Building Occupation

This project was produced in collaboration with Picture The Homeless, a homeless-led community organization based in the Bronx. Picture The Homeless wanted to bring attention to the contradictions and failures of Mayor Bloomberg’s five-year plan to end homelessness by making visible the thousands of city and bank-owned properties sitting vacant in NYC.

For this intervention, members of Picture The Homeless occupied the inside of a boarded-up vacant bank-owned building, while Not An Alternative made their message visible to supporters and members of the media on the outside.

Our strategy involved appropriating an ad campaign sponsored by the local Business Improvement District (BID) which encouraged investment in the community. We costumed as a construction crew and installed painted signs that looked very similar to the official ads found on lampposts throughout the neighborhood. When re-contextualized on a homeless building occupation, the ad slogans (e.g. “El Barrio means a place to call home”) took on a new meaning.