Ryan Hickey (Interview 2)

Lewis: [00:00:00] Alrighty, so today is May 22,

Hickey: Think so

Lewis: Right?

Hickey: Yes.

Lewis: 2019… I’m Lynn Lewis with Ryan Hickey for our second interview for the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project. How are you Ryan?

Hickey: I’m good. I’m tired and jetlagged but I’m good.

Lewis: Okay. And—do you want to share what you’re jetlagged from?

Hickey: [00:00:29] Ah, yeah sure… I’m in a long-distance relationship with somebody who lives in Berlin, Germany. And I’ve been traveling there pretty regularly for almost a year and a half and I’m tired of it [smiles] but she’s coming in August for a year to study so there’s an end in sight, thank God.

Lewis: Well we may get to this later in this interview, but with all of this stuff in Berlin—giant marches…

Hickey: [00:01:02] I met up with—I went to a meeting with them, and I met some people.

Lewis: and the stuff in Venezuela that’s going on

Hickey: Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: with the group you and I met and the housing that they’re creating themselves.

Hickey: Inquilinos… Pobladores, those folks?

Lewis: Yes. So, I was actually thinking about you with Berlin and Caracas [Venezuela] housing stuff in the news.

Hickey: Imagine if we could convene activists from Berlin and Caracas and New York—what a dream that would be, wow.

Lewis: And, talk to me a little bit about why that would be a dream.

Hickey: [00:01:39] So the folks who we met in Venezuela have a really—I mean it’s super interesting there, right—because they have a lot of power, and they also got a lot of power under the [Hugo] Chavez rule. And from what I remember, I mean the state was almost entirely on their side. And if I remember correctly, they encourage folks to go into vacant buildings and just say, “If you need a home take it.” Just like, you know—one of those old slogans of Picture the Homeless was, I think I have that. There’s a flyer on my refrigerator that says, “If you need a home take it.” That Frank Morales made.

Hickey: [00:02:20] And they are building collectively owned, collectively managed housing in a very democratic way, and they’re constructing it themselves. They are the ones putting in the equity, the sweat equity—and these are high-rises! They’re enormous buildings too, I remember. And they’re beautiful apartments! We went into some. They are absolutely beautiful apartments, and these folks were formerly homeless. And… It’s kind of like what Picture the Homeless was doing, you know—just because somebody was homeless doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a beautiful home. And it can be done if you organize correctly, if you organize for power and you have people in power who are willing to help and funnel state money towards your efforts—then yeah, that’s going to be really helpful.

Hickey: [00:03:06] And it’s really interesting in Berlin because they are fighting against Deutsche Wohnen and a lot of other huge landlords who have kind of cornered the market—the real estate market, and who almost are singlehandedly driving up rents in Berlin, which was once this affordable housing haven and, you know—it was a squatter’s haven... You know, activism has been really prevalent there for many, many decades and this huge counterculture, and that counterculture is now being pushed out because of real estate. And they are fighting to institute a referendum that would expropriate thousands and thousands and thousands of privately owned units and put it into social control—which is kind of what we did with the cluster site stuff.

Hickey: [00:04:03] So yeah, I met with them as well, and it’s quite straightforward. You know, they just have to get a certain amount of signatures and the referendum, then a certain amount of people have to turn out for voting, and then they have to win and then they can institute—I think it’s Article XV. And I was reading their constitution—it says, pretty much like… What did it… It says, you know—what our “eminent domain” says. As long as it’s for public use the state can expropriate land or resources and put it under a social control if it’s for public use. And unfortunately, New York City has used that to the detriment of the public often, with stadiums or huge infrastructure projects and has often displaced people.

Hickey: [00:04:47] But, I mean that would be so interesting—to have all of those folks together so we can learn from each other and… We all have a different relationship to the state as well. Like people in Germany, they have a very different relationship with the state and social ownership—where they—I think they trust the state a little bit more than we do. Because—you know, when people say we should build more public housing—which is true, we should build more public housing—oftentimes, I think what if we do build public housing and then we just end up disinvesting in it because another Trump gets elected or something like that. Because it’s often at the whims of our leaders and our leaders are oftentimes so shitty, when, you know—in Germany, they have a very different relationship to social housing and they often view it more as a right, rather than a privilege. And the same goes for the folks in Venezuela, so... Anyway, I would just like to kind of work through those problems and learn from each other. So yeah…

Lewis: [00:05:55] So, you had mentioned the misuse of eminent domain

Hickey: Mmmmm.

Lewis: for the interests of corporations

Hickey: Yeah. [Sighs]

Lewis: and big money. One of the things that we want to talk about today is how the Picture the Homeless housing campaign was focused on solutions to homelessness, and again—back to the Picture the Homeless mission statement—about addressing root causes of homelessness.

Hickey: Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: And so, would you share a little bit—the work of Gaining Ground, the proposal—the kind of blueprint to end homelessness that you all worked on?

Hickey: [00:06:51] Yeah. So, Gaining Ground came out of a lot of formal and impromptu conversations with housing leaders in and outside of meetings where we were organizing in cluster sites and our members, and I were seeing just the really shitty conditions that people were living in. And then, simultaneously we were working on the Community Land Trust [CLT] work, which members had long identified as a solution to the problem not the solution to the problem and we were just thinking about how we can put all these things together, and also wrapped into that was the question of subsidies, right? So, the whole thing about the government always issuing temporary subsidies when time and time again that had been disproven not to work.

Hickey: [00:07:46] So we were… Like the three main things, I think—were permanent subsidies, we have to do something about these cluster sites, and all that is going towards a solution which is land trusts—where people own and control the land and then somehow manage the properties on top of it. So… You know, we’d been having these conversations for a long time, and I guess I was struggling to figure out what to do with them because we were doing all these things kind of separately rather than as part of just one cohesive framework.

Hickey: [00:08:28] And I think it was probably in a staff meeting where you or Sam was just—probably said something like, “So we have to create a plan! Let’s like, write a white paper or whatever the government usually does when they want to create an outline of a framework and let’s just do it. Let’s put all these things on paper and lay out a blueprint for both the cluster site—all these problems that we’re facing… The cluster sites, the subsidies—and lay out a solution.” Which was somehow—own and manage the housing that homeless people live in.

Hickey: [00:09:01] And so, I started writing Gaining Ground as just bullet points on paper, because I’d never written something as comprehensive as what Gaining Ground turned out to be. So, I remember writing it and I remember having these meetings with Valerio Orselli from Cooper Square, Ken Wray from CATCH [Community Assisted Tenant Controlled Housing], and Harry from Banana Kelly—who are all developers and who all had gotten buildings or gotten properties from the government, who knew the motions of how to do this, and also had a lot of experience with dealing and tracking down subsidies and most importantly, housing poor people… Who had been for decades and eons—disenfranchised and marginalized from the housing market. So, they were like my “how-to” people.
 
Hickey: [00:09:56] And after two or three meetings, you know—we were… I was formatting the outline to this kind of stuff and then Jenny came on. Because, I remember basically handing all this off to Jenny and she was still studying at the time and I think I just said to her like, “Please fix this. I have all this information on this paper. Some of it makes sense, some—a lot of it is just scattered. There’s no kind of flow to it. Here are the notes from these meetings…” And we had all these conversations and stuff. And, I think she just goes, “Yeah, I can do this. Just give me it and I’ll write it.” Because she’s a brilliant writer and she has this flow with language that’s very… I don’t know, comes very easy to her.

Hickey: [00:10:44] So, at the same time we were, you know—obviously talking back and forth with members and members were in all these meetings where we were talking about how to frame some of this stuff, what examples to use if we do use examples... We ended up using a lot of examples on cluster sites and going and using publicly accessed data like OASIS [Open Accessible Space Information System] and ACRIS [Automated City Register Information System] to kind of guess, or at least make educated estimates on what some of these buildings were worth and what eminent domain would look like. And the eminent domain question was big because that’s when Harry and Val and all of them were just… I think they were just like, “Good luck. I don’t think it’s going to work but, why not. Shoot for the stars kid.” [Laughs] I think that’s kind of what their thinking was.

Hickey: [00:11:39] But our members were adamant in that these cluster site buildings, these privately owned buildings owned by slumlords, they had to be owned by somebody else. Preferably nonprofits and by way of CATCH or Banana Kelly or the Cooper Square model or something like that—because that’s what the solution was, right? We saw that their housing worked. Our folks lived in them. It could be done sustainably. And so, we’re like this is a solution to these problems. Meanwhile, like the government can subsidize it through LINC [Living in Communities] as it was—is there still a LINC?

Lewis: I don’t know.

Hickey: The LINC I, II, III, IV, V or whatever, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X… However many renditions of LINC there were, or Section 8 or whatever.

Hickey: [00:12:26] So, we were having these conversations with members and Jenny—mostly Jenny, a little bit me but mostly Jenny, was writing Gaining Ground and we were talking about these specific cluster site buildings, particularly the Podolsky owned buildings… And yeah—I don’t remember when we unveiled the finished product. I remember, the demonstration we had, the press... But I just remember talking a lot with our members and going back and forth and reading parts of it in housing campaign meetings and also talking with Harry and Ken and just getting their cell phone numbers and being like, “Hey Ken, we said this. This makes sense, right?” And he goes, “Yeah, that’s how we do it.” And I was like, “Okay cool.” I was like, “Valerio, we’re saying this. This makes sense, right?” He’s like, “Yeah,  that’s what I said and that’s what I said.” And they were really helpful for a really long time.

Hickey: [00:13:25] So, the finished product was Gaining Ground where we specifically looked at, I think it was—I don’t know, five, six, seven cluster site buildings and we did value assessments on them, and we said the government should take this over through eminent domain. And a lot of people who we asked to sign on to Gaining Ground did not like that. And they specifically said, no they weren’t going to sign on to it because it said eminent domain. I think those folks were the ANHDs [Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development] of the world, the bigger groups. But some of the smaller, more radical groups signed on to it because they had no problems with eminent domain, and they knew… They knew and understood the political ramifications of asking for eminent domain for this stuff, but they would’ve done the same in their campaign so that’s why they had no problem with it.

Lewis: [00:14:15] Who were some of the groups that signed on?

Hickey: Ooooooo! Cooper Square, CAAAV, I think GOLES… I’m not sure if Community Voices Heard [CVH] did. Banana Kelly did and CATCH, Mutual Housing Association did. We listed them as like cowriters, codevelopers… We had a couple of unions, DC-37 was on there because the head of DC-37 came to the press conference that we had, and he spoke about that, I think. There were over twenty, I think. My memory is failing me right now.

Hickey: [00:15:00] And yeah—so we were meeting with [Steve] Banks and then ultimately, we met with Alicia Glen, with Harry in the room. And I remember when Alicia Glen walked in the first thing she said was, “Harry DeRienzo, how are you? It’s been so long!” And I didn’t know they knew each other, and they were just kind of chummy together. And we were talking about, you know—specifically the cluster site stuff and pushing for eminent domain and also looking at land trusts in a more serious way—because the city wasn’t really doing much at that time. And we were saying, “This is a model that can be emulated even with cluster sites, and we want the city to start doing this. And we’re ready to work with the city to organize in these buildings and getting signatures from tenants or whatever… You know, tell us what to do and we’ll do it. Tell us the checks that you need to have—and we’ll do it.”

Hickey: [00:15:59] And at the same time, we were still knocking on doors in cluster sites. We still had contacts with the folks in cluster sites. And, you know—we kept having meetings with Banks. I think Alicia Glen we met with her once, maybe one other time. But it was really up to Banks to—

Lewis: Steve Banks?

Hickey: Steve Banks yeah.

Hickey: We wanted to convince him—so he could convince Alicia Glen and then those folks would convince the higher ups above them. So, I think our strategy was to convince Steve Banks that this is a workable model, let him hear it from the horse’s mouth—so let him hear from Harry, from Val, from Ken and say, “This can work.” And even being like, “We would take some of these buildings if the city were to support us.” And, you know—the conversations weren’t bad, but they weren’t great I would say.

Hickey: [00:16:57] And… Things I guess stalled just because then we were really focusing on—I mean then the whole—all the LINC stuff happened during that time I think and where members and homeless folks were coming to us saying, “I have a LINC but nobody’s accepting me.”

Lewis: The LINC voucher, a housing voucher?

Hickey: The LINC voucher yeah. There’s LINC I, II, III, IV and eventually a fifth one was added. And all of them targeted a certain population of homeless folks. So, there’s a seniors, there was single adults. There were the adults with children. Families without children, so just couples and stuff like that. I mean they kind of like, sectioned it off. What we were saying, and this was part of Gaining Ground I think you know—why not just have one subsidy that’s permanent so landlords aren’t—wouldn’t be able to discriminate based on what kind of person is coming to their door and saying, “I need a house.” Or whatever, because discrimination was happening. And that’s when we started teaming up, a little—we started teaming up with VOCAL a little bit because their members were also facing this stuff… And the whole source of discrimination stuff and that’s when I think—slowly, we got involved with the Homeless Union, but more with VOCAL first.

Hickey: [00:18:16] But then, you know—I guess fast forward a couple years or whatever it was, we were still trying to get signatures. We’re still trying to get endorsements from organizations and even from politicians. We tried to get some endorsements from—I think, the councilwoman from the Bronx with a lot of cluster sites in her—Arroyo was it?

Lewis: Carmen Arroyo?

Hickey: Carmen Arroyo.

Lewis: Or Anabelle Palma?

Hickey: Anabelle Palma. Yeah. So we were trying to get endorsements from critical people with a lot of cluster sites in their district who would benefit from this plan, and I think we got a few. And you know, we didn’t reach out to everybody, just because not everybody had a stake in this per se. And then we were trying to get hearings and we were trying to get council meetings and stuff like that. And yeah, I think things stalled but at the same time we were still doing the work of the cluster site stuff but a little bit more slowly.

Hickey: [00:19:21] Because that’s when the CLT [Community Land Trust] stuff started really heating up. That’s when the city started recognizing separately—like, not Steve Banks, but HPD [Housing Preservation and Development] started recognizing CLTs as a really viable way to get them out of the housing crisis… And, because I think they were realizing their housing plan wasn’t addressing the needs of the people that need housing most and it still isn’t. And we—yeah, and I think we were just focusing a lot more on CLTs then and the CLT stuff really started taking off.

Hickey: [00:19:56] And then fast forward whatever, a year and a half, two years later after Gaining Ground… That’s when [laughs] Mayor [Bill] de Blasio announced that actually they did like the eminent domain question and they were going to implement eminent domain on the Podolsky portfolio. And I remember that day being like, “What the fuck is this?” You know nobody else was pushing this—except us. We were the only ones knocking on doors in cluster sites.

Hickey: [00:20:23] And now… Even one of our fucking members—Tahesha, who was, you know—she was like a member of Picture the Homeless, but she was also a member of Banana Kelly—we got her housing. We got her whole family housing because we knocked on her door. I don’t think it was 941 [Intervale] [Bronx, New York]. Yeah, it was a 941, I think.

Lewis: Yeah, she was in a cluster site.

Hickey: [00:20:46] Yeah, she was in a cluster site. And then we learned that she was going to be sitting next to the mayor announcing this deal talking about her experience in the cluster site stuff. And I remember being furious and I called Harry, and I was like, “Harry, you didn’t think to invite us!? You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us. Like, we did this. We did this.” And he’s like, “The mayor told us not to invite anybody else. I’m sorry.” I was like, “Harry, you know better. Come on.” He’s like, “All right, all right. This is where it’s going to be. This is what’s up.”

Hickey: [00:21:15] And the day of we—you know, I brought… I called Lisa and I was like, “Lisa, the mayor is going to announce this cluster site thing. You need to come here.” At the time she was in Brooklyn, or... I think she was in Brooklyn, or even Coney Island or someplace really far away. And I was like, “You need to get to the Bronx now because we need to confront Mayor de Blasio on this stuff.” And we did.

Hickey: [00:21:39] And also, Charmel [Lucas] because Charmel was really the one—the one member who was knocking on doors—I mean consistently, and building relationships with people. And I just said to the mayor, “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these two people, Lisa, and Charmel. Like, you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us because I don’t know if you know but—we’re the ones who put this plan in motion. We’re the ones who gave you the statistics. We’re the ones who gave you the facts. We’re the ones who gave you the framework to work with and then you’re just ignoring homeless peoples’ work.” Which the city often does and always does and probably—­­hopefully they won’t continue to do that. But yeah. And then,  turns out eminent domain wasn’t such a bad idea after all, and the city really liked it and that was because of us. For the record that was because of us.

Lewis: Right on, Ryan. For the record, that’s one reason why we’re doing this.

Lewis: [00:22:37] One of the things that—when I interviewed Joo-Hyun Kang about… One of the things I asked her about—to share some memories of Picture the Homeless, that she had… And she shared how Picture the Homeless members really took ownership when the Community Safety Act was passed—you know, because Picture the Homeless members also were doing court support, doing the stop-and-frisk trial… When things were won, that Picture the Homeless members really felt like, “We did this. We helped.” Not that we did it by ourselves, but we had something to do with this victory.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: And so, what you’re mentioning just now was you and Charmel and Lisa—and Lisa’s the person who the cabinet fell off the wall?

Hickey: The cabinet almost killed her child, yeah.

Lewis: [00:23:35] So, how—how did you as an organizer and how did Charmel—because Lisa wasn’t in the office a lot, but Charmel was.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: How did you all bring that back to the housing campaign, so they would know?

Hickey: Right. Sometimes I think, and I’m speaking for myself too—we don’t acknowledge our victories because we’re… We just think, “Great! We won this thing, back to work!” And that’s really—that’s harmful I learned. And, I think Sam had to be—had to talk to me sometimes and be like, “Take some space and acknowledge the work that you and everybody has done because victories are seldom, and we really need to acknowledge the work that we’ve done and… Just so—also, so people know the work that they’re doing isn’t fruitless.”

Hickey: [00:24:30] But… That—so, when the whole cluster site announcement happened that was my last week at Picture the Homeless, or something like that. So, I think maybe at my last housing meeting we just—we tried to gather as many folks. We were making calls saying we had all these announcements to make because that was also the time when Housing Not Warehousing was passed—that, almost that same week. And of course you know, members—we knew the Housing Not Warehousing Act was getting passed because that was ninety-nine percent of our campaign work.

Hickey: [00:25:09] But we just gathered everybody and we kind of like did a brief history of how we got here and we… Like, jogging peoples’ memories about Gaining Ground and how hard that was and how important that document was, and is—and really just being intentional about recognizing people and the work that they did. So, Andres [Perez], Charmel, people who knocked on the doors, who got contacts, and who helped do actions and the sleep outs that we did… Just taking space and applauding people and just being like, “We did this y’all, like—the city would not have done this if homeless people—if we did not ask for eminent domain.

Hickey: [00:25:53] Because we were told, “It would never be done!” We were—that’s what… ANHD told us that. Even the people we were working with, they were like, “This is not going to happen but put it in there.” And we were just like, “No, fuck you. We’re going to put it in there because we know it’s important, we know it’s the right thing to do.” And also, you don’t organize for what you can get. You organize for what you want, right? And we wanted eminent domain. We wanted these buildings taken out of these peoples’ control, preferably for no money, but we soon learned that that wasn’t possible, because that’s not lawful.

Lewis: Unless they’re criminal.

Hickey: Unless they’re criminal, which—

Lewis: Which they were.

Hickey: Which they were.

Lewis: They were.

Hickey: [00:26:39] But yeah, we took space in the meeting and we just—celebrated a little bit, you know? Yeah. We just kind of took a few minutes—a few minutes… It was probably like twenty or thirty minutes just running down all the things that we did to get there, and yeah… It was really powerful. What a great way to end my tenure at Picture the Homeless. [Smiles]

Lewis: [00:27:01] Who are some of the other leaders that were involved with that? You mentioned Andres and Charmel.

Hickey: So, you know—we spoke last time of the whole 941 eviction stuff. Arvernetta [Henry] was definitely part of it, Maria [Walles] was definitely part of it, I mean Tahesha as well. Tahesha, so—she came to the office only a few times, but she was doing a lot. She was coming to meetings with elected or public officials. She was also helping knock on doors. She was also—helped making calls, even though she’s usually based in Banana Kelly because we helped her get a house there. She was mainly stationed there but we were always in contact with her and yeah, so she did a lot.

Hickey: [00:27:51] Marcus [Moore], you know, who hates outreach—he was still doing a lot of the actions and he was helping make calls and stuff like that, because he’s really good at making calls. He gets in this kind of persona where, he just—when you talk to him, you’re like, “Marcus, you know… Phone calls you can’t sound bored. You have to be excited. You have to have some energy.” He’s like, “Okay, I got it. I got it.” And then he just [snaps fingers] takes off on these phone calls and people respond to it really, really well because he’s just such a happy, joyous person.

Lewis: Like when he was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners.

Hickey: Oh my God!

Lewis: Do you know that story? [Smiles]

Hickey: A long time ago I think, but I don’t remember the specifics. But I remember something about he’s done this before, and he knows how it’s done.

Lewis: The goal is you want them to say yes.

Hickey: Yeah, it’s so interesting—totally forgot about that.

Lewis: [00:28:48] So, you know—I think it’s easier for people to visualize homeless folks knocking on doors and homeless folks doing sleep outs... But the policy work of Picture the Homeless—talk a little bit about what that looked like—coming up with the policy—and I’m also going to interview Jenny. You had mentioned talking to members but what were those conversations like about—about…

Hickey: [00:29:19] We had really… We had these really intense brainstorming sessions on… The mechanics of building maintenance… I mean this was coming out, like—the CLT study group really informed the way we talk about this stuff, but I remember being in these meetings. So, like Harry, Ken, Val, and then with meetings with members—we were talking about doing hypothetical rent roles as well, where we were thinking about—so these cluster sites have thirty units and say if we got LINC that would subsidize x amount and then we would need this amount of subsidies from the state and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Hickey: [00:30:09] But we were also talking about who would get to live in these buildings, and we did this also with the CLT stuff—like who would get to live in these buildings… Because we wanted to think through everything and we wanted to give the city a framework on which they could just be like yes, no, yes, no—really take our work and make it more collaborative because we wanted to give them the ammunition to do this stuff.

Lewis: [00:30:34] So, who was going to get to live in these buildings?

Hickey: I mean, what we wanted—we said everybody who was in these buildings, these cluster sites, as “homeless people” we recognize them as tenants, and I think we referred to them as tenants and we said everybody has a right to a lease. If they want to stay there, they can. But then the question arose where—a lot of these people are living in unsafe conditions so you would have to do repairs, so that’s going to take city money. And then the family size didn’t match the apartment size. So, if they’re in a one bedroom and they have four kids, you have to move them. And so, we were telling the city in Gaining Ground we have to do assessments. We have to know who lives here. We have to know how big the apartments are. We need to know all the code violations. Because the code violations sometimes were current, sometimes they weren’t. But also, code violations are a very different picture than going into these units and seeing just the degradation that these people live in.

Hickey: [00:31:38] So… And we were telling the city, “If you need us to do this, if you need us to go and evaluate peoples’ housing size—you know, household size, and the apartment size we can do that. Tell us what to do.” I think we started doing that, but then the city wasn’t responding, or the city was just like, “No we don’t need this,” or something like that. They were like… I think we were going into this work with the mindset the city’s going to need this at some point, so let’s just give them the ammunition. But we didn’t do that for too long because I think it became clear the city was stalling and we didn’t want to do the work if it wasn’t going to be kind of, recognized.

Hickey: [00:32:19] So, we had those conversations with members. Then of course the whole CLT thing. We were just dreaming about putting these all on the CLT and what that would mean, you know... We’d have to start CLTs and who would start them because we don’t even live in these places and going through all these questions—yeah. And it was a lot of numbers and just simple arithmetic where we were just calculating dream rent roles versus the subsidies given and trying to work—trying to provide working models for the city to convince them that this could be done, if they had the will. And we did that and that’s in Gaining Ground where we were talking about, you know—all of this stuff.

Lewis: [00:33:04] So, in the—the Alicia Glen meeting, I was in that meeting also

Hickey: Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: and Al went, Harry, you,

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: and Jenny I think.

Hickey: Mm-Hmmmm. And Donna? [Morgan] Or no… A woman was there.

Lewis: Okay. We have photos.

Hickey: Yeah, we do.

Lewis: The archive. [Smiles] So, I remember Alicia Glen saying that their biggest challenge is the units for extremely low-income people. And I think at the time the mayor’s plan for affordable housing—the goal was two hundred thousand.

Hickey: And only eight percent was for people with extremely low income.

Lewis: And that’s below what? Twenty-five thousand?

Hickey: Some pitiful number.

Lewis: So, below twenty-five thousand a year, which is a whole bunch of New Yorkers.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: You know, and she was saying, “Well, if you can help me solve this problem.” And when we met with Steve Banks, he kind of said the same thing.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: [00:34:07] Then, here’s Picture the Homeless doing all this work,
Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: to come up with—working with developers to come up with policies that the city doesn’t adopt anyway.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: [00:34:20] What do you think—in your experience with Picture the Homeless, what’s the tension or what’s the combination of ingredients? You have policy work, you mentioned sleep outs, outreach, and reflecting back on that what—what do we need to make change?

Hickey: Oh wow. I’m a huge believer in both political and popular education like, being very much intertwined in the work that we do. So, I remember the housing meetings always had an element of either political or popular education. I mean the popular education element was really part of the NYCCLI [New York City Community Land Initiative] stuff, where we were really developing these hands-on tools for folks around CLTs and Mutual Housing Associations [MHAs].

Hickey: [00:35:20] But we realized that we couldn’t leave it up to the “experts” to solve the problems because if they could, or if they would, or if they wanted to—things would’ve been solved. I think this is part of Picture the Homeless’ mission where homeless people know the problems, therefore they know the solutions and I guess the challenge is the organizing work between identifying the problem and identifying the solution and how to get there.

Hickey: [00:35:48] So yeah—political and popular education are really big for me because that’s where people also develop their political consciousness, right? Not everybody who gets involved in organizing is like this radical socialist who knows all these philosophers and everything like that. It’s up to us to read on our own, which is why people like Jean [Rice] are so amazingly helpful in those situations where Jean can bring in what Bayard Ruskin did in the 1960s and how revolutionary he was and then bring in constitutional law. Because people are drawn to Jean because he has this like—I don’t know, gravitas to him.

Lewis: And knowledge!

Hickey: [00:36:29] And knowledge! Yeah, of course, and he knows shit. And he—I remember seeing him speak to newer members basically saying, “You can’t just come in here and think that things are going to be handed to you. You have to educate yourself while we educate each other.” And he always encouraged people to do their own research and read. He always was recommending books to people.

Lewis: He created a library!

Hickey: [00:36:52] He created a fucking library of hundreds of books and stuff like that. And people utilized that library pretty often. They didn’t take anything out, but I remember seeing people regularly take out a book, flip through it, put it back. I mean sometimes the books were just like, strange. [Laughs] But it was always a work in progress—it was, yeah. But that was really important.

Lewis: When you say we with NYCCLI, could you talk about who the we were?

Hickey: [00:37:22] Yeah, so NYCCLI basically for a while it was just us and New Economy Project—

Lewis: Picture the Homeless us?

Hickey: Picture the Homeless us and New Economy Project formerly known as NEDAP [Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project]. And first, we were really working closely with Monica [Garcia] who along with me was co-chairing the Education and Outreach workgroup. And that—that was a time when we were formulating this common shared language, a visual and spoken language, about these issues like Community Land Trust and MHAs.

Hickey: [00:38:01] And that’s when we were also working to develop these graphics, these flyers, these posters, these board games… And yeah, that took a really long time. But it was with Monica and then later Lauren [Wilflong], we were developing these things from scratch and that’s when people were learning and relearning things about CLTs and MHAs and realizing how much we didn’t know, but also realizing how much we knew.

Lewis: [00:38:35] And the Picture the Homeless members that were involved in all that, who were they?

Hickey: All together it was Arvernetta, it was Maria, it was Kendall [Jackman], it was Marcus, it was Scott [Andrew Hutchins], it was even folks like Steve [Wavra]... You know, Steve came, and Althea was really active. [Long pause] I’m sure I’m missing people.

Lewis: I think I saw Dave Subren?

Hickey: Dave Subren! Oh my God! Dave Subren was—you know, you never heard from him, but you’d send an email to him, and you just hope that he saw it and then he showed up, almost every time. Who else? That was—I mean, that was the core.

Hickey: [00:39:20] And they took it upon themselves to really do the work over however many years it was. But yeah, so that’s really important in winning and organizing and getting what we want, and you know—building these relationships. In these meetings we were building relationships but also, as I was saying last time, after housing meetings where we were just hanging out, you’re building relationships there. I mean, every interaction is relationship building.

Hickey: [00:39:51] And… Yeah, we just—we all developed really strong relationships with each other, which were sometimes contentious but ultimately it—

Lewis: I’m sorry, what would make them contentious? Like, what would be some points of tension?

Hickey: I would say it was rarely about direction of the work, it was more just like— personalities, because we were all pretty much politically in line with the mission. We knew what we had to do. We knew what we were doing. Very rarely I think there was a disagreement amongst people around political direction.

Hickey: [00:40:28] But mostly it was around personalities where people had big personalities and sometimes, they clashed. And, you know—some folks knew when to stop talking and just kind of say to themselves, “This isn’t worth it, and I’ll just come back tomorrow. It’s going to be fine.” Let things cool down. But some people really couldn’t let things go and maybe needed to be right—and these are human elements, you know. I know so many people like this already still—who needed to be right or who needed to dominate the conversation, who needed to speak last, who—even though they knew meeting rules, they were going to ignore the meeting rules—stuff like that.

Hickey: [00:41:12] And this is just—when you’re dealing with humans it’s always going to happen. Every political space I’ve ever been in has these kinds of personalities. And all things considered, I think we did a pretty good damn job of, you know—managing these things. And once you also build relationships with people you know who works well with who else, and some people are oil and water, but some people are peanut butter and jelly and, you know—if you want something done in a really quick way you can put two and two together and figure out who would be great in which spaces.

Hickey: [00:41:51] Because, as an organizer you learn people’s strengths. You learn people’s—I don’t want to say weaknesses because they’re not weaknesses, but you learn where people aren’t as strong and where you should build them up. And, it’s a matter of making sure people are in the spaces that they’re challenged but they also can be leaders, and stuff like that. So yeah, I would say most of the disagreements came from personalities, which is fine.

Lewis: [00:42:19] Yeah. I think when you said that every political group you’ve ever been involved with these are human elements that show up.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: Then on top of the human elements, when organizing homeless folks you’re dealing with people who are suffering from sleep deprivation,

Hickey: Yes.

Lewis: untreated medical issues,

Hickey: Yes.

Lewis: hungry maybe…

Hickey: Yes, oh God yeah.

Lewis: Coming from so much stress.

Lewis: [00:42:50] One of the things that—memories that I have of you, speaking of popular education, is a presentation that you and Arvernetta and Marcus gave at a National Community Land Trust Network.

Hickey: That was such a good time.

Lewis: And it was standing room only!

Hickey: Yes.

Lewis: And… talk to me about that and why it was such a good time.

Hickey: [00:43:19] [Sighs] I’m so proud of that moment still. So, we’d been going to these national CLT conferences since I got in Picture the Homeless from 2013. And from the beginning—from my beginning, talking with members… We always left the conference wanting more, because we were always thinking to ourselves or saying to each other, “That didn’t address our needs or our experiences, so we needed to do something.”

Lewis: In what way did it not?

Hickey: They were always… I wouldn’t say always, but most—yeah, [laughs] pretty much always talking about home ownership. They were talking about—more often than not, suburban environments. They were talking about whiter—that’s not true, actually. But they were talking about suburban environments.

Hickey: [00:44:08] They weren’t talking about meeting the income levels that we needed. We’re talking about people making well below thirty percent of the Area Median Income—New York’s Area Median Income and also, just like a sense of social justice. Like, a mission of social justice imbued within the CLT mission. Because, you know—loosely speaking yeah, like a lot of these CLTs were—had a justice-oriented mission, but in terms of factoring in environmental justice, racial justice, and you know—connecting the dots between all these things, we didn’t hear the intentionality from any of these groups.

Hickey: [00:44:46] So we always… I think the first two years that I went we left thinking like, “This—is this worth our time?” Right? So, we’re learning a lot but often it was the same conversation about low-income HDFCs [Housing Development Fund Corporation], low-income, limited equity co-ops, or low-income home ownership. And a t some point when we were with Right to the City when Right to the City was kind of bubbling up again, we helped organize this like, anti-convening—I think it was in 2014 or 2015.

Hickey: [00:45:20] Where, we were—we, yeah—we just went around to people who we thought we were politically aligned with and said, “Meet at this bar afterwards because we need to talk about how this isn’t everything. Right? There’s a lot of things that we aren’t learning here that we need to.” And so, we gathered—I don’t know, a dozen or twenty groups including Dudley St. [Boston, Massachusetts] people, including Trust South LA people, and other people we met along the way. Where—really it was us, even though Right to the City took credit, because we were there, like the two years or one year beforehand, we were having these conversations and we were talking with other folks being like, “This isn’t doing it.”

Hickey: [00:46:06] And so, we helped organize this kind of anti-convening. And I remember me and other members speaking—I think Arvernetta especially—me and Arvernetta speaking to this crowd of like fifty people in a bar. Because mind you, this bar was the bar where they marketed it as like, “Let’s all come together and just decompress.” And in that same bar we’re like, “No, we’re going to have this part of the bar and we’re going to talk about our shit, you go over there.”

Hickey: [00:46:26] And I remember—I think her name was Emily, she was looking at us like, “What is happening? What are you all doing?” And us, you know—as part of Right to the City, we were just saying, “This isn’t what we need. Let’s try to have what we need. Let’s create a formal document and let’s send it to the National CLT Network. We did and then the next year that’s when they opened up the presenter format. They opened up these sessions to us, like the Right to the City people who were really concerned with the organizing elements of CLTs, the real social justice grassroots element of CLTs, the really, really low-income element of CLTs. And that was the year—the next year was the year where we were rushing to get the board game and the comic book done.

Hickey: [00:47:15] And that’s when we presented it and it was, you know—a standing room only thing because I think people were just thinking to themselves, “Oh wow, this is new and fresh and something we don’t really hear in this space where people are talking about community organizing and linking that directly to forming and sustaining Community Land Trusts.” And so we—me and Marcus and Arvernetta along with Monica—or no, was it Lauren at that time? I think it was Lauren at that time.  
 
Lewis: Yeah, because you shared a room with her.

Hickey: [00:47:44] Yeah, we shared a room. Yeah, and the night before—and the night before the presentation we played the game just to remind ourselves and we were just, you know— having fun. We were staying up late. We were playing this board game—

Lewis: On the floor.

Hickey: —that we created on the floor. So fun.

Hickey: [00:47:57] And the day afterwards we really knocked it out of the park! Like, it was a flawless presentation because we prepped really, really well. And we split up into groups and everybody was playing their board game, and Marcus and Arvernetta both were facilitators. And I don’t even know if I was facilitating. I think I was just making sure people were okay. I was like, checking in on Marcus like, “You good?” Checking in on Arvernetta like, “You good?” I think Lauren was doing it, but I was taking photos, and everybody was just having so much fun and it was flawless.

Hickey: [00:48:28] And afterwards, everybody—literally everybody was like, “Where can I buy this? Can I buy this from you?” And we created a list. I don’t even know what they did with that list. I hope they did something about it. But we created a list of folks who wanted to buy it to be on this pre, pre, pre order sale list. Because they were thinking this could really help us. This could really help our tenants or our members or however they, you know—related to their homeownership model.

Lewis: [00:49:02] I remember you standing kind of back, with this giant smile on your face and Arvernetta and Marcus really owning that whole—

Hickey: Owned it.

Lewis: space as like a stage, where they were going to reach people—so that when they walked out of the room, they would be totally down

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: with land trusts for poor—housing for poor people. It was very beautiful.

Hickey: [00:49:31] And I think even before—you know how Arvernetta, when she agrees to do something it’ll be an hour before, and she’s like, “Ryan, I don’t know if I can do this.” And I think she did that that time, maybe the night before and in the back of my mind I’m like, “This is not happening. There’s no way. You are absolutely doing it because we prepped for this, you know…” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we played the game and then she got a little bit more confident. And then the next day we just had a conversation like, “Arvernetta, you know this more than almost any other member of Picture the Homeless, you know. If you can’t do it then nobody can. You can do this!” And then she just rocked it. She owned it. And Marcus of course with his charismatic ass, did an amazing job and it was amazing. It was positive, as he would say.

Lewis: [00:50:18] So, you know—that trip… We went—you shared a room with Lauren, because we were going to all stay in the same room.

Hickey: Yeah, and then Lauren had that separate room.

Lewis: Lauren had space. And so, Marcus and Arvernetta and Jenny and I shared a room. And Arvernetta, the night before initiated like a pillow fight and we had bathing suits, so we went to the hot tub—she, Marcus, and I went to the hot tub together.

Hickey: Oh yeah! I remember, yes. I was there! I went there, yeah.

Lewis: Did you come?

Hickey: Yeah. Mm-Hmmm.

Lewis: All of those things happened in that conference. And then, we all went out one night and—

Hickey: Played pool.

Lewis: —were shooting pool and Arvernetta won, and she did a victory lap around the bar. [Smiles]

Hickey: How could I forget? [Laughs]

Lewis: And so,

Hickey: Yep.

Lewis: those fun times, right—as you mentioned more than once, are all part of the organizing.

Hickey: [00:51:23] I mean, I was so stressed out because organizing these conferences, you know—the flights, the hotel, making sure we’re under budget, you know—making sure… Talking to the National CLT people, making sure we’re on, it’s just like—it’s a lot of things and in the back of my mind… You’re never really chill. Like, you’re being chill, you’re having fun and stuff—for me at least in the back of my mind, I was like, “Okay, so tomorrow we’re waking up at six-thirty and then at seven we’re going to have breakfast, and then at seven-thirty we’re going to prep.” Like all these things to make sure that, you know, we don’t fuck up.

Hickey: [00:51:57] Because again, harkening back to our last chat—it’s like, I learned from my mistakes. I learned that not being prepared… Because the year before it was me, Ryan Gibbs, and Kendall and I waited too long to book the hotel. And we had to book—it was in Philadelphia, the conference, and we had to book in Cherry Hill, New Jersey which is across the river, like a twenty-minute cab ride away, and we had to take a cab every morning to the conference. And, it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was a deal, and then it just looks bad on you because you’re not prepared. And then the next year, I was like, “That’s not going to happen again.” So, I was just super tight. [Laughs]

Lewis: [00:52:39] One of the things that you mentioned that I think is really important to explore is how you and Arvernetta and members that were involved with the CLT work nationally, assessed what was happening and then planned an intervention and organized an intervention. And one of the challenges with the housing movement in New York City is that we really don’t have anyone fighting for housing for people below twenty-five,

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: —thirty percent

Hickey: Yes, without any conditions, just for poor people

Lewis: for poor people.

Hickey: period, full stop.

Lewis: [00:53:21] And so, can you share some experiences where you as a housing organizer with leaders of the housing campaign assessed what coalition to join or attend it, or part of a coalition and then said, “Nah, this—we’re not going to do an intervention. We’re just going to—”

Hickey: Peace out, right.

Lewis: —not be part of this.”

Hickey: There was a coalition, I think it was called End Homelessness 2017, or whatever it was. That Coalition for the Homeless was spearheading. And I remember talking with Sam, because Sam got an email and he said, “You should probably go to this.” And then I said, “Is that really going to be worth our time? We know these people. We know what they’re talking about.” And, you know—paraphrasing what he said—I think he was just like, “If we’re not part of the conversation we’re going to be left out. So at least when we’re in these meetings we’ll be able to steer the conversation more towards our interests.”

Hickey: [00:54:25] Which we really tried to, because it was—it was these large NGOs that oftentimes got city money who were never really pushing for what we were pushing for. A lot of their rhetoric was grounded in supportive housing and still is, but it was the Care for the Homeless's, it was Coalition for the Homeless, it was, you know—some service providers even. And that’s where they think—that’s where they thought they got their strength from where they said us service providers and us advocates are teaming up to say we have a shared interest in demanding whatever it was, twenty-four thousand units of supportive housing.

Hickey: [00:55:06] And when we got there, we were just saying, “Our membership doesn’t qualify for supportive housing, so what about us? So, why don’t you ask for just housing, full stop, without any services attached to it because a lot of our members don’t need services.” And that was an uphill battle because we being the small grassroots group were outnumbered and kind of drowned out by these larger NGOs who were more respected by the city, who were taken more seriously by the city. Who weren’t homeless led.

Hickey: [00:55:39] And at some point, I think the coalition just fizzled out or we just backed out because, you know—we weren’t getting anywhere. But neither was the coalition, really. And we—that’s also when we just said to ourselves, “We have other work to do that’s going to impact our membership and really make a dent in the housing crisis a little bit more than this coalition would.”

Lewis: [00:56:03] Were you going to those coalition meetings by yourself?

Hickey: No. I was going with members. It was usually like, one member—because not a lot of people were jazzed about it. A lot of people were just like, “I don’t want to go to this meeting because they’re boring as hell and we’re not getting anything out of it.” I don’t remember who was going, but I remember always having a member with me. For some reason Arvernetta was popping into my head, maybe DeBoRah [Dickerson] as well. Because DeBoRah, in the—I think that’s when DeBoRah was slowly getting back involved. DeBoRah was used to being in these spaces because she had been part of the Continuum of Care and she had been in these spaces where she could navigate these large NGOs and she knew what to say and she knew how to get her way, sort of. But even so I think it was largely an uphill battle. Yeah. So, that’s one memory.

Lewis: [00:57:04] There was a… I remember there was a rally where—about affordable housing and Picture the Homeless housing campaign members were like, booing and hissing.

Hickey: Oh God yeah. [Smiles] And then afterwards—

Lewis: What was that story? [Laughs]

Hickey: [00:57:20] Oh, what was that? I don’t remember. I remember the instance where people were booing and hissing and afterwards—I think it was somebody from CVH maybe, or no Make the Road or something like that. It was—it was a space where these big groups were at, who just could move a hundred people at an instant, where our members booed or hissed or something like that. Afterwards an organizer was just like, “Don’t do that again.” Or like, “Why did you do this?”

Hickey: [00:57:55] No! It was Jeremy from, he was… Oh shit, what was that coalition called? It was Jeremy—fuck.

Lewis: Sanders?

Hickey: No, no, no, no, no.

Lewis: Jaron Benjamin?

Hickey: Jaron, it was Jaron. Jaron who was leading a coalition at some time—that was, it’s called Real Affordability for All, RAFA.

Lewis: Okay, I remember, RAFA.

Hickey: Oh, now it’s coming back to me. So, RAFA was a fucking mess because again they were calling for largely supportive housing and they weren’t—if they were calling for permanent housing for just poor people, it was a very limited amount. But I remember us being really unhappy about it. And then Jaron… One of the speakers was talking about housing and how we need supportive housing, and I remember—like, Scott or somebody was just booing and hissing.

Hickey: [00:58:42] And I was like, Yeah!” Okay, you know. I agree with the booing and hissing. It’s not a great look to be with coalition members and booing.

Lewis: In your own rally. [Laugh]

Hickey: Yeah, at our own rally. But that’s coming from a real place. And I remember talking to Jaron when Jaron was like, “Dude don’t do that. Tell your members not to do that.” I’m like, “Listen, like listen to where that’s coming from. Ask yourself why they were booing and hissing rather than saying ‘Don’t boo and hiss.’”

Hickey: [00:59:08] Because I remember being… You know, talking to him and talking about permanent housing, deep affordable housing for people making well below thirty percent of the AMI. Because none of the other membership of any other group needed or wanted or were asking for housing at that level—even though all their membership would benefit from it!

Lewis: They need it, that’s just not what the group’s fighting for.

Hickey: That’s not what they fought for. And also it was a—they were trying to be nice to de Blasio to make him see their niceness and like all of a sudden come around to their niceness rather than being real with like—the scale of poverty in New York City. Like, come on—there’s sixty thousand homeless people, Jesus.

Lewis: [00:59:52] So I… Now that you mention RAFA and Jaron Benjamin, I have a whole flashback to… They had a platform?

Hickey: Yeah, it evolved I remember.

Lewis: But they kept temporary subsidies.

Hickey: That was it.

Lewis: And that was

Hickey: That was it.

Lewis: Jaron Benjamin came up to me at a North Star Fund Gala and said, “I just want to check in with you. We’re keeping in the temporary subsidies.” And I said, “Well then I don’t see how Picture the Homeless

Hickey: Yeah!

Lewis: members are going to sign on and a whole bunch of your member groups aren’t either.” And Jennifer Flynn had come up to Maria Walles and me when we first got to the gala and Maria said [smiles] to her, “How come HASA [HIV/AIDS Services Administration] people have permanent vouchers, but we don’t?”

Hickey: [Laughs] A truer statement has never been spoken. Yeah.

Lewis: [01:00:44] And so, I think

Hickey: It’s true.

Lewis: that whole question… What happened with RAFA then? You said that was it, but what actually happened?

Hickey: So we pushed them to adapt the subsidy question and they didn’t, and we got really pissed off. And I remember they also put our name on the endorsement list without us endorsing and I was furious, and our membership was furious. I think it was Kendall or somebody came up to me and was like, “Are we an endorser?” I was like, “No.” “So, why is our name on the endorsement form?” I’m like, “It’s not.” She’s like, “Yes, it is. Look.” And I was like, “God fucking dammit.” You know? So, I was like, “Take us off.”

Hickey: [01:01:20] And I think that was one of the last straws where we were just like, “You know what? Never mind.” And then RAFA basically collapsed because Jaron left after—whatever, a year or two doing what he was doing. Who was he employed by?

Lewis: I don’t remember. He’s worked at a couple different places, Housing Works and Met Council and VOCAL.

Hickey: Yeah, I think he was doing the Met Council stuff.

Hickey: But RAFA really wasn’t calling for solutions to the problems. They saw the problem, they were like, “Homelessness is out of control.” And then they’re like, “Temporary subsidies.” We’re like—out of all of the reports, out of all the analysis of HSP [Housing Stability Plus] and all of these temporary subsidies, what makes you think a temporary subsidy is going to actually do it, you know? Like, get your head out of your ass and stop being afraid of Mayor de Blasio because he won’t like a permanent subsidy. It’s like, what is… Why can’t we talk about this? Talk about it! So stupid.

Lewis: Section 8 is a permanent subsidy and that works. [Smiles]

Hickey: Yeah! And then we’re just like, “Give us more Section 8!” You know? Fuck! Yeah.

Lewis: [01:02:28] What are some of the challenges with organizing for what we need, not just what they want to give us? Like…

Hickey: I might… Yeah. So, now I’m thinking about vacant property

Lewis: Mm-Hmmmm.

Hickey: and Housing Not Warehousing stuff because we haven’t talked about that yet but also because nobody was talking about vacant property as being a problem. And Picture the Homeless was, even before I got there—long before I got there, since basically the beginning.

Lewis: Since the beginning. [Laughs]

Hickey: Since the beginning. Talking about vacant property and we were just kind of asking ourselves questions, you know? There’s an affordable housing crisis, there’s a lot of vacant property, why don’t we just open up this vacant property and put people in them? Flat out. Right? And then a lot of other questions started bubbling up, you know? Who owns these properties? Where are they? Are they located more densely in another area, or whatever?

Hickey: [01:03:24] I mean, this was something—going back to your question, this was something that we were asking ourselves that we were doing that was politically unpopular, even though it shouldn’t have been unpopular. It was unpopular because nobody wanted to think about it. It was unpopular because people always said, “Oh, that’s not a problem.” That was the answer, right? That was their answer, “This is not a problem, like you think it is.” But our membership was like, “No, every time I walk in my neighborhood, every time I walk in East Harlem, every time I walk here—I see boarded up housing, boarded up buildings, and then I see somebody sleeping on the street right next to it.” That is just not just. That is not right.

Hickey: [01:04:02] And so we—years and years, I mean I’m sure other people have spoken about this who you’ve interviewed, but we were redeveloping or revamping our vacant property bills back—when did it start? Because I remember people introduced it, they were our bills, they were introduced—our bills. And we saw it and we were just like… We called the council people, and we were like, “What the fuck? We have to meet right now because we have been doing years of work on this.” And they were all amenable. They were just, “Yes, come on in and do this.”

Hickey: [01:04:36] But they didn’t realize this had a history. They didn’t realize those bills had a history. They also didn’t realize the struggles that we put in beforehand when Melissa Mark Viverito was sponsoring, and our other sponsors were stonewalling or whatever. So, we were… That was in 2015, I think.

Lewis: Who put in… So the vacant property bills became three.

Hickey: It became three. They split it up.

Lewis: And it was Jumaane [Williams]?

Hickey: It was Jumaane, Ydanis Rodriguez, and Letitia James the public advocate.

Lewis: So, Tish James and Jumaane knew that Picture the Homeless had been doing that work because they—

Hickey: A little more yeah.

Lewis: But Ydanis Rodriguez—

Hickey: He was always kind of like—head in the clouds, kind of. He never really got it. He never really understood the issue. I mean we pushed him when he needed to be pushed for sure, but he was never a leader in the fight to pass his bill. So, yeah—I mean that started in 2015, I think.

Hickey: [01:05:39] That was a two year campaign and that was for two years, like ninety-nine percent of my work, maybe not ninety-nine percent but a large chunk of my work. Where we met with those politicians, we redrafted, we jumped through all the hoops that we needed to do, we held, you know—council meetings, we held presentations for caucuses, we got sponsorships, we got endorsements, we held amazing fun actions.

Hickey: [01:06:09] And yeah, because the thing is our membership knew why that was important. They had always known why it was important. But even newer folks who came in—when we were talking about vacant property, I could—I mean, there were so many times when people in the housing meeting, a new person in the housing meeting was like, “Oh yeah! Vacant property. I always wonder why they don’t do something about that, because that’s an issue.”

Hickey: [01:06:32] Like, that is—that’s a really important organizing moment where like—issue identification for people and tying that to a solution, and doing political education around like, “Okay, so there’s vacant property. Why isn’t it counted? Why aren’t landlords held accountable? Why isn’t the city held accountable?” Like, asking all these questions to kind of slowly politicize and radicalize the issue and our membership was really good at doing that with newer membership as well.

Hickey: [01:06:59] And it also helped that it was a very clear-cut campaign, right? It was a legislative campaign where we knew exactly what we had to do and we had to do certain things before it could be introduced in a committee or whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s pretty straightforward, but it was hard.

Lewis: [01:07:18] So, prior to the Housing Not Warehousing Act being three separate bills there was Intro 48,

Hickey: Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: which was one bill. And what were some of the—what was that like, because longtime members were really attached to Intro 48.

Hickey: Really attached yes.

Lewis: [01:07:38] So, what was it like negotiating with three different—two councilmembers and the public advocate, to kind of get what folks wanted out of the one bill and make sure it stayed in the three bills?

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: What were the challenges like and what were some of the learning moments like?

Hickey: I mean it was exhausting—because they weren’t talking to each other. They were talking to each other through us. And we had to always… I mean we had one person in the public advocate’s office who was doing a lot of the work, Jared. And I’m still thankful for all the work he had done, because people in Ydanis’ office, as I said—they weren’t really—they didn’t really care, they weren’t really doing shit. And Jumaane’s people were kind of incompetent a little bit. So, it was really Jared from the public advocate’s office who was the inter-liaison between all the offices and making sure whatever was in our bill—that bill would cover, and making sure they were all complementary to each other. But we had—we always had to… We rarely had joint meetings because it was so hard to schedule joint meetings with all of them. I mean, like—we never met with Jumaane and Tish and Ydanis in the same room because, you know—that’s very hard to do. I think we met with their staff jointly a few times, but usually it was phone calls, and the in-person meetings were, you know—really substantive.

Hickey: [01:09:12] We—we read the bills… Our membership knew the bills front to back, we knew the challenges, we knew loopholes that people might find, and we always came with solutions of what we wanted to see. And we also had questions—because sometimes in Tish James’ bill where they were talking about fines versus fees, for example, where we couldn’t say, “If you did not register your property, you would face a fine.” We couldn’t say fine because a fine is a tax—or something like this—a fine was a tax and a tax laid at the state’s hands. But if you said a fee, that laid at the city’s hands, and it would do effectively the same thing.

Hickey: [01:09:57] So, these kind of like—learning moments, where we couldn’t say some things because it would open up the bill to failure and then the real estate industry would say, “Oh! See?” They would point to it and say, “Oh! You can’t do that. This is why the bill shouldn’t be passed.” Or whatever. So, we learned from our—from people like Jared and Michael at some point who was in Jumaane’s office. He was the legislative person.

Hickey: [01:10:26] We learned what we could and could not say, and because we knew it was important to pass these bills we were like, “Okay fine, we won’t say it. Now it is a fee, it’s not a fine.” Or, yeah—I mean, we educated those people a lot because to them it’s another thing that just popped up on their plate that they have to do, but for our membership it was very real and very like… It was grounded in their experience of being homeless because it was just a stark reminder that private property trumped human rights.

Hickey: [01:11:03] So, we had to make the moral case and tie it to the political case about how it could be passed and why it would be beneficial for the city to pass it. Because every time we talked to HPD or Alicia Glen… You know, Vicki Been, who was the head of HPD at that time would always say, “Vacant property isn’t a problem. We think we only have a three percent vacancy rate. That’s what the federal government says, three percent vacancy rate.” But they only count certain things, and they don’t count every part of the city, and their methodology was wrong… Because we had done the count—Banking on Vacancy, years before and our methodology was like super tight. It was airtight, because we did it with Tom Angotti and our membership knew exactly how a successful methodology was carried out.

Lewis: [01:11:50] I think in Banking on Vacancy, only eleven percent of the vacant property that we identified had been identified by the city

Hickey: Yeah!

Lewis: citywide.

Hickey: And we—we, I mean members really addressed the gaps in the city’s methodology and the—kind of pointed to a working functional methodology, which was ours. And we often used that as ammunition to say, “This is why we need a more comprehensive count and accountability process for landlords who are warehousing their property intentionally and waiting for rezoning or whatever.”

Lewis: [01:12:31] So the three—tell, just for folks that don’t know, describe each of the three bills and what they would do.

Hickey: Intro 1034 was Tish James’ bill, I think. And that was a—that would force private landlords to register their vacant buildings. And if they failed to register, there would be a fee. And we had discussions with their office about what that fee would be like—you know, escalating fees for failure to register, escalating fees for how many units you had. So, if you were a smaller landlord with six units or something your fee would be less than if a landlord like Blackstone or Blackrock—Blackrock? I always forget. It is Blackstone because Blackrock is the private military company. So like, escalating fees and stuff like that.

Hickey: [01:13:26] So we had to work through that and that was really good. Those were really good conversations that we—had those conversations with ourselves, and we went back with some ideas and then we negotiated. Because, sometimes the political capital wasn’t there to ask for what we wanted. And we—like we, in housing meetings, we had these very frank conversations to say, “Okay, what we want is this, what we are willing to settle for is this, so what are we going to ask for?” Right? And kind of like playing political chess with ourselves in our minds to strategically get what we want. So that’s 1034.

Hickey: [01:14:03] 1036 was Ydanis Rodriguez’s bill. And I haven’t looked at these in so long,

Lewis: Sorry!

Hickey: so hopefully I’m getting them right. 1036 was Ydanis Rodriguez’s bill and that was a count. That was just a straight up count, counting vacant buildings. Not units, buildings. Because at some point Ydanis wanted to have—or did have an action in front of a vacant—partially vacant building and we were just like, “This doesn’t really address what we’re talking about/” But that would be a count and it’d be annual and HPD would do it and that would give us like a comprehensive analysis of what we had. That was the inventory.

Hickey: [01:14:37] And then Intro 1039, which was Jumaane’s bill was the public vacant buildings. So, what was owned by the city, or state authorities, or federal authorities... Because the state, you know—or the city even back from the ‘70s and ‘80s, they had to take over a lot of property because landlords abandoned them, and this goes into like the Third-Party Transfer Program and stuff like that where the city often gave these buildings away for one dollar or something like that. And we kind of wanted to put a stop to that. But we—but first, we needed to know what was in the public domain.

Hickey: [01:15:17] And that would be a count and then it would offer recommendations for how deeply affordable—like what kind of housing could be there. And that was land and buildings. So, yeah—so we’d be, pretty… You know, together the three bills would be a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the inventory, what the stock—what the housing—vacant property stock would be—housing, vacant buildings, and land. And basically, it would help us try to map towards what we could do with all this stuff. So we can say, “Okay ten thousand—we would just like, you know—divvy up this land amongst the homeless people who need it and say this land would support this many people living at this percent of AMI and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s what we wanted.

Lewis: [01:16:10] So, Jumaane Williams, when he still worked for Tenants and Neighbors, he was the ED, in 2006 was one of the people that participated in the street count

Hickey: Cool.

Lewis: for the Manhattan vacant property count. And then, when he became a councilmember, and we were doing a lot of disruptions in the city council,

Hickey: Oh, yeah.

Lewis: and I remember him being quoted in the paper. There was some article, maybe in Shelter Force or something, that… Of community organizers who became council members. And it was him and Brad Lander, and I can’t remember the third one. And he—he mentioned, I don’t know if he mentioned Picture the Homeless, but he said, “Some groups don’t do their due diligence—”

Hickey: Yeah, I remember that.

Lewis: and they just do disruptions and protests.” And our feelings were all hurt, and we were mad.

Lewis: [01:17:08] But he did—when he became chair of the Housing and Buildings Committee, had us do a hearing.

Hickey: Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: And you were the organizer then. Could you talk about how many people turned out for that hearing? We had waves and waves of people giving testimonies.

Hickey: I think we had—we a few hearings. But we… I mean not—we like packed that. And we had a lot of people give testimony. And I remember HPD—you know, HPD testified, and I think there was another—there was a few city agencies that testified. Even firefighters testified, Con Ed—no, not Con Ed…RS—the RSA Real Es—Rent Stabilization Association or REBNY [Real Estate Board of New York] testified, and Jumaane grilled them! Jumaane grilled everybody because he wanted to—he was coming from the assumption like, “Okay. The city says we have this information, let’s go off of that.”

Hickey: [01:18:10] And so he kept asking these questions like, “How much vacant land do we have?” Simple questions. And HPD never could answer it. And then he goes, he would say something like, “Okay, so the city says they don’t want these bills passed because we have this information, and yet you are here without this information. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

Hickey: [01:18:31] And, you know—going back to your due diligence thing, I think—I remember members talking to other members being like, “We shouldn’t have these actions just right away because we need to do our due diligence because…” They learned from that critique. They really did, which, you know—is incredible and just really smart of people to just be like, take a step backwards, let go of their ego—because some people had ego, and be like, “Yeah, he might be right in some regard.” But we did heavy turnout for those hearings, at least that one hearing that I’m thinking of. And we had a bunch of people testify, including Sam. Sam testified I think. But yeah, it was… You know, just like a lot of hearings, it was hours long, hours and hours, and we sat through it. We sat through every one.

Lewis: [01:19:23] And people had their Picture the Homeless t-shirts on...

Hickey: Oh yeah, always t-shirts.

Lewis: And hats.

Hickey: The light blue t-shirts, the hats, yeah.

Hickey: [01:19:43] I’m blurring together some of these—some of these hearings. Because I remember one hearing wasn’t in the main council chambers, it was off to a room on the side where it was really packed, and like we, some people couldn’t get in and stuff. But the main hearing that I’m—now that I’m thinking of it, was—it was in the main chambers, and yeah.  Jumaane did a really good job at just pressing those folks who said, “This isn’t a problem.” And then when he asked simple questions, they couldn’t answer them. But those were really—those were learning moments for people, because even for newer members who had never been to a council hearing, they realized like—you know, sometimes you actually do have to jump through a hoop to get to what you want. And if this is what we have to do to have an action, or to do this—who cares, let’s just do it.

Hickey: [01:20:31] Plus, it’s also really informative and it informs our argument, and it makes our argument stronger, and it builds leadership because people were writing their own testimony and they were testifying in front of politicians, which is really scary. It built confidence of people in public speaking and just formed solidarity amongst members. Because members went there of course to hear what was going on, but also in solidarity for people who were—solidarity with people who were testifying. Yeah.

Lewis: [01:20:58] I’ll never forget HPD not having answers to all these questions. And I guess they had come back? There had been a previous hearing

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: and they had been asked the questions and then it was like four months later and Jumaane got really mad and was like, “We already asked y’all this stuff.”

Hickey: yeah.

Lewis: And we had members there who were like, “We know things they don’t know.”

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: and had copies of Banking on Vacancy with them

Hickey: Yep.

Lewis: and then started passing—

Hickey: We gave them to everybody. Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: [01:21:26] And I think that, you know—even though folks embraced the mission of Picture the Homeless, that homeless people are experts, being in those spaces—for members to be in those spaces where HPD people with their titles and their whatever…

Hickey: Seventy thousand a year salary.

Lewis: Couldn’t answer basic questions.

Hickey: Yep.

Lewis: It was really powerful.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: [01:21:49] Picture the Homeless was one of the only groups to protest the rezoning

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: and you were there.

Hickey: Or Mandatory Inclusionary Housing [MIH] yeah.

Lewis: Mandatory Inclusionary Housing. Could you talk about that—that struggle?

Hickey: That was—yeah, that reminds me of the RAFA stuff where… So, at that time we were part of RAFA and RAFA was still alive. And, you know—de Blasio came out with his Housing New York Plan, which was a five-borough, ten-year plan to build or preserve two hundred thousand units of housing. And we were pissed off because it said out of those two hundred thousand units only about eight percent would be for extremely low-income households.

Hickey: [01:22:38] Now, any idiot could think and realize that the greatest need is amongst extremely low-income households and so why are we only divvying up eight percent of two hundred thousand units? And that begs the question of vacant property. We’re not factoring in those questions, so we were really pissed. And, part of RAFA—a lot of people thought, you know—that was not a great deal, but a good deal and so there was room for negotiation. And so, everybody was opposing it—at first, because everybody said, “This isn’t good enough. We need to enter in negotiation.” You know, weeks go by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Hickey: [01:23:19] And then it turns out that a select few groups with the most political power in New York—and that was Make the Road, that was—it wasn’t CASA, I learned later, when I thought it was. It was Make the Road, and it was NYCC, and it was maybe one other group—who sat down with de Blasio’s team and negotiated a deal where RAFA or whoever—I think it was assumed that if they agreed RAFA would agree—that if they negotiated then RAFA would, you know—sign on to Mandatory Inclusionary Housing.

Hickey: [01:24:00] Which was really important for de Blasio because he was still building himself as a progressive successfully—more successfully at that time. And so it was them and then they came out of negotiations with an agreement—not set in stone, like not enforceable—that they would agree—like these groups would agree to the plan if they were to have an assessment of the displacement factor, I think. So in these areas that were to be set to rezone, I think the agreement was, as I remember, that they would have to have a commitment from the city to do analyses on the potential displacement from Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, based on like racial and economic lines. That wasn’t a firm commitment. They didn’t have to do that. So, it wasn’t a binding commitment.

Hickey: [01:25:00] And then, RAFA said, “Okay! We’re on board now.” And then a lot of the groups in RAFA weren’t consulted and we were really pissed off, especially the smaller groups who were often more radical or often like, more socialist. And we just said, “No. How… Who did this? How did this happen!?” And then word got out that, you know—the Make the Roads of the world were in these closed-door meetings with the de Blasio administration, and we held like—a counterprotest. We kind of factioned off from RAFA and held a counterprotest the day of the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing vote, which was weeks, weeks, weeks later, if not months.

Hickey: [01:25:43] And that was us, that was Banana Kelly, that was Equality for Flatbush, it was CAAAV and a few other groups. But you know, some—a lot of the groups were just thinking to themselves, this—“We’re not going to fight this, but we’re pissed off and we’ll issue a statement, but we won’t fight.” And so we held a protest the day of the vote.

Lewis: In the council chambers.

Hickey: So we held a protest outside the council chambers and then we went in the council chambers, and we had planned an action with… It was Crown Heights Tenant Union, us, Raquel [Namuche], and I don’t remember… Raquel was part of Three Quarter Housing at that time, but I think she was there in a personal capacity—Equality for Flatbush, Banana Kelly. We decided that we were going to disrupt the council hopefully to the point where they would just end the session, because we didn’t want them to pass it. So we said, okay we’ll have three or four—I think it was four, four waves of disruption. So, we had eight people or something like that, and when they were about to vote—I remember looking at… DeBoRah was one of the first people who agreed to stand up and disrupt. And the disruption was a chant—maybe, “MIH vote no!” Or “City Council vote no. MIH has got to go!” Something like that.

Hickey: [01:27:07] And DeBoRah did that because I remember DeBoRah looking at me like, “Is it time? Is it time? Is it time?” And so they—she and somebody else stood up. They were asked to leave, because we were very clear, like only—like, “You are not going to get arrested. Only certain people would risk arrest.” So, DeBoRah was one of the people who did not want to get arrested. So we said, “When they ask you to leave don’t fight, go because then there’s no risk of arrest.” Then that continued. Thirty seconds later two other people got up, started shouting. And hopefully—at this point we were hoping that people would realize that this was going to be somewhat never-ending. Like, they wouldn’t get anything done. And then, that stopped and then another group did it.

Hickey: [01:27:54] And then at that point people were getting pissed. And even people like Brad Lander were looking up like—you know,

Lewis: Okay now...

Hickey: Yeah like, “Go home, okay you’ve had your fun.” And Melissa was obviously furious because she was the speaker of the council and she really wanted this to go forward because, you know—she was never the type to fight de Blasio really.

Hickey: [01:28:17] So after the third wave that’s when—so [laughs] I proposed, and I’ll take blame or responsibility for this, I proposed that we—the people who were willing to risk arrest would sit down and glue ourselves to each other. Because I did a similar action when I was in the UK, as part of this group Frack Off who was against hydraulic fracking, where people superglued themselves to each other around a fence, to prevent like a fracking machine from entering into this facility that would rehab it. And so we were just like, “No. Leave it broken because it doesn’t—we don’t need it.” So, that was really successful. That was a really successful action, it was really fun. And I proposed that we do the same thing here because it’s much harder to move five people who are superglued together, than one person when they’re not superglued—or five people when they’re not superglued, because then you could rip somebody off from the group and then arrest them, take them away. But when they’re superglued, you can’t do that. So, I said, “We should do this because it’s going to be impossible for them to do it.” And I remember people were like, “What the fuck? Superglue? Are you stupid? Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you?”

Hickey: [01:29:35] But at some point people were like, “Yeah, actually—whatever. If we’re willing to get arrested, we’re willing to get arrested.” Because, really the only way you can get superglue—you can undo the superglue—is to get a special solution that you have to administer very carefully because you can’t rip your hands apart—because it’s impossible or you will severely damage us and then that’s not going to look good for the city council. So we’re like, “Okay, we’re willing to do that.”

Hickey: [01:30:04] So, beforehand—I made it very clear that everybody had to open their superglue before we got there because we don’t have any time to not—we don’t have any time to open it to like make sure it works or whatever. Like, open your superglue now so you can just twist off the cap, put it in your hands, and then do it. Because we were going to put the superglue on our hands, link arms, and then our hands would be superglued while our arms were linked. And it was me, Jermaine [Jarquay Abdullah], Anna [Burnham], Raquel, and Joel from CHT, Crown Heights Tenant Union.

Hickey: [01:30:36] So we did that, and we were chanting and stuff like that and I remember Melissa was shouting at us, from below.

Lewis: What was she saying?

Hickey: You know like, “Get them out of here. You’ve had your fun. If you don’t do this, we’re going to remove you.” And then security came over and they removed us and then we shouted to security, “Don’t touch us we’re superglued!” And I remember security all of a sudden taking their hands away and like asking themselves, “What?”

Hickey: [01:31:06] And then later I found out that down below the city councilors were wondering what was taking so long. And at one point—it might’ve been Brad Lander, it might’ve been somebody else—they were whispering to each other, “Did they say superglue? I think they superglued themselves to…” Because you can’t superglue yourself to property then you’re going to be arrested for property damage. So you superglue yourself to yourself and you kind of fix that problem.

Hickey: [01:31:33] But! Anna Burnham, who was there, didn’t open her superglue fast enough and didn’t check it, so she was delayed, and she didn’t like... It was delayed and the superglue didn’t dry fast enough because she was waiting too long, and she didn’t open it beforehand. So, that was really successful. Because we stayed there for ten, fifteen minutes until they did rip our hands apart from each other. And it didn’t hurt too much, it hurt a little bit.

Hickey: [01:32:06] But, they took us out and I remember they sectioned off Jermaine because—I don’t know why. I mean…

Lewis: He’s a big Black man.

Hickey: Because he’s a big Black man, and I remember Imani [Henry] really focusing on Jermaine because Jermaine was getting like—not beaten up, but like roughed up. And I think he hit his head because he was being roughed up so much. But I remember they took us out and they didn’t arrest us. And I remember looking around and people were—like the press was there... And I was like, “I’m not going to talk to the press because I don’t do that.” And I think Raquel or Imani, or Anna were talking to the press.

Hickey: [01:32:47] And I remember looking around, I’m like, “Where’s Jermaine?” And Imani’s freaking out because Imani’s like, “They have the only Black person in this group, and we can’t get in and we need to do something.” And actually, I was just looking at the photos that I sent you because Jermaine was—you know, we didn’t know where he was because something happened to him. And we got word that he was being sent to a hospital because he hit his head and something happened to his heart—something happened to him, I forget.

Hickey: [01:33:19] But, at one point I was texting Jermaine—this was before I knew he was taken. And somebody texted back. But only when I realized that he was taken did… Then they, you know—was the text message sent to me. And I was like, “Well, if he’s arrested or detained, he’s not going to be able to text me, so this is a cop talking to me.” I don’t think it was. I just think I was like, paranoid. It turns out he was at a hospital for being roughed up a tiny bit. I think he had something with his heart or his head, I forget. But, it turns out you know—he was okay. He wasn’t hurt too bad. I just think he like, was bruised or something like that.

Hickey: [01:34:03] And the city council passed it that day. They were delayed but they didn’t stop the session, so they passed it. And, lo and behold, Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is a shitty program and I hope that haunts people who voted for it and who agreed to sign on to it. To his credit, Jumaane did not sign on to it. Neither did Inez Barron. They were the only two who did not sign on to it.

Lewis: There were two bills, right? The rezoning and MIH? Were there two?

Hickey: So MIH—I don’t remember. Because they—maybe they were voting on the East New York rezoning that day but MIH—that was a separate vote. And, oh! Also, part of the agreement I think, was a fourth option in MIH to go a little bit deeper and subsidize a little bit more housing.

Lewis: To forty percent.

Hickey: To forty percent or something like that. But again, these were optional. They weren’t mandatory.

Lewis: [01:35:01] Yeah, it went down to forty percent.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: Before that—New York Community for Change, as you mentioned, was part of the negotiation and remember they were threatening to do some kind of civil disobedience. And then when it went down to forty percent from sixty

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: they were like, “Okay. We won this.”

Hickey: [01:35:21] Yeah. Their membership would not qualify for forty percent of AMI. And that just goes to show the faults of nonmember led, huge organizations.

Lewis: I think it is fifty-three percent of people in East New York—living in East New York, are below forty percent of area median income. So, that’s almost—that over half the neighborhood does not qualify for the affordable housing.

Hickey: Yeah, it’s crazy.

Lewis: [01:35:48] You mentioned RAFA, Make the Road, and New York Community for Change being in this negotiation with de Blasio. But there’s a lot of—the groups that opposed it, why were more groups not—why didn’t more groups participate in this protest inside even if they couldn’t get arrested? There weren’t many people inside in that action.

Hickey: [01:36:18] No.. You know, I don’t know for certain, and I can only guess. I think part of it might be that they didn’t really take us serious enough to participate because we were one of the groups you know—protesting it and sort of organizing that. So, it was a bunch of smaller groups trying to organize a counterprotest. And I think some of the other groups were just like, “These folks will never have an impact like an NYCC would or something like that.” And I also think they thought it was inevitable that it would pass so they just thought resistance was futile. But I remember talking to—who’s in charge of GOLES? What’s her name?

Lewis: Damaris [Reyes]?

Hickey: Damaris. And she was really unhappy, but I don’t think GOLES turned out for the counterprotest or anything like that. But I remember talking to her and her being pretty unhappy. But also, GOLES doesn’t have a huge membership, as well. I mean they can’t turn out a whole lot of people.

Hickey: [01:37:37] and folks, you know—like Met Council, it just wasn’t a fight they were super invested in, I don’t think. But Met Council was there that day. I remember they were there. Ava [Farkas] was there. But in terms of what they’re doing now, for example—like, leading the rent law stuff. Their thing is the rent law, every year. Their thing is the rent laws and everything else is kind of like, subsidiary and they don’t really invest as much time and effort. Which, you know—the rent laws are important, but it is what it is.

Lewis: The rent laws—if you don’t have a house…

Hickey: Exactly. Exactly.

Lewis: [01:38:17] I want to switch up a little bit and ask you about a member that I know you worked with really closely, Donna?

Hickey: Donna Morgan. Mm-Hmmmm.

Lewis: And the issue—as an organizer and organizing with folks that are in shelter. I remember Donna got like a shelter transfer—an overnight shelter transfer.

Hickey: Yeah, she got a couple of those.

Lewis: [01:38:48] What—what were some of the challenges as an organizer specifically organizing folks who were homeless? That, reflecting back on that, what were some of the things that worked and what were some of the challenges?

Hickey: I mean the challenges were manyfold. Just keeping in contact with folks on a very real, day-to-day basis. One day their phone number might work and the other day—the next day, it might not work. And then who knows—you may not ever see them again, you know? Because you don’t know where they are or if they’re in a shelter you can’t get there or if you send mail to them it’s never going to reach them, which was so often the case. You know, we often did mailers to invite folks to new membership orientations and stuff—who we met in shelters. And you know, I don’t know what the percentage was, but at least fifty percent were sent back as “cannot find the sender”, or “send back to sender” or whatever it was. So, just keeping in contact with folks.

Hickey: [01:39:59] And you know, going back to Donna—meeting people’s real immediate needs and connecting that to the political direction and mission of Picture the Homeless. Because, a lot of the times—I think Donna was one example where I invested a lot of time into her specific situation, where she had a LINC voucher and I was looking for housing with her and I was sending her leads and I was you know, advocating on her behalf to the city to extend her subsidy often when it lapsed. And that stuff doesn’t serve our campaigns necessarily—but in doing so you build a relationship, and you build a lot of trust, and you build—I mean yeah, you build the trust that’s necessary to carry on the political work and you have to intentionally redirect that into our work.

Hickey: [01:40:58] So, she may not have come to every housing meeting. She came to a bunch, but she may not have come to every housing meeting. But when it came time to talk to the press about the failures of LINC or the failures of temporary subsidies, which was a huge thing for the press for a year. Like New York 1, PIX 11—they were often doing these exposés, these exclusives. Because Sam did a really good job of building relationships with people like Jay Toole who was on PIX11 or whatever it was—or New York Times and Nikita Stewart... When they needed a story about the failures of these problems, if I didn’t do that work with Donna, we wouldn’t have had—they wouldn’t have come to us and we would’ve been like, “Sorry we don’t have anybody.”

Hickey: [01:41:40] So even if it didn’t serve… Like even if we didn’t have a campaign—a targeted campaign about temporary subsidies, that still served the mission and still served the work because Donna was talking. Like, I remember going through the photos that I was sending you. Donna was on camera for this press thing that happened [snaps fingers] like that because oftentimes it did. They called us like, “Can we come today at 3:00 p.m. and can we interview somebody?” Like, “Jesus fucking Christ I hate when you do this. But yes we can.” And I remember calling Donna and people like Donna and they were just like, “Yeah, if I can tell my story I’ll be there in twenty minutes and we’ll prep.”

Hickey: [01:42:18] I remember Donna was on camera, but she didn’t want to show her face because she was afraid of retaliation. So they lit behind her and kept her face shadowed. And at the end of the day, you know—she was telling a very good, real story about the failures of LINC and that helped push our other campaign work up because then we could say, “Look at our member who did such a great job on this. This isn’t the solution. This is the solution.” And then that’s when we did a lot of the social media stuff and that got a lot of traction because we effectively managed the narrative around the failures of the system versus the policy solutions that we were talking about and were working towards. So, but then—still it was a challenge spending hours and hours and hours dealing with these problems that didn’t necessarily have to do with campaign stuff.

Hickey: [01:43:13] Thinking about another member who was active towards later in—in my years… He was really—he was an artist. Like he didn’t really—he didn’t come to the organization as politicized necessarily. He didn’t come to the organization believing in the mission. He came to the organization because he wanted a place to chill out. To be—to, you know—he lived in the shelter, and he wanted a place to chill out. He wanted a place to just not have to deal with anybody. He was quiet, he kept to himself. You know who I’m talking about?

Lewis: Joey?

Hickey: Joel.

Lewis: Joel. Joel keeps sending me Facebook friend requests.

Hickey: [01:43:52] So Joel—he was quiet, and he didn’t really want to do much. But slowly after having some one on ones with him and just like chatting with him, you—I found out he wanted to be an artist. And he was amazing at graffiti and stuff like this. So, that’s when we created a new campaign banner for the Housing Not Warehousing Act. I was like, “Joel, this is perfect for you. Would you want to do this?” He’s like, “Hell yeah! I want to do this. I want to do this.”

Hickey: [01:44:23] I was like, “Cool! Just like—as long as it’s legible, do it.” Because oftentimes his graffiti wasn’t legible, because graffiti sometimes isn’t. But that was something for him to do. And I remember we built up a bunch of trust and I had a vision for where he was going in the organization because we—we needed to like uproot our graphics game and our visual graphics game. And I just thought, you know—this is why Joel can be here. This is what he’s here for because he needs an expressive—like a creative, expressive outlet and we can provide that for him and while serving our campaigns.

Hickey: [01:45:04] And I remember during one of these actions I gave him some money to go get some stuff, like supplies—because I didn’t have any time. And he didn’t show up again and it was twenty bucks. And it wasn’t, you know—it’s not like I’m mad I lost twenty bucks. I’m mad that he broke the trust that I had with him. And little things like that made me question—or like, question my trust in people, which sucks, and I hate that feeling because just because something bad happens doesn’t mean you should blow it up, but it’s kind of a human thing to do.

Hickey: [01:45:42] But leaning on—like even leaning on  relationships when you’ve built relationships—that’s really hard because even solid folks like Al [Williams] or Charmel who were the most solid of the solid, right? Sometimes you ask them to do something, and you prepped, and they flake out or then they come to the thing fucked up. And you built these relationships with these people, and you think to yourself, “How—why would you do this? To us, to this organization, to me? You know, we put trust in you.”

Hickey: [01:46:19] But that’s what you deal with when you deal with folks who don’t have a stable home, who need some way to deal with the shit that they’re dealing with—either, lack of sleep, you know… They don’t have anywhere else to go... Like, you’re dealing with all these things, and you trust people and sometimes your trust is betrayed. But most of the time it isn’t. But successes, you know—I guess every bad little thing that happens is also kind of a success. It shows a success.

Hickey: [01:46:54] Like, I still… If I saw Joel today… He came back one time. I don’t hold a grudge, it’s just like, “Joel, continue what you were doing, you know? Start working on that mural you wanted to do. Start doing this. Like, water under the bridge dude, just get back to it.” You know? Or like Jorge—you know, Joel and Jorge were really close. Jorge often—he was so flaky, so, so flaky. And I started relying on him a little bit more and more because I wanted to get him more involved. And again, he’s very much involved with like, graphics and aesthetics. And we wanted him to redesign the calendar and keep up with the calendar of events and stuff—because we had stuff going on every day, all day. And none of the staff had time to spend an hour to talk to every single person and say, “What do you have on this day? What do you have on this day?” But Jorge did. But again, Jorge—you know, fucked up a few big times. And… Yeah.

Hickey: [01:47:56] So, the good thing was you build these relationships with these people who never had done something like this before. You’re—they have this creative outlet for their work and the things that they’ve been wanting to do in their lives, but nobody’s given them the opportunity to shine and you’re giving them that opportunity. But at the same time, it’s like a risk, you know—building these relationships and then leaning on people a little bit too much. So yeah—good mixed with the bad. It’s always like a coin toss sometimes. [Smiles] But you just can’t let it drag you down because still like Jorge and Joel—I’d vouch for them to some degree.

Lewis: I see Joel in the neighborhood.

Hickey: I’ve seen him once.

Lewis: He’s around here

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: somewhere.

Lewis: [01:48:44] You had mentioned earlier with the Housing Not Warehousing Act, all the fun actions.

Hickey: Mmmmm!

Lewis: So, what are some fun actions that come to mind?

Hickey: We had… So, the summer of 2017 we had an action every few weeks, I think. So, there’s was one time where my friend Ingrid, she was working out of the Laundromat Project, and she was—like her task as part of the Laundromat Project was to bridge art and community and protests and activism. And we like came together and she’s like, “You guys are working on this vacant property stuff. That’s really cool because we’re based in East Harlem and there’s a lot of vacant property. Like, how can we support each other?”

Hickey: [01:49:32] And so, they—we together, we.. From like—we did the end-to-end planning with Ingrid and this other guy; I forget his name. But we developed this kind of like, day of action where we started out in Marcus Garvey [Park]. We had this event where people were making the banner, themselves. So, it was—and there was like different stalls around about activism and art and East Harlem and stuff like that.

Hickey: [01:50:01] But the day’s big activity was going to be a march from vacant property to vacant property and we spent weeks planning. I remember us going to where they were located in this school, I think… And, I mean it was just like a very powerful process of members and artists—but Ingrid was also an organizer—members and artists and organizers working together to create this really fun creative day of action where—it wasn’t just given to people. People had input, on the day of. So, like kids were helping us fill out—like paint this banner and I mean that was pretty cool.

Hickey: [01:50:43] And we educated folks in the community [thank you] about a problem that they see but maybe they didn’t have the words to put it into a policy yet. And that day we did that and then at each point of the vacant property. we had a member do something. So, DeBoRah led a prayer one time... She was dressed in her, you know—chaplain outfit? Is that it?

Lewis: Mm-Hmmmm.

Hickey: She was dressed in her chaplain outfit, and she led a prayer, which was so beautiful and so powerful.

Hickey: [01:51:13] And then Freddy, a new member who I was really psyched about because he had all this energy—he met us at an action at the New York Public Library with VOCAL—or some other people. It was part of the CPR [Communities United for Police Reform] stuff. He met us at an action, and he was like, “I want to get involved.” And we never lost touch and we—there’s a very clear trajectory of his leadership, from start to end. And I say end—you now, I don’t even know if he’s there anymore.

Hickey: [01:51:44] But his thing was—he loves performing and singing. And at that time in my organizing life, I was very good at making space for people’s passions in our actions and in our work. So, Freddy wanted to sing, I was like, “Well Freddy we’re having all these actions. Why don’t you make a piece and sing around vacant property or homelessness or whatever?” And he did. And he—it took a couple weeks, but he developed this like, platform. He developed—like he wrote a poem and then he sang a song at a piece of vacant property.

Hickey: [01:52:21] And meanwhile, we had a marching band—the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, helping us march from place to place. And then—yeah, that was during the summer where we were zip tying our wishes, our hopes, and dreams of what each vacant lot could be—whether it be housing, whether it be a school, you know? If there was a food desert people very clearly wrote, “We need another supermarket.” Because in East Harlem the Pathmark closed down and people wrote, “We need another supermarket.” It was just a ground-up way of doing kind of, community planning and stuff like that—mixed with art and culture and really tapping into the skills and the passions that homeless people have that are often ignored in capitalist society. So that was really good.

Hickey: [01:53:08] And that summer we just had action after action doing these visioning sessions. Because, I remember I wanted to do something like that when I saw South Bronx CLT folks do a visioning session outside of the property that they wanted. But they didn’t zip tie stuff. I think they just like, has a—you know, they were just like talking with each other. But I was like, “No we should do that because fences are eyesores, right? And it just makes you feel like you’re in a prison so let’s beautify it a little bit.”

Hickey: [01:53:36] And I remember Ingrid and I made a flyer and Ingrid went to wheat-paste all around East Harlem on mailboxes and shit like that. And it was a beautiful flyer. And I—oh yeah! And I got a friend that I… I remember I met her in college, and I’d spoken to her once and I met her…I like talked to her on Facebook, I’m like, “Listen, I saw your post that you wanted to do more art stuff. We’re having this action—can you do this thing on homelessness?” She’s like, “Yeah, cool.” And she made it and we—Ingrid wheatpasted this flyer, beautiful poster flyer, all over East Harlem after, you know—going back and forth between members and the artists and stuff. She just sent us a final copy and it was amazing. And you know—that was the summer of our visioning sessions. It was really cool—very pretty, very aesthetically pleasing, very creative and I think each time we had a really good weather, which was great.

Lewis: [01:54:34] How do you think you have changed as a person because of your experience working at Picture the Homeless?

Hickey: I’m much more confident in my organizing abilities. You know, when I got there, I didn’t have a lot of confidence and through failing and through succeeding and just through members doing what they do, I got a lot more confidence in my organizing abilities. And I think… I think more strategically about things. Things are way more clear to me in terms of getting what we want as part of an organizing strategy and campaign. So, it just developed my organizing abilities a lot more.

Hickey: [01:55:27] You know, building relationships with people… I think I’ve always been decent at building relationships with people but not in—not on like, a roadmap towards political action. So, I can, you know—I could talk to anybody, and I could just talk shit with people. But there’s a difference between talking shit with people and just meeting or whatever, and then looping them into political action—political activity and really having intentional conversations that get to what move people and then looping that in with political activity—you know, through one-on-ones and stuff.

Hickey: [01:56:06] I think… I don’t have as much time for top-down leadership because I think the way that our membership worked was… It didn’t restore my faith; it cemented my belief that bottom-up organizing is the only effective way that we’re going to change society at large. And I never really viewed—like I knew… You know, obviously Picture the Homeless—we had our Picture the Homeless goals, we had our campaigns, but I never really viewed what I was doing as like a “Picture the Homeless thing.” I always viewed—because of the nature of our membership, where they dipped in and out and sometimes they moved out of state… I always thought that what we did in Picture the Homeless was developing leadership, just homeless leadership—just full stop. Not like Picture the Homeless leadership—but homeless leadership.

Hickey: [01:57:00] And I always thought Picture the Homeless wasn’t conceited in knowing that what we’re doing is forming building blocks of a new society sort of thing. And I still try and carry that into my organizing work today where—like, groups come and go. Right—like organizations—they start up, they fail. And if you just tie people to an organization, once that organization stops what happens to the person if they’re so tied to that organization? You have to build something that transcends organizational boundaries and I think Picture the Homeless really did that. So I think I try and let that inform my organizing now.

Hickey: [01:57:45] [Long exhale] Yeah, and… I don’t know. It changed me in so many small ways. Just the way that I relate to people, the way it shaped my analysis of housing and homelessness in the world. You know, oftentimes in these housing discussions, homelessness isn’t talked about, it’s not mentioned. It’s only mentioned as like, “We have to prevent this.” Like, “Oh homeless people…’ It’s used as like, a political tool.

Lewis: Boogeyman.

Hickey: [01:58:16] Boogeyman… Or like, “We don’t want this to happen to people, therefore we have to fight for stronger rent laws.” But they—those same people, those same organizers, they don’t know how to talk to homeless people. They don’t know how to confront their limits—like, their philosophical limits, their organizing limits where… Yeah, they can organize tenants, they can knock on doors. But if you put them in Picture the Homeless, would they be able to organize? And part of me thinks no—because there’s a limit to what they’d be able to do. Because I’ve seen it! I’ve seen like—they don’t know how to relate to homeless people who don’t have time for bullshit. Our members did not have time to beat around the bush. It’s like, “I am sleeping in the fucking street. I’m not going to skirt around the issue. I’m not going to demand what you think we could get. You know, I’m…

Hickey: [01:59:12] And this goes back to your question, you know—what have I learned. I’ve learned that you have to ask for the most radical thing. You should never limit yourself in terms of what you think you can get. Because, you know—if people in Caracas did that then they wouldn’t be where they’re at. If the people in Berlin thought that way, they wouldn’t be having this huge referendum on expropriating private property. Because we—what we need to do is, you know—challenge these whole facets of the American economy and American society. And I think our membership was pretty clear in not compromising where we didn’t need to compromise, or where we shouldn’t compromise.

Lewis: [01:59:56] You remind me of this episode with Genghis [Khalil Muhammad] [GKM] and Right to the City and they kept having all this strategic planning stuff—which you know, you need. But he got impatient with it. And they were going to hold off on making any decisions about campaign work—for six months. And Genghis stood up and was like, “I’m going to be dead in six months.”

Hickey: Yeah. Genghis was sometimes terrifying.

Lewis: And he would challenge Picture the Homeless staff—and members in shelters

Hickey: Yep.

Lewis: that we should sleep on the train one night a week.

Hickey: I remember that.

Lewis: [02:00:42] And so, what you’re saying about the urgency—I think, is really crucial. And I think it also speaks to the importance of folks in those situations to have power within the organization and not just—you know, being asked to carry signs, and...

Hickey: Yeah—"don’t talk about us, talk with us.” You know…

Lewis: Do you have anything that you want to share that we haven’t covered?

Hickey: I mean, we talked Gaining Ground, cluster sites, Housing Not Warehousing, CLT stuff. I don’t think so.

Lewis: [02:01:28] I guess one final question. Why do you think that Picture the Homeless is important to the housing movement? You’ve kind of alluded to that but—directly.

Hickey: In terms of any issue, if it doesn’t start with like, the most marginalized people who are often left out of those conversations and decisions then it’s just going to end up as a failure. And I think grounding our organization—grounding the organization in homelessness, which is, you know—as you said, is kind of the boogeyman and the thing that nobody else wants to talk about or organize.

Hickey: [02:02:14] And I know when Picture the Homeless was founded people told you, “It can’t be done…” Whatever, whatever.

Lewis: Yeah.

Hickey: But you proved that it can be done very successfully, and our members prove that homeless people aren’t anything like what we’ve been fed our entire lives, we—meaning like, the American people. You know… Yeah, and when people talk about the bottom-up organizing in terms of like socioeconomic status and marginalization, homeless people are quite damn near the bottom.

Hickey: [02:02:49] And of course there are intersections between LGTBQ runaway youth who are homeless, and trans folks who are homeless and there are all these intersections of oppression, but a lot of the times what they have in common is that they’re homeless. And—you know, I guess also I’ve learned and why it’s important, it’s like—sectioning off homeless people into groups and categories often serves to—you know, it’s divisive. And when you craft policies based on that way of thinking then… You know, we’ve seen it. Then homeless folks who aren’t getting the benefits of that policy are like, “Well, you—person who’s getting this policy I don’t like you anymore, and now I’m going to fight for me. And it’s—the state has done that pretty successfully I would say, which is a shame.

Hickey: [02:03:50] And I think we—Picture the Homeless has tried to counter that narrative of like, “Yeah, if we divide society into neat little sections then our policy will be really neat and then finally, we’ll end homelessness.” Well, we see that’s not true and in fact it’s done a lot of damage to like, movement thinking and movement organizers where we think that we can house homeless people with AIDS, and then we’ll be fine. Or, we’ll house veterans and we’ll be fine. Or, you know—single mothers and then we’ll be fine. It’s like—the problem isn’t divided into these neat little sections. It’s very messy, and we have to embrace those differences but not craft policies around those differences, per se. And PTH I think, counters that narrative pretty well.

Hickey: [02:04:38] And you know—obviously the member leaders who are leading the work and in the press and speaking for themselves and… You know, there’s no other organization in the city, I see—that does that really, or even the country. Then again, I don’t know as much—what’s happening outside of New York City.

Hickey: [02:05:03] You know, membership in a lot of groups are often used to serve an end. But I don’t—I never felt like our membership was being used, because our membership was—first of all, really strong. And if we did something stupid, people like GKM would be like, “What the fuck is your problem?”

Lewis: You work for me.

Hickey: Exactly! It’s like, “You work for me.” And… We were held accountable—to them. We were accountable to them, and they were accountable to us. It was like this shared accountability that was—you know, I think was healthy! A lot of the times there were unhealthy moments for sure, but that is how it should be. You should be directly accountable to membership and if you’re member led, which we were. And it was, you know…

Hickey: [02:05:57] I don’t think I ever spoke to the press! And I don’t think my face was ever in the paper, and I don’t think… And that’s not an organizer’s job! Your job is not to be in the paper, it’s to build up the leadership of the people you’re organizing and make them realize their leadership—like if they don’t realize it already. I think we did a pretty damn good job at that.

Lewis: [02:06:21] There was a… You mentioned Donna and that New York Times article that Nikita Stewart did, and there’s a beautiful picture that was in the article of Donna—like a profile,

Hickey: Yep.

Lewis: and all the buildings around her.

Hickey: I remember.

Lewis: And she’s working, she has a job.

Hickey: That was a big thing for them, yeah.

Lewis: And you know, there were—I think, thirty-three percent of homeless people are working.

Hickey: Or have at least one family member who’s working full time, yeah.

Lewis: And Donna, as you had mentioned previously, didn’t want her face to be shown. And then that article, right? With her—you know like,

Hickey: Yep.

Lewis: in the middle of, kind of—metaphorically Manhattan, surrounded by all these buildings, but none of them have a place for her to live in.

Hickey: Yeah, exactly.

Lewis: It was so powerful.

Hickey: Yeah.

Lewis: Much more powerful than if it had been a picture of you.

Hickey: Yeah, of course and...

Lewis: or anybody else.

Hickey: [02:07:18] And also thinking of—you know, just going back in the photos that I was sending you, Jose [Rodriquez], who we haven’t really talked about... Jose was [long pause] a remarkable person. He is a remarkable person. He came to the organization a little bit meek-ish, like, very quiet—wanted to keep to his own. He’s like, “Can I help in any way? I’m homeless.” But you know… Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…. Very soft spoken. And he was at the front desk for a little bit.

Hickey: [02:07:47] And he took on leadership that was… If you saw him in the beginning, you would never think that he would be able to do some of the things that he did. He came in, you know—not knowing what we do at all and within a few months he could speak on the issues better than anybody I had seen—in a very simple way, like not complicated at all. I remember he did the video of the Housing Not Warehousing Act with those few folks, and he brought those folks around to East Harlem and talked about each lot, what it meant, like how many units it could hold…

Hickey: [02:08:21] And he was really accountable to people, he wasn’t flaky… So, yeah—I mean, Jose… I don’t even think I mentioned him at all, but Jose was like my go-to person for a lot of things for a couple years. And the Housing Not Warehousing Act was his baby, you know? He was the person talking to council members. He was the person… He didn’t like being in the spotlight but behind closed doors—like one-on-one interactions, he really shined. But in terms of speaking to crowds at actions and stuff he needed a lot of support. And we worked on that, and I think he overcame a lot of hurdles and stuff like that. But, you know—like taking a lead, taking point on the video for the Housing Not Warehousing Act… You know, I—we did so much stuff for the Housing Not Warehousing Act, that he was behind.

Hickey: [02:09:12] Yeah—and we got him housing too, you know? We helped him get housing and that’s a huge part of the work that we don’t often talk about just because it’s… I don’t know, we should. Like, eighteen people got housing out of the 941 stuff—eighteen households got housing. We got Donna housing, we got Tahesha housing, we got Jose housing. It’s not like we’re just fighting and not getting people housing. Like, we’re doing as much as we can and we’re leveraging the relationships that we can leverage. And yeah… It’s just—we did so much good shit. [Smiles]

Lewis: Alright Ryan Hickey, thank you so much.

Hickey: Thanks for having me again.
 
[END OF INTERVIEW]