulevard is beautiful American Airlines and the cruise ships that we see on television, is this homeless shanty town. It’s startling to see how this issue is handled in different cities.

[00:52:09] I knew I wasn't going to escape homelessness out of Miami. I had to come back to New York, with the combination of infrastructure and family. What scared the hell out of me, in Miami, was the number of people that accepted their condition.

[00:53:10] The one that really pushed my buttons was a double amputee, former Vietnam vet drinking Georgi Vodka out of a pint bottle at ten after eight, he'd been that way for twenty-five years on the streets of Miami.

[00:54:17] It was Thanksgiving 2006, and a bus rolls up on the beach wanting to take everybody to Thanksgiving dinner, you can get a haircut, you can clothes. They were really forceful and eventually talked me into getting on the bus, they said, "Well, we can help you get back to New York."

[00:55:43] I never told my family I was homeless, I was supposed to switch a bus to take the last leg from Port Authority out to Long Island, and I got cold feet in the end. I said, "I can't let my family see me like this." I asked somebody at the Port Authority where I could go and get cleaned up and they pointed to the shelter called The Open Door.

[00:56:34] This is a lot of the foundation of why I organize on behalf of homeless people. It originally started as a drop-in center, if you stayed there overnight, you had to sleep in a chair, it ended up with me organizing around food, around the sleeping conditions, security, we had a list.

[00:57:35] We started going to a client advocacy meeting that they had, and worked with an intern from Columbia School of Social Work, when we didn’t feel we were getting enough response, we said, "We need to take this to the next level."

[00:59:16] Fred [Shack] sent me to a meeting. He says, "I think your advocacy should go to a higher level, and that's something called the Continuum of Care. I went to the first meeting. I thought it was a circus, but it ended being fruitful.

[00:59:38] I started getting emails from Sam at Picture the Homeless, and was still working with some of the guys at Urban Pathways who were trying to now move their advocacy to a higher level. I said, "Well, I don't know how good we're going to do on our own, but I keep getting emails from this group, Picture the Homeless. Maybe we should go to one of their meetings and see what they're about.

[01:00:20] I have a permanent disability, but I always had pretty good jobs, the shelter staff there was almost insistent that I apply for Social Security Disability. That experience also showed me a lot about how homeless people are being treated. I ended up getting on Social Security Disability and that gave me an income, before I came to Picture the Homeless, I actually got an apartment.

[01:01:56] I’d started communicating with Picture the Homeless just before I left the shelter, a bunch of us came up to a housing meeting one night and that's how I was introduced to Picture the Homeless.

[01:02:07] I ended up co-facilitating the client advocacy meeting with the interns, now they have a staff person that does it, it's moved to a different place, but I spent number of years co-facilitating that meeting.

[01:04:06] I think there was a different level of respect for me coming in, she knew that I was all about having a voice for people with lived experiences, so they're going to have a voice in the space. I think she was kind of molded in a way because it wasn't a big challenge.

[01:04:42] Issues that drop-in center residents flagged as a problem and won were maintenance and repair of a bathroom, better food quality, people sitting in chairs, their legs are swelling up, so we got a nurse, so you can go in, get your blood pressure checked if you weren’t feeling well, you can take a shower, folks get clothes there, referrals for medical, health issues, psychiatric issues.

[01:06:50] There was a young lady who worked the front door, to be able to do what she had to do with a smile, was special. She's meeting a line of desperate people every morning at nine o'clock, standing sometimes out in the cold for an hour, she would greet them every morning with a smile.

[01:07:22] It's very easy to beat up on staff people, sometimes in that situation you just sit there and look at a person who obviously had the worst night of their lives, every night just gets worse. Ali used to just greet these people with a smile every morning.

[01:08:13] The referrals were a big part, after you became a client, you were allowed to be bused to church beds, there were these respite beds in churches that they would take you at six o'clock, and you come back in the morning, you started to be able to get at least a decent night's sleep if you're looking for work or whatever it is you had to do.

[01:08:43] At Picture the Homeless we would get emails from homeless people, "Oh, what's going to happen when this person comes who is homeless and found us, and is now emailing us." Which wasn’t as common then, more than ten years ago.

[01:09:46] All of a sudden, I’m getting these emails, “Sam at Picture the Homeless.” It was interesting and probably the first time that I really understood you build power by coming together.

[01:10:31] It was interesting to see homeless people, to hear people's problems and how long they were stuck in the system that didn’t seem to be working for them and really empowered me to say, "Okay, you need to focus on this."

[01:11:01] The more I talked to people, the more I heard stories, two years, three years. “Yo, this is messed up. We got to figure something out." So again, that whole dynamic of people coming together and hearing these stories. Then, hearing the commitment of people, how long people were there. Meeting people like Jean and hearing his story, the story of the founders and whatnot.

[01:11:57] Two things had happened at The Open Door. One was the coming in at two o'clock in the morning looking for people that may have had a warrant, also playing homeless people by offering them ten dollars to stand in a line-up. I wasn't giving in to certain things like that.

[01:12:43] That founding story was important to me. That's why I first said, "Okay, people can rise up and fight back but also be recognized for doing that." Especially who it was, people of color, but here's somebody organizing people to say, "We have a voice together." I've always believed in that togetherness and hearing his story and how he passed and where he was, that was moving.

[01:13:42] Once I got on disability and got some income, I said, "It's not the greatest income in the world, but I can manage this." I found an apartment that fit within the money that I was getting, and I was still connected to a lot of the services that homeless people could get, I could carve out a living, and do some of this work to make change.

[01:14:09] I made a decision, “I'm going to stick with this, and I'm going to change this shit—just like they did.” They started to organize people, they made a commitment, if I got transformed and they weren't lucky enough to get transformed, then I have to support them.

[01:14:44] I believe I was with Sam and Jean one day, somebody is telling us a story, and Sam goes to him, "Well, are you angry about it? So, what do you want to do about it?" I had never done organizing with people, but I say, "Yeah, it makes sense. If they're angry about it then you come up here and talk about it and let's see what we can do together."

[01:15:10] Because you can stay off mad over there, and it ain’t going to do anything right? But if twenty people came to an office and got mad, and figured out a process to take their anger channel it to something positive, then that's going to make change.

[01:15:54] The Picture the Homeless office in the Bronx, it became like this subway station, constant people coming and going, talking, they had an opportunity to relax a little bit and meet other people in the same situation. If you were trying to think through something, it was hard, but it was nice to see people actively coming through and moving about and staying connected.

[01:17:21] One thing that was constant was the meeting schedules, those were the days when you saw the most people. That idea of, “If you're angry about it, come on this day if you're about this, and come on this day if you're about that really worked. That whole process was a learning experience for me. I had never done organizing.

[01:18:19] I got a foundation of how to organize, then I went to that organizing trainee training, and I think that really helped me, it also helped me to understand that this problem is bigger than us and people need to be connected. Through Picture the Homeless, I met folks around the country.
 
[01:18:53] The Western Regional Advocacy Project, Paul Boden is a good friend now. We've done a lot of work together. We get on the phone and talk about this stuff and chop it up together and connect each other to other people. Those relationships are strong.

[01:19:32] Picture the Homeless helped build those relationships, my work at Picture the Homeless made a lot of that concrete and though I'm not a member of the organization, I'm still involved in supporting it. I think those relationships are important to continue to build and they were built ten years ago when I first came to Picture the Homeless.

[01:21:04] I started seeing this issue bigger than New York City. Coming from being homeless in Miami, I said, "This is a national issue." And then through Picture the Homeless, I got to travel to Miami to see Take Back the Land.

[01:21:23] Miami was a place where I always wanted to go back and prove something. I went back there with the Right to the City Alliance when they had a protest and that was very empowering for me, and emotional. It was the first time I got back to Miami, and now I’m a part of this social movement that I got involved with through Picture the Homeless.

[01:22:33] Understanding what it meant to have people come together like that and then to go back to Miami and learn about Take Back the Land and take over a vacant space in the same city where nobody would help me when I was homeless, now I could take it back from these cities and corporations and give it to somebody who needs it.

[01:23:03] That probably shifted me to a proponent of direct action and civil disobedience. That was a move to say, "Okay, where are these vacant buildings around the rest of the country? We need to just take this shit, take it back, and just redistribute it." That wouldn't have happened if I wasn't involved with Picture the Homeless.

[01:23:44] Take Back the Land went national, there was trips to Hungary and seeing homeless people around the world, to be able to go to the other side of the world and see people experiencing the same things that you went through.

[01:24:09] I said to the homeless people that were with us in Budapest, "I slept in an area just like this in Miami." This vision of the U.S. is a place where nobody is going through that, to say, "Okay, this is a worldwide issue, and the narrative needs to change on a worldwide basis.

[01:25:43] It was important to me that we need to work to flip that script, to share with the rest the world, whatever worldwide outlet you got your information from, they're spewing the story that the government wants to hear, but here's somebody who lived through this stuff and who sees it every day and and people need to be educated on it.

[01:26:29] I don’t know where the theoretical part of it came in, that's probably hanging around those academics when I was involved with Picture the Homeless and the Right to the City Alliance, but the students pushed me.

[01:27:47] Back to narratives again, I think the oral history and this stuff it's important, you need to document these stories whether it be in writing or whether oral.

[01:28:16] Process of becoming convinced that direct action and civil disobedience was important, two key points. The first one was the Right to the City Alliance, breaking up a conference called the Future of New York at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and I was one of eight people arrested for that event.

[01:30:46] I got sort of militant, there were eight of us arrested and seven of the people were willing to take a plea. I was wondering why you even went through this if you just wanted to plead out. The lawyers basically said to me, "Rob, probably the worst thing that'll happen to you here, if everybody takes a plea, they'll probably get a day of community service and six months conditional discharge.

[01:31:37] I said, "I don’t want that because that means I have to be a good boy for six months, so let's go to trial." And they said, "If you lose the trial, you might end up with two days of community service." When Picture the Homeless decided to move on the building on 116th and Fifth Avenue I wanted to be the police negotiator.

[01:32:20] People were telling me, “The police always attack you and vamp on you...” I saw films and read and thought, always saw people retreating when the police come, "so I'm not going to retreat. I'm just going to stand there, and I think they also react to agitation, so don’t get agitated.” And we ended up holding the space for a couple of days.

[01:33:03] It was a way of saying to the members, "You don’t have to be afraid. You can step up. I have an open case, but I want to do this. You're not going to make any change without taking a risk.” The lawyers were very clear as to what could or couldn’t happen. I said, “The reward versus the risk is overpowering. If we set a precedent, it's going to change who the organization is, change how people look at vacant spaces.

[01:33:45] A lot of the ally support that we had garnered that day was also empowering, knowing that you have this role as the police negotiator and somebody says, "The police are coming." Right? Then I said, "Okay." And turn my head to the right and here come three-hundred people marching, so okay, now I'm empowered. "Come on Mr. Policeman, let's talk."

[01:34:12] I've got three-hundred folks down here that are going to stand behind me, so what do you want to do? The other thing is Mark Taylor was standing on a wall behind me, that also empowers you, Mark said to me, "The best thing that you did at that event is you never got agitated and they were stuck. They didn't know how to react." So it was a lesson learned.

[01:35:30] The day you got arrested at the Grand Hyatt, we always had quarters on us in case we got arrested and you called from a payphone in the jail, and Sam recorded it, and we were calling you George Jackson. I had the Zoom recorder in my pocket and gave it to Abdulai [People's Production House], so they got it on radio.

[01:37:15] What did we learn from the three-hundred people marching up to that corner in front of that vacant building and then a couple months later, we took over a vacant lot, where we got arrested, then the next major rally in the vacant lot, lessons learned.

[01:38:13] We learned how we could let the city know that we’re a force to be reckoned with, they hadn't seen anybody do a takeover like that in a while, learned that we can bring people together around an issue to support us and we learned the power of spectacle, the art involved.

[01:39:32] The other thing that we learned when we were working with the youth group, New York to New Orleans.

[01:40:01] Understanding that risk has to have limitations, the building wasn't safe, but back to spectacle, we knew how to make a presence around the building as if we occupied the building. They kept asking us, you know, "How many people are inside?"

[01:40:48] We had gone in and come out because it was dangerous, to be able to react on the fly was incredible. There was a lighter moment when she [the owner] said, "The reason it's empty is God is going to help us fix it up." I said to her, "God didn’t help you for twelve years. What makes you think he's coming to tomorrow?"

[01:41:33] You could force the police to respect you and your organization, we had the respect and solidarity of allies around the city at a pretty high level, to get three-hundred people there, in the middle of the day.

[01:41:56] Members got empowered from that action, they understood that they had a role. We had support. The Ñetas and those guys were around the building, that type of support, was incredible.

[01:42:20] When we took over the lot, the first thing that Deputy Inspector Caban said to me "Well, you are wrong the last time about the ownership." I said, "Well, we got it right this time." So there were some humor in there too, and I think the relationship helped.

[01:43:18] The film that was cut from that action shows where it's very tense and Deputy Inspector Caban is walking back and forth in front of the fence with his hands behind his back, as if he had been arrested. There was a relationship that was built between us and Caban that wasn't the same with Orvelli and us, or Orvelli and Caban even.

[01:44:17] It was empowering for me because there were some tensions. I still hold a little bit of animosity to some of the members who backed away. I understand there was a risk out there, but in those moments people have to stay together. We proved in the past that nothing is going to happen to us.

[01:44:47] It said to me, you can elevate the respect of this organization by doing this type of work in a way that you look good in the end, even though the police arrested you. We had two Episcopal priests in collars, which was huge.

[01:45:46] It was a dynamic that we put together between both those actions, that garnered us a lot of respect in this city, at places you wouldn’t expect a grassroots organization to be respected, particularly a homeless organization, members got empowered by that and started to think a little bit differently, I thought a lot about it, and I said, "This is a way."

[01:46:24] One of Caban's men came down to the holding cell where we were and said, "Who's Rob Robinson?" That’s when he said, "Caban sent me down here and told me he ain’t got no problems with you or your organization. The orders to lock you up came from Chief Orvelli."

[01:46:59] I always said, he had an Aunt Mary or somebody who lived in Cleveland, Ohio, that went through foreclosure, and he’s saying, "This makes sense what they're doing.” I've always believed that.

[01:47:40] They moved in on us right after the fashion show because we were having a good time. They stopped us from the cookout, two hours of back and forth, we were, "Okay, well fuck that. We're going to have fun in here."

[01:48:07] Colin Moynihan from the Times was there blogging and then CNN picked it up on the live feed, and I think, “Okay, these mother F-ers from Harlem are on national news with this shit.” There was also one of their own that made them look so bad. That was a great moment.

[01:48:46] Recommendations for other homeless-organizing groups or poor people's groups, it was a time of empowerment, for the organization and individuals. You can confront the police in a way where you can be respected but people have to be organized around it, and know that everybody has a role, stick to your role.

[01:49:59] Doing it on a moral ground changes the playing field, "We're taking over the space to give back to the community" has a different ring than Picture the Homeless just taking this shit. We've seen banks come in our communities and take from us. Now, it's time to take from the banks and give back to the community, messaging is important.

[01:50:45] An organization can do this in a way to make change, but the change doesn’t happen overnight, I think sometimes we're a little bit guilty of fantasizing about, “Okay, now they're going to open up all these vacant buildings around the city and let us in.” No, it’s not. But it's putting the issue front and center.

[01:51:14] At a Right to the City meeting at the Urban Justice Center, Micky Melendez said, "Ain’t you from Picture the Homeless? You guys did that action right?" I don’t want you guys to make some of the same mistakes we did." To have somebody that was a former Young Lord, and nobody had done this type of stuff in twenty or thirty years, it also puts an organization front and center, gives you recognition and an importance in the community.

[01:52:06] We shared with the community, you can turn this into fun, but at the same time deliver a serious message, both actions were that way, by the time we came around the second, “We got this.” Right? You learn how to manage a situation.

[01:52:55] The risk isn't as big as we might think, that’s the biggest takeaway, that removes the fear from people in the future. When you think about it, eight of us were arrested and we went about our lives, and they don’t want the spectacle inside of the courtroom.

[01:54:42] That video still resonates. Paul Boden had never seen it until I showed it to him, I still show it to a lot of people because I think the collaboration between art—the messaging and social justice, that intersection is important, it was an incredible collaboration.

[01:56:30] They told us to look in East Harlem, where there might be a film shoot and to steal signs, then we photoshopped it and the cops that morning helped move cars. It was so funny.

[01:57:40] What it's going to take for the housing movement to scale up our protests, I thought every condition was put in front of us to do that and for people to step up, I think there is some fear of situations that existed thirty, forty years ago, I think we have a problem collaborating.

[01:59:59] The financing that we get from foundations can be somewhat problematic, if we can find foundations that are going to support our work with general operating funds, I think that'll allow us space for us to do it.

[02:00:16] We have to do the political education, which I think is lacking here, in Latin America, and that's front and center in their work, the masses have to come together to push back on that system.

[02:01:07] In Brazil, the MST [Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra] [Landless Workers' Movement] has its own school. In Brazil, they say, "Let's move in formation. Let's bring everybody to this point, then we move together.

[02:01:47] I thought when we had the first African American elected as president, in 2008, we were all enamored that everything was going to change. He basically said, “We're in an economic downturn and our banks are teetering on the brink. I'm going to take your tax money to support the banks. You can fail, but Bank of America can't fail.”

[02:02:49] It makes me say, "Will we ever get up? What will push us to come up with that scale that you're talking about?" Because if we didn’t rise up then I'm afraid we may never rise up, and I don’t think we're going to see the change we want to see until we do!

[02:03:12] I remember the work of Take Back the Land, we used to talk about, “Nonviolent, civil disobedience, and direct action….” One day, Neil Smith walks by me in the Graduate Center and says, "Rob, you and Max always talks about nonviolence, civil disobedience, and direct action. What do you call positive action? I just want you to know the revolution can be violent." The system is violent.

[02:03:52] The only way is to push back with the same violence and until we get there, we won't have that scale that you're asking about and the way our movements work and their reliance on financing from people that don’t necessarily have your best interest in mind.

[02:04:17] At that time when we were escalating our housing campaign actions, because we were also sleeping on the sidewalk and all, we were getting the same kind of foundation funding and that didn’t stop us, we never had a conversation in the office about funding and actions.

[02:04:56] People move to a place of militancy, you come to a place and say, "We have to do it this way." Not everybody is there and there's also structures within organizations where decisions are made by staff versus members, where they say, "No, we're not going to put our funding in jeopardy."

[02:05:35] I think there were forward thinkers in philanthropy but all of philanthropy hasn’t shifted yet, to figure out a different way. I learned a lot through those site visits. I now sit with North Star Fund’s community funding committee. I'm the longest serving member on that and I sometimes struggle because it seems like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, but they do it differently.

[02:07:16] There's a general fear that the way things happened fifty years ago, some of that is valid, I'm back to risk versus reward. Sometimes, you have to take a risk and now at this stage of my life, I will say in a minute, "I'm going to do some direct action.” You send a message to a bunch of other people that he's willing to take the risk, and hopefully it'll lead to some change.

[02:08:07] I got my foundation in this organizing stuff that has led to me traveling around the world, which is pretty incredible. It all came from an email from Sam at Picture the Homeless, and it's blossomed into this thing now where the organization’s got worldwide recognition.

[02:08:30] Laura Flanders from GRITtv is in Europe, ended up in her trip in Budapest, Hungary, so she asked the people that she likes to work with, "Who's doing social justice work in Budapest?" So they say, "You need to contact A Város Mindenkié.” She contacts them, and they meet with her and then she says, "Where did you get the idea to do this?" And whoever she was with said, "Picture the Homeless in New York." And then Laura said, "Do you know Rob Robinson? He's a long time member.
 
[02:09:40] It speaks to the organization's work and how they're looked upon around the country, the city and around the world, and that's huge. You do it in such a way that people recognize you and I think that's powerful and that speaks to the work of the organization, the work of the staff, and the commitment of people, which is huge.