Four Narratives of Anti-Poverty Community Mobilization:

Lower East Side Collective, Housing Works, the New York City AIDS Housing
Network Human Rights Watch, and the More Gardens! Coalition
Humanity and Society: Journal of the Association of Humanist Sociology. 33(4):317-340

By Benjamin Shepard, PhD
Assistant Professor
Human Services Department
New York City College of Technology/ City University of New York
300 Jay Street N401
Brooklyn, NY 11201
bshepard@citytech.cuny.edu























Abstract
The impact of major political and economic transformations was felt first in urban
neighborhoods. Yet the ways community organizations responded suggests a future
global city that is open, egalitarian, safe, just, and joyous. Neighborhoods and their
members sometimes manage to thrive as innovative community organizers fight
displacement, organize immigrants, build syringe exchanges, plant gardens, and ride
bikes through streets in an example of what a healthy neighborhood can be. This article
describes how four distinct groups--The Lower East Side Collective, Housing Works, the
New York City AIDS Housing Network, and the More Gardens! Coalition--struggled
against social and economic threats to build effective coalitions, caring communities and
create wins. The Four Narratives serve as best practice examples of contemporary
community organizing practices. From these examples, a seven-stage model for moving
an organizing campaign is delineated.
Personal Reflective Statement I am profoundly committed to the work of the groups
listed. I have worked, played, committed civil disobedience, achieved wins and built
community with the groups listed in the case examples. Faced with an ongoing cultural
narrative that suggests community organizing is a relic of the past, my experiences with
the four groups profiled informs my view that there is always room for organizers if they
are willing to be flexible, advance a workable claim, compile research, communicate a
message in a creative fashion, mobilize to push a message, look for long term solutions,
and play to sustain a campaign. With a flexible application of these ingredients, they can
still create wins. My experiences with such organizing campaigns inspired this paper.





Four Narratives of Anti-Poverty Community Mobilization: Lower East Side
Collective, Housing Works, the New York City AIDS Housing Network Human
Rights Watch, and the More Gardens! Coalition
Globalization, neoliberalism, and the global war on drugs have displaced low-
income populations around the world. The revolving door of incarceration (fueled by
three strike get tough on crime policies), prison, and parole make jail a perverse housing
of last resort for many. Toxic dumping, brown fields, and new patterns of redlining have
also limited suitable space for housing and public use. Moreover, public spaces are
increasingly subject to privatization as global capital transforms the most innocuous of
neighborhood spaces into commodities. Over and over, the impact of major political and
economic transformations has been felt first in local urban neighborhoods.
Yet, the ways community organizations respond to these threats suggests a future
global city that could be open, egalitarian, safe, just, and even joyful. Despite the threats
they face, neighborhoods often manage to thrive as innovative community organizers
fight displacement, organize immigrants, build syringe exchanges, plant gardens, and ride
bikes through the streets to exemplify what a healthy neighborhood can be. This article
considers how four distinct anti-poverty groups, The Lower East Side Collective,
Housing Works, the New York City AIDS Housing Network, and More Gardens!
Coalition, struggled against a series of social and economic threats to build coalitions,
communities and win political battles.
Barriers and Possibilities
Organizers face formidable obstacles. In 1964, Marcuse alluded to a merging of
mass media, corporate power, and the blurring of social welfare into militarization. The
ingredients of this merger - corporatism, concentration of wealth, increased state police




powers are familiar enough. Here, mass media, public opinion, and market pressure
created a coercive context that blurred opposition, and further eroded the line between
welfare and military operations. Over the final decades of the 20
th
century, the policy
landscape in the U.S. shifted from an emphasis on public welfare to policing (Davis
1995). For example, the prioritization of law and order over human needs during
Hurricane Katrina is a recent example of this long-term trend.
The foundations of this shift in social policy can be traced to the late 1960s and
early 1970s. By 1968, years of race riots had created fertile ground for a political shift.
By linking crime and race, Richard Nixon mobilized an anti-crime coalition. Its aim was
to justify an ongoing expansion of federal authority under the guise of the War on Drugs,
which thrived at the expense of other public services. With each election cycle,
politicians fanned the flames over the danger of social outsiders, as fear over urban public
spaces diverted attention away from the real problems and urban spaces became
battlegrounds (Hall et al. 1978; Shepard 2007).
By the 1990s, three strikes, get tough, and broken windows policing
strategies found favor across the country (Schichor 1997). By 2000, well over six million
American citizens were incarcerated, on parole or probation, or under other forms of
police supervision (Morone 2003).

Displacement followed, social controls increased,
income inequalities widened, and the concentration of wealth among the rich congealed
into a contemporary form of primitive accumulation, described as primitive globalization
(Sites, 2003). Within this cycle, inequalities continued to increase; instability grew and
communities often became fragmented.






However, this did not always happen. The four case studies presented here
acknowledge that neighborhoods and community groups face immense problems in the
era of corporate globalization (Moody 2007; Vitale 2008). Each narrative is rooted in the
Lower East Side (LES) of New York. The story of late 20
th
century New York City and
its LES is often viewed as a narrative of globalist transformation and as a story of
community fragmentation (Sites 2003). Yet this very process of impoverishment and
dislocation has simultaneously inspired a series of creative responses and modes of
activist engagement. While recent studies of economic and social transformations
effectively describe the citys bifurcated resurgence (Abu-Lughod 1994; Mele 2000),
many ignore how urban activists creatively resisted or transcended these trends. This is a
problem. It is all too easy to ignore the possibilities and innovative modes of urban
struggle and give in to global boosterism or provincial cynicism.
The Four Narratives of Community Mobilization are counter narratives that
highlight ways to challenge globally linked, local inequalities. Each represents an
effective form of community mobilization in the era of corporate globalization. Fisher
(1994) suggests that while contemporary activism may not be as glamorous as the
golden era of US activism, it is perhaps smarter and often more effective. These
stories, compiled from a purposeful sample of life story interviews with New York
activists, confirm this outlook (Patton, 2001). Each describes a mobilization aimed at
creating and preserving spaces for regular people. The narratives represent different
perspectives of community life and organizing including: labor, housing, services, and
public space. The narratives are compiled following extended case methodology (Yin




1994). Because they are primarily supported by recollections of social actors involved,
they are narratives.
These narratives offer images of how regular people can stake a claim and build
the components of healthy communities, affordable housing, and community spaces.
Many LES squats and community gardens that were born of its spirit of community
engagement remain despite threats to the neighborhood (Mele, 2000; Spitzer 2002). This
is specifically because organizers fought to protect them The Four Narratives highlight
some of the sparks that propel this activism.
While globalization from above is seen as monolithic, opposition abounds, fueled
by a craving for authentic community democracy (Brechner et al, 2000). Yet, without
community involvement, globalization from above will only become more pronounced.
Fortunately, in a number of sectors community organizers continue to compile research
and provide data, preach, scream and pressure targets to create change. These projects
share a willingness to lay out a clear campaign target, be flexible in their tactics, mobilize
their constituents, use street theatrics and other innovative means to advance their
campaign goals, outline legal strategies and infuse their campaigns with as much fun as
possible. In this respect the Four Narratives present a snapshot of just what effective
urban-based activism can look and feel like.
From the Lower East Side to the Greater East Side
The East Village of Manhattan stretches north from East Houston Street and
eastward from Broadway toward 14
th
Street. Since the late 1970s, this area has also been
referred to as Alphabet City, due to its lettered avenues (Mele 2000).

One description
of the neighborhood seems to remain constant: the East Village has become a model case




of urban gentrification. The literature on the areas history and gentrification is extensive
(Abu-Lughod 1994; Smith 1996; Mele 2000; Sites 2003).

While many of these studies
concentrate on the loss of community sovereignty to market forces and gentrification,
few consider how competing groups of urban actors have successfully brokered
compromises that allowed them to survive. The Four Narratives provided herein
attempts to offer an antidote to this trend.
There is no denying that real estate pressures have displaced countless community
spaces in New Yorks East Village. Blackout Books on Avenue A was forced to move
out of its storefront and relocate in the less accessible lobby of the Theater for a New
City, before it was eventually evicted from there. The Lower East Side Harm Reduction
Center on Avenue C was forced out of the East Village and into Chinatown. A hip,
upscale bar, replaced the Crowbar, a sex space located on East 10th Street. Over and
over the Lower East Sides difference has been repackaged as a highly marketable and
sanitized neighborhood, without many of its previous rough edges (Zukin and Kosta,
2004).
Still, in many ways, the East Village has thrived as a somewhat anachronistic,
perhaps even utopian, experience in community building in the midst of hostile market
forces. The neighborhood continues to occasionally produce social relations and
representational spaces of opposition despite market pressures from corporate
globalization, gentrification, the increase of hip cultural capital, and official dismay.
While use values have found themselves at odds with the exchange values that can be
realized in real estate throughout the East Village, the rules of community and collective
consumption have occasionally sustained themselves despite the pressures of the rules of




individual consumption, which turns urban spaces into commodities (Login and Molotch
1987). Such a politics of community occasionally thwarts the politics of fear and panic,
propelling the logic of corporate globalization and the Revanchist City (Smith, 1996).
Giuliani-ism and Quality of Life Politics
With his election in 1993, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani initiated a series
of efforts to improve the city and enforce quality of life policies that facilitated
middle-class renewal of mixed-income neighborhoods such as the East Village (McArdle
and Erzen 2001;Vitale 2008). For example, in 1999, he announced plans to sell off
dozens of Lower East Side Community Gardens. He taunted garden supporters saying,
This is a free market economy: welcome to the era after communism (Kifner 1999,
B3). But community members cried foul, noting that there was a cost to the mayors
policies.
The mayors efforts were largely a response to anxiety, which had overwhelmed
the ways New Yorkers viewed public space during the early 1990s (Didion 1992).
Within this context, the mayor skillfully played on this feeling to deploy a series of
narratives of moral panic related to mugging, race, and sex to justify hitherto
unacceptable encroachments into public space in the name of redevelopment and public
safety (Shepard 2007). Giulianis tactical manipulation of social anxieties was consistent
with dominant urban political thinking. As geographer Neil Smith explains: In the
1990s an unabated litany of crime and violence, drugs and unemployment, immigration
and depravity, all laced through with terror, now scripts an unabashed revanchism of the
city

(Smith 1996, p. 211). Giuliani framed a number of draconian policies under the
guise of improving New Yorkers quality of life. This included wiping signs of




decline, including squats and community gardens, off the streets and out of the
neighborhoods (Mele 2000). The underside of this quality of life campaign was
increased police brutality, social controls, and the blandification of urban space (Ferrell
2001; Hammett and Hammett 2007; Johnson 2003; McArdle and Erzen 2001; Shepard
and Hayduk 2002; Vitale 2008).
A History of Opposition
Simultaneously, there remained significant opposition to these forces. As Login
and Molotch (1987) note, activism is a force in cities

(p.11). A subtext of this essay is
the competing narratives involved in the struggle over urban public space in New York
City during the quality of life years, which ignited wave after wave of protest. On a
neighborhood level, the East Village remains a place where numerous actors have
successfully thwarted elements of the growth machine (Patterson 2006). Concurrent with
increasing rents and social inequality, community activists have created counter
narratives to the quality of life crusade. To do this, they established compelling and
workable alternative strategies that preserved a culture of opposition, public spaces, and
even a few squats in the East Village.
The philosophical point inherent in the East Village squatter movement was
simple: housing is a human right. Yet, for the squatters, the gentrification of the East
Village was about more than real estate, it was about a state-sponsored strategy to
establish forms of social control over poor people, people of color and counterculture
youth, by pushing them out and displacing them (Tobocman, 2000). In response to these
new forms of social control, the LES squatters built on the movements DIY cultural
ethos to address the situation. [W]e have taken charge of an important area of our lives:




housing (Van Kleunen 1994, p. 285). Squatters moved into vacant buildings. In 1994,
some 500 people lived in 20 squats in the LES. By 2002, after years of fights, including
the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riots, the remaining squats in the East Village won
formal permanent status (Sites 2003).
Despite these successes, critics including Sites contend that activism in the Lower
East Side basically ended after 1989. The dramatic confrontations in Tompkins Square
Park... reemerge in a new light: no longer the culmination of a movement, they are
symptoms of its endgame (Sites 2003 p.104). This assertion is highly suspect. The
squatter struggle, which set the stage for these activists to get to the table to cut a deal
with the Bloomberg Administration 14 years later, must be viewed as a success for
community mobilization.

This was not the only success story during these years. For
many, the years after the Tompkins Square Park riots of August 1988 presented
community members with a compelling imperative to act. Out of the pressure cooker,
came new organizational forms and activist practices aimed at countering the patterns of
community displacement witnessed by the squatters. As public spaces around the globe
faced a challenge, activists proved they were more than ready to respond.
Part I - The Lower East Side Collective
A primary example of activist engagement that found its inspiration in the
regressive policies of the Giuliani years was the Lower East Side Collective (LESC).
Born in 1997, the groups propaganda stated:




The Lower East Side Collective is an activist group based on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan. We have been saving community gardens,
defending community centers, disrupting auctions, organizing immigrant
workers, unfurling guerrilla billboards, jamming phones and faxes,
fighting for affordable housing, sponsoring poetry readings, policing the
police, reclaiming streets, holding fabulous parties, and generally making
life miserable for landlords, bureaucrats and developers.

The flyer ends with an invitation to a new sort of political ethos, Come celebrate the
neighborhood's vibrant political culture with some of its most unruly elements. For
years after the legendary Tompkins Square Park police riots, some people suggested that
the battle against gentrification in the LES was lost. Yet for others, the long history and
culture of activism in the LES was an opportunity. Many, including the daughter of one
of the organizers from Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, a 1960s LES anarchist street
group, contributed to LESCs new ethos of activism. They borrowed from this history,
picking and choosing elements to embrace and reject. Their case study highlights a
number of elements of a holistic organizing approach, beginning with flexibility, pushing
for a practical solution, and using play to sustain its work.
LESC was a convergence of students, teachers, organizers, and newcomers who
came to activism with a new, pragmatic approach, carefully picking and choosing their
battles. It aspired to be an effective, playful collective of multiple affinity groups with
both a strategy and an analysis. While many of the issues the group addressed had a long
history of struggle on the LES (e.g. fair wages, critiques of consumerism, police
accountability, etc.) the group rejected the dourness and culture of competing oppressions
that characterized the declining old-style activism. Radical street performance, block
parties, barbeques, and picnics were as much a part of the groups attitude toward
community building as demonstrations. LESC projects included a community and labor




coalition, a police and prisons project, a public space/gardens/housing group, an
environmental justice group, Reclaim the Streets, and a Ministry of Love designed to
handle process issues and help people get and stay involved.
Many activists came to LESC after years of work with the AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power (ACT UP!) or groups, like WHAM! (Womens Health Action and
Mobilization!) and the Lesbian Avengers, which were heavily influenced by ACT UP!
and the desire to translate that experience into neighborhood organizing. LESC members
consciously sought to emphasize activist work and praxis over long discussions about
philosophy or ideology. Every three weeks, the project groups would meet to present
their work in five minutes or less. As a result, LESC and by extension Lower East Side
activism in general, was infused with an immediacy that focused attention on projects,
not personalities. Ideas, tactics, strategies, and themes intermingled at each meeting
forcing activists to grapple with how their issues overlapped and how they could share
resources. Along the road, the group was able to articulate what protest and community
building were for as much as what they were against: green space, affordable housing, a
dynamic mix of cultures, living wages, and public space.
A cornerstone of LESCs work was the linkage of apparently unrelated issues,
such as labor and public space. Project members from the LESC Community Labor
Coalition worked successfully with members of its public space groups to defend
community gardens. The public space activists, in turn, supported the Community Labor
Coalitions work on behalf immigrant greengrocer workers who labored in the delis
found throughout the neighborhood, their pay often far below the minimum wage. In
many ways, these immigrant workers were the product of the North American Free Trade




Agreement (NAFTA), which had pushed laborers and farmers out of their historic
workplaces and farms in Mexico and into the dire conditions of New York City
sweatshops. Pro-labor and pro-environmental chants no more green sweatshops and
no justice no peas rang out through the air during the 1999 May Day immigrants rights
march.
By May Day 2001, members of a number of LESC project groups, including
Reclaim the Streets (RTS) and other activists within the still burgeoning global justice
movement, converged with members of the Community Labor Coalition and other
workers and immigrants to demand higher wages and dignity on the job. Street
performers from the LESC project group Reclaim the Streets and the Community Labor
Coalition staged street theater performances of wrestling matches that pit Super Barrio
Man, a cartoon character based on a Mexican folk hero, against Union Busters. The day
after these theatrics, New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer filed claims against four
grocers for all back wages due to employees, who were being paid an average of $2.60 an
hour. The greengrocer campaign was an example of a politics that called for citizens to
connect local working conditions with the impacts of neoliberal global trade polices.
Despite the successes associated with these innovations, critics theorize that,
cities no longer produce successful movements (Sites 2003, p.101). Yet, the LESC
story offers a picture of a mode of engagement that challenges destructive patterns of
globalization.

Indeed, what has emerged in the last decade is a mode of activism that has
successfully linked local demands within a global movement (Duncombe 2006; Patterson
2006; Shepard and Hayduk 2002).




Much of LESCs success stemed from a politics of creativity, resourcefulness,
and imagination. The notion of being able to imagine a better world and then strive to
create it has been a cornerstone of this organizing approach. Ron Hayduk (2005), a
member of the Lower East Side Collect from the beginning, explains:
The interconnections of the inside outside strategy are where the action is
at. If you want the Utopian ends, you gotta find the means that works and
thats the inside outside. You gotta start where the people are at. Thats
where the play comes in. Its where you can engage people. You got em
in. You gotta be willing to see where they are at. Its an experience of
learning how do you play. Part of the fun is the dance. You arent going
to go anywhere unless you try to imagine it.

People need a positive vision of a utopian future so in order to try to create it. One has to
play to stay engaged and dream (Duncombe, 2006). Hayduk elaborates:
If the Civil Rights folks had listened to those who said, you cant
overthrow Jim Crow, history would be far different. Same thing with
Apartheid. If they didnt imagine another world, they would have given
up to the naysayers...If they hadnt imagined a positive alternative vision
and believed it and worked for it and made trouble for it, the world would
be a different place. Its the bridging of the inside/outside strategy. If you
hadnt heard of Ella Baker you wouldnt have heard of MLK. All those
local activists made it happen, bridging the local to the global. Janet Abu-
Lughod said globalization is the big problem and the Lower East Side is
lost and were defeated. LESC started from a perspective that
globalization exists. And low and behold, they won some things the
gardens, the community labor coalition, the squats despite the naysayers.
If people had believed the naysayers Sites and Abu-Lughod, you
couldnt have had those wins.

LESC was at its most effective in bridging the links between global forces taking place
within a local geography, the LES, and connecting this ambition with a movement of
movements. From 1997-2000, LESC creatively helped merge the ambitions Hayduk
described.
To do so activists benefited from integrating a flexible approach that on occasion
ran in stark contrast to more doctrinaire understandings of the process of social change, in




which ideology trumps a spirit of trial and error. The Housing Question by Frederick
Engels (1872/ 1955) provides an example. Engels suggested that short-term reforms
aimed at providing immediate relief to the housing problem were no substitute for a
revolutionary strategy; only with, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is
the solution of the housing question made possible," (p.82). Engels purist argument is a
form of ideological rigidity that runs in stark contrast to the spirit of DIY engagement of
the LESC experience of collaboration among working groups. Yet, many contemporary
critics still make a similar argument.

They repeatedly rehash the Golden Era narrative
of U.S. activism, which suggests after the 1960s activism effectively ended. As Sites
(2003) argues, Following the 1960s, when mobilizations in cities had successful impacts
on social perception and public policy urban-based activism seemed to become more
attenuated and diffuse (p. 105). Harold Weissman (2004), who worked for Mobilization
for Youth and chronicled his experiences in a series of volumes (see Weissman, 1969),
suggests, it is difficult to claim those years as Halcyon days. One could argue that the
poor management of those programs created a backlash that prevented future generations
from enjoying similar federal support. In the years since, organizers have worked without
such funds but they have continued to advance workable solutions and broker deals and
compromises that make cities livable. Part of what made LESC effective was its
capacity to utilize a number of the elements of a coherent organizing strategy. It
succeeded in planting a joyous brand of activism again, explained LESC member David
Crane (2006), summing up the groups influence after the group dissolved. The second
narrative offers another useful example.
Part II - Notes on Housing Works: toward a Poor People with AIDS Movement




From the late 1960s through early 1970s, the National Welfare Rights
Organization (NWRO) sought to create a new kind of public welfare system that no
longer stigmatized those who received public aid (Piven and Cloward 1979). It did this
through a strategy that began with fierce legal advocacy and ended with a wide range of
disruptive tactics, including direct action. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Housing
Works, the nations most militant AIDS service organization, pushed for a different kind
of public welfare and for a consciousness about the lives of homeless people with
HIV/AIDS whose diagnoses were complicated by histories of chemical dependence,
mental illness and poverty. Like NWRO, Housing Works strategy included fierce legal
advocacy and a wide range of disruptive tactics. Both organizations struggled with a
dwindling welfare state, a conservative backlash, and reconciling the provision of service
with advocacy. Eight years after its formation, the NWRO met its demise. In contrast, 15
years after its formation, Housing Works reached a budget of over $41 million dollars
(Dwyer 2005). This section considers the life, times, and survival strategy of Housing
Works and its relationship to a reluctant welfare state.
From the earliest days of US AIDS pandemic, the crisis wound itself in the web of
poverty in America. Throughout these years, the AIDS epidemic threatened many of the
same socially vulnerable populations that had organized with and benefited from the
work of the NWRO. By the mid 1980s, some 25 percent of people with HIV/AIDS in the
U.S. were African American, and 57 percent of all children with HIV/AIDS were Black
(Cohen 1999; Levinson 2004). Still, advocates screamed, fought, faced arrest, and
created a safety net for poor people with HIV/AIDS (Siplon 2002).




A prime mover for the safety net for people with HIV/AIDS in New York City
was Keith Cylar, co-founder of Housing Works. Cylar effectively pushed for the
development of federal legislation to create and fund HIV/AIDS programs, chemical
dependence, mental health, and housing services within a harm reduction framework.

In
an interview, Cylar described the Housing Works approach:
First of all, the number one rule is that an individual has to have a stable
place to live. And if you have a stable place to live and you have food and
you have safety, the basics of Maslows theory. If you have those
components first, then you can start working on issues of education,
employment; you can start working on spirituality; you can start
working on all those other issues that may lead to a decrease in negative
behaviors that those people may manifest. Self-destructive behaviors, you
can start labeling them all sorts of things, right? But were talking about
creating a safe space for people to change and to grow. Thats where we
started. We started, literally at square one, which was to give people a
house (Shepard 2008, p. 11).

These ventures help the organization generate income for its programs as well as
employment opportunities for its clients (Shepard, 2002, p. 352). However, the
agency is perhaps most famous for its tradition of street activism and pioneering services
(Dwyer 2005).
In The Trend of Social Movements in America, McCarthy and Zald (1973) suggest
that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, professional advocates had become effective
agents for translating the political claims of ordinary people into political advances. The
challenge of professional activists was to serve as mediators between movements and
elites, constituents and resources, policy targets and policy-makers (Moore and Young
2002). A similar task faced professional and grassroots advocates involved with Housing
Works. In asserting that social movements and movement organizations are rational and




goal-oriented, rather than impulsive and merely spontaneous, theorists have come to
describe McCarthy and Zalds framework as part of the resource rationalist model.
Building on the legacy of aggressive HIV/AIDS advocacy advanced by the AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the community-building spirit of the Settlement
Houses, and the community economic development movement, Housing Works imagined
itself as a different type of anti-poverty organization (Stoecker 1996; Shepard, 2008).
The organizations mission is to reach the most vulnerable and underserved among those
affected by the AIDS epidemic in New York Cityhomeless people of color whose HIV
diagnoses are complicated by a history of chronic mental illness and/or chemical
dependence. Since it was founded in 1990, Housing Works has had to strike a balance
between social service, and a social movement orientations.
While Housing Works approach can be described within a resource rationalist
model (Armstrong 2002), there is more to it. By cultivating group solidarity among
mostly homeless low-income people of color and linking their needs with those of other
stigmatized groups, such as injection drug users, transgender people, and queers, Housing
Works advanced both socioeconomic and ethical agendas with their often colorful,
flamboyant actions and view that everyone deserves a place to call home. Here, Housing
Works valued the importance of a messy, queer sort of collective identity among its
clients and the movements in which they operated.
1
By acknowledging the emotional and
expressive needs of social actors, Housing Works helped those it organized create
meaning in their lives through community building, creative direct action, housing, work,
and an often joyous pursuit of happiness and democratic political engagement. Housing




Works did this by recognizing the importance of play, pleasure, and culture, as well as
the need to advance a political agenda through the calculated mobilization of resources.
Housing Works has strived to maintain its position as a radical advocacy
organization that combines activism and services despite the conventional view that
professionalization and organizational development undermine acts of group solidarity
and advocacy. As Piven and Cloward argue, it is not possible to compel concessions
from elites that can be used as resources to sustain oppositional organizations over time
(p. xxi).

Yet Housing Works life course reflects a different experience; it has
aggressively and successfully attacked government, bureaucracies, and even agencies that
provided funds for the organization. Moreover, it survived and thrived despite attacks by
Mayor Giuliani (Dwyer 2005; Ferrell 2001).

Rather than cave in, Housing Works stayed
the course, an approach which is known to provide advantages for the organizational
survival various social movement organizations (Moore and Young 2002).


By focusing on organizing and advocacy while using tools of community
economic development to take control of its own resources, Housing Works provided
support for a newer trend in social movement organization that suggests that radical
beliefs are often quite consistent with professionalization in activism and service
provision (Reeser and Epstein 1990). The group made use of a wide range of tools,
including research, aggressive legal and service advocacy, direct action, pranks, street
theatrics, and media savvy to successfully demand services for socially vulnerable
populations. Here, the group effectively staked the claim that active drug users, sex
workers, and homeless people all deserve a place to sleep and eat, as well as the right to
earn a paycheck (Shepard 2008).




Born from the Housing Committee of ACT UP, the groups foundation was direct
action. The initial service-oriented mobilization around AIDS was followed by a second,
angrier wave in the late 1980s that gave birth to ACT UP. ACT UP helped create a sense
that the AIDS crisis required action by policymakers. In doing this, the groups work was
marked by a theatrical flair. Building on the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement, ACT
UP cultivated a creative tension that stimulated action. When faced with a policy
impasse, the group made use of effective disruptions, like interruptions of formal policy
bodies, which broke down barriers to proactive policy formation. These disruptions
created a climate that compelled policy-makers to move. For the last two decades, ACT
UP has successfully redeployed the Ghandian/Civil Rights era repertoire of nonviolent
civil disobedience techniques to fight for effective therapies for people with HIV/AIDS.
With the mantra drugs into bodies, the group successfully fought for treatment,
services, expedited approval of HIV drugs, and innovative approaches to HIV prevention.
For example, the groups effective struggle to advance a harm reduction principles to
HIV prevention marked one of its biggest wins (Singer 1991).


Successes ranged from the advancement of a number of policies, laws, and
services, followed by new, more successful treatments for people living with HIV/AIDS
who could afford the drugs. This included the passage of the Ryan White CARE Act in
1990 (including the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), the Housing Opportunities
for People with AIDS Act (HOPWA ) in 1992 and the approval of city and state syringe
exchange laws across the country. HOPWA, a program of the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) designed to provide federal funding for housing
and supportive services for people living with HIV/AIDS, was a response to organizing




by groups including Housing Works, then an ACT UP affinity group, which insisted that
adequate housing was an AIDS issue (HUD 2003; Shepard 2002, 2008: Siplon 2002).
Housing Works founders, Keith Cylar, Charles King, and Eric Sawyer, had all
been members of ACT UP. Throughout the 1990s, ACT UP evolved the AIDS crisis.
Dealing with AIDS involved addressing endemic social problems of racism, income
inequality, and discrimination faced by the disadvantaged. Housing Works assumed a
leadership role, recognizing that the demographics of the AIDS pandemic would continue
to shift toward underserved high-risk groups such as low-income women and people of
color, many without housing. As Eric Sawyer (2004) who lived in Harlem recalled
I knew a couple of people in the neighborhood who were homeless, who
didnt have housing. I just started reading a lot about it and, because of
the connection with drug use, started learning that theres this whole other
AIDS plague, tied to drug use, that is very prevalent in homeless
communities, and its a whole area where there are no services.

The strategy was to push, push, push, Cylar said in describing the approach of
the early Housing Works years. It wasnt different than the general ACT UP strategy
about inclusion. But it was always to get those populations also included... People of
color were so far off the Richter scale. This meant creating an organization in which
aggressive advocacy for unpopular causes coincided with the groups unique institutional
needs. Housing Works started when, after demonstrating, fighting, and working in the
AIDS community, the people that I cared the most about were the people least likely to
get served Cylar elaborated, And so we decided we had to do it ourselves, (Shepard,
2002, p. 356). Over the next two decades, it would remain true to its ethos, even as the
organization straddled between direct action and direct services. The Housing Works
story highlights the utility of a smart groups capacity to remain flexible, highlight a




workable alternative harm reduction program, compile research to support its claims, and
utilize direct action to advance its goals.
Part III NY City AIDS Housing Network, Human Rights Watch: An Oral History
From the squats of Amsterdam and New York to the land occupations in Brazil,
citizens around the world are engaged in a struggle for shelter (Stedile 2003; Van
Kleunen 1994). The shared belief is housing is a human right. In New York City, where
gentrification has put housing costs beyond the reach of many working people, the need
for shelter is no different. Here, the AIDS crisis compounded the problem as people who
were once able to house themselves fell ill, lost their jobs, faced eviction, entered the
homeless population, and created gridlock in the hospitals. Keith Cylar, who worked in a
hospital in the mid 1980s, described the challenges faced by social workers as the AIDS
crisis emerged this way: I couldnt get people out of the hospital because they didnt
have a place to liveSo housing all of a sudden became this issue. ACT UP recognized
it and formed the Housing Committee (Shepard 2002, p. 355). Housing is an AIDS
Issue, Housing Equals Health, became slogan for AIDS housing activists. They linked
the co-epidemics of homelessness and AIDS into a struggle to house homeless people
with AIDS (and other co-occurring conditions, including chemical dependence).
To guarantee a right to shelter for homeless people with HIV/AIDS, housing
activists fought for the creation of the New York City Department of AIDS Services and
Income Support (DASIS) within the city Human Resources Administration (later
renamed HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA). They also fought for a law passed
in 1997, referred to as Local Law 49, that guaranteed people with HIV/AIDS the legal




right to be housed by the city within a day of a housing placement request. Unfortunately,
the spirit of the law would not find full expression for another five years.
In a campaign reminiscent of the 1960s National Welfare Rights Organization
campaigns (Piven and Cloward 1979), NYCAHN spent well over two years monitoring
the citys compliance with this local law. The core organizing principle remained the
demand that the City of New York obey its own law. By the end of 2001, the city was
compelled to do just that some four years after the local laws passage. The campaign
involved extensive legal research into the workings of the public welfare bureaucracy and
the tenacity to make it work; it included the willingness to push through Winter nights,
hot summer days, and every other day for over a year; finally, activists drew attention to
the cause through a media strategy which highlighted the citys failure to implement
Local Law 49. They had to build support with caseworkers and with policymakers.
Finally, they had to make use of highly creative forms of direct action.
Narrative two begins where Charles King and Keith Cylar left off in narrative
one. It begins with NYCAHN co-founder Jennifer Flynn (2005) and Bob Kohler (2005)
describing the conditions and legal battles involving struggles for shelter in the mid
1990s. Jennifer situated the conflict.
Prior to the early 1990s, people with AIDS [PWAs] lived in the shelters
like homeless people in New York do. In New York we have an
interpretation in our constitution that gives us a right to shelter. However,
there was a tuberculosis outbreak in the shelters. People living with
compromised immune systems in the shelters were dying. So there was a
court case, Mixon vs. Grinker. That case said that shelters are not
medically appropriate housing for people with compromised immune
systems. As result, the city really did start to send people to single
occupancy hotels, the system we use now. Throughout the 1990s PWAs
were sent to these hotels There was an initiative that was created
through HRA and the Department of Health, specifically to provide




housing for people with HIV/AIDS that created the system of what we
now have as AIDS housing.

One of the largest actions in NY history occurred shortly after Rudy Giuliani was
elected to office in 1993. The action is known as Bridges and Tunnels. Flynn recalled:
Then in 1994, when [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani came into office, it was
really interesting... It was the first time that social services across the
board were cut. Straight up every single social service program was being
cut. That led, in 1995, to this kind of unified cry out for attention to fight
back those cuts. And that led to the 1995 Bridges and Tunnels action.
There were also a few high-profile police brutality cases. And people
really thought that was result of the policies of the Republican mayor,
which they were. It was also that he was talking about cutting welfare in a
way that predated federal welfare reform. He talked about changing
welfare. One of the first things he did when he came into office was try to
shut down the city agency that provided welfare, including housing for
PWAs, the Division of AIDS Services. And there was an enormous
outpouring of anger, and he was stopped - because of the publicity. ACT
UP had been doing a lot of organizing against Giuliani around his attempts
to dismantle DASIS, which would have resulted in homeless PWAs going
back to the shelters...
So some members of ACT UP made some calls to other organizers
throughout the city. I think that the first call that they made was to Richie
Perez, who was at the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. He'd
been organizing this coalition of parents whose kids had been killed by the
police and had looked at some changes in policing that were resulting in
increased cases of police brutality in New York City. And also he had a
history of doing sort of ACT UP type of direct actionThen they brought
in some other groups. CUNY students were organizing. In the months
before April 25th, 1995, they had had ten thousand students just
descending on City Hall.
So there was a complete shut down of the East Side of Manhattan.
ACT UP and Housing Works had about 145 people arrested at the
midtown tunnel, the one that goes to Queens. And Community Against
Anti-Asian Violence took Manhattan Bridge. And the National Congress
for Puerto Rican Rights. The CUNY students took the Brooklyn Bridge.
Coalition for the Homeless and Urban Justice Center actually had
homeless people getting arrested on the Williamsburg Bridge. And the
entire East Side was tied up for two or three hours as a result.
The struggle continued well into Rudy Giulianis second term, as direct action
profoundly influenced the policy arena. Flynn recalls:




The other thing he kept doing in every budget was to do away with the
Department of AIDS Services. He hated that there was this separate
agency that served PWAs He decided to dismantle DAS as soon as he
came into office. City Counsel member, particularly Tom Duane, and his
then chief of staff who was Christine Quinn and Drew Cramer, who was in
his office, started to write the legislation. And they really worked to pass
that legislation in the next two years. I think they have a lot to do with it
but I think, I mean Tom Duane was essentially a member of ACT UP so it
kind of came from ACT UP. People say that it was an insider strategy, but
Tom Duane really was not an insider kind of guy at that point. His power
really came from ACT UP. It was a grassroots strategy. He was able to say
to other council members If you dont sign onto this, I will have 1,000
people at your door in the middle of the night. They knew that that was
possible.
There was this huge march across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1996, the year
before the law was passed. It was organized by ACT UP and Housing
Works. About 1,000 people marched across the bridge. About 300 people
stood outside of the gates of City Hall waiting to get in. And they really
were sick people with AIDS. I guess it was early 1996 so people were
looking sick.

Yet, immediately after the creation of Local Law 49 in 1997, it became clear the
city had no intention of following the letter of the law. According to Flynn,
There was a ruling on Hannah vs. Turner in 1999. We felt that the city had
violated the ruling, which meant providing same day meaning 9 to 5 PM
emergency housing placements to everyone who qualified and everyone
who requested it. We had had a march around May Day. We needed to do
something so we begged Armen Mergen, who was the lawyer from
Housing Works, and he kept telling us that it wasnt enough. But finally,
he took the 17 people that we gave him. We sent more. And what he says
is that that legal strategy alone could not have worked. It worked purely as
the perfect storm of an organizing strategy, having a testimony people who
were effected, and having your testimony. Everyone says that it was your
testimony (Bob Kohler) that threw it over.

Bob Kohler, a long term volunteer for the campaign who had been listening,
chimed in. I remember the judge at one point saying to me, Are you crazy [for doing
this]? Kohler spent every night for over a year outside the welfare center.




The campaign held together and sustained itself, especially as the wins started to
accumulate and building on one other. What started as an intractable problem began to
feel manageable. There seemed like a clear food chain of policy makers that could
change it. As Flynn described it,
It was also using everything together. It was targeting Giuliani, directly
trying to make policy changes. Also, everybody wanted to be the one who
solved it. And the legal strategy helped. The leadership development and
organizing helped. The monitoring just standing there with a moral
purpose. Its also one case where it was so clear that we were right. There
just isnt any gray area about that.

Bob Kohler (2005) ruminated, once you get one win, then you want more. Once you got
a water-cooler and doors then you keep going. And it shows you, we got that. By 2001,
the city began complying with the local law. Thanks to the diligent work of organizers to
combine a willingness to communicate around a problem, mobilize around an issue, and
apply this mobilization to a long term legal strategy, organizers were able to succeed.
Part IV - The More Gardens! Coalition
Simultaneously with the evolution of Housing Works and NYCAHN, a
community garden movement gained momentum in New York City. Its aim is to make
streets and neighborhoods healthy places for joy and connection. I came into the gardens
direct action movement in March of 1999, when members designed an action to stop the
auction of 114 community gardens. Throughout that spring, garden activists from the
More Gardens! Coalition and the Lower East Side Collective Public Space Group
engaged in a theatrical brand of protest, which included activists dressing like tomatoes
and climbing into a tree in City Hall Park, and lobbying dressed as giant vegetables. The
state Attorney General even noted that the reason he put a Temporary Restraining Order
on the development of the garden lots was because, according to activist folklore, a giant




tomato told him to. These actions seemed to compel neighborhood members to
participate in a process of creating change (Spitzer 2002). Like Housing Works and
NYCAHN, garden activists combined a savvy use of research with an engaging model of
protest to bridge a praxis divide between a theoretical demand for public space for the
people and a real world struggle over land use in a global city.
Michael Shanker (2005), a long time LES squatter and garden activist recalls four
tactics used in the garden struggle in NYC. They included: direct action, a judicial
strategy, fundraising, and a legislative approach. Direct action combined with a joyous
approach played out through tactics including a sing out to disrupt a public hearing, as
well as an ecstatic theatrical model of organizing which compelled many actors to
participate in the story themselves. The aim was to convey their messages and engage an
audience without being excessively didactic. Thus groups made use of a range of crafty
approaches that engaged audiences in playful engaging ways. This theatrical mode of
civil disobedience lulled audiences with stories that seduced rather than hammered,
disarmed people, and shifted the terms of debate.
More Gardens! Coalition organizer Aresh Javadi described his approach to
organizing by saying, Theatre has always been a method. It opens you to all sorts of
possibilities. Such an approach is directly useful when applied to an organizing
campaign. Again, when you see a plant or a vegetable, your automatically come back to
a world of childhood, cartoons, something that is not like the, there is a protest and they
are against us. Here, The reaction is, thats so magical. Thats so amazing on top on
concrete. It brings you recognition of why it is that people care so much about green
space when you cant actually take them to the garden. It reminds people of countless




associations. What it meant to this woman, to this grandfather, this granddaughter, how
much its improved their health, their life? Javadi explained. You can do that by
having a flower dancing with a giant tomato and then there is the action of someone
trying to take that away from people and people are willing to step up and move that.
Here, people re think social views by engaging and stimulating questions. Its a very,
very powerful thingWe are like this is fun; its loving; and you are going to see how
passionate we are about that.
Theatrics even extended into the act of non-violence civil disobedience. Javadi
explained
During the civil disobediences we would have hats and colorful things.
The police sometimes didnt even know what to do with the puppets. And
they would be like, We cant arrest a flower... Thats not a person that we
can arrest.

Much of the power of theatrics and civil disobedience involves advancing in image of the
world that is full of life. For Aresh, it was part of being a Yes group. Rather that
argue, those in More Gardens! would say, Yes, you can do the right thing. By doing
this, the group invited others into their vision. Visuals included images of a celebration,
a bringing together of the spirits, having the politicians just follow what was right. Each
image was supported and illustrated a policy argument supported by data. Art helped
communicate this message. When we did a banner hang or put puppets up in a tree, we
would say: 10,000 vacant lots, Why Destroy the Garden Plots? The visual enhanced the
words.
Javadi said that the group rejected a zero sum argument, which pitted the
environment against housing.




We want both real housing as well as real green spaces. Any time
anyone builds over land, he or she should be adding community gardens
with your money for the community. The point is opening up spaces that
are communal and cultural.

Such campaigns are about mobilizing and creating healthy communities.
Javadi recalled a moment during the campaign to save 114 community gardens.
There were moments when the group was holding onto a garden that was a week away
from being bulldozed, And the children came and took the puppets and automatically
told the storyof the garden. Pointing to a vacant lot without a garden, the children
asked, So why do you think we shouldnt have housing right there? Countless
observers and decision makers were impressed by this argument. The result was a
compromise that helped preserve the community gardens in New York City for the next
decade (see Spitzer 2002). The win was a victory for those who use them, yet the
struggle is anything but over. By their very opposition to the rules of consumption and
the view of urban space as growth machine, spaces like community gardens, are locations
for do-it-yourself creativity, rather than profit (Logan and Molotch 1987). As result of
their emphasis on use, rather than exchange, community rather than commodification
community gardens were viewed as a threat to Guilianis view of New York City as an
economic engine, a growth machine (Vitale, 2008).
Given their function as spaces where social actors organize against the notion of
urban space as growth machine and therefore and neo liberalism itself, community
gardens function as distinctly subversive representative spaces (Zukin 2004). Each
affirms a right to differential urban space, which not only looks different, but is different.
Each gardens existence in a town driven by real estate dollars thwarts the conception of
urban space as commodity. Each garden celebrates a right to the city as a space for




community building and possibility, despite the view that differential space cannot and
must not be allowed to thrive by the powers that be (Lefebvre 1974/1991; Merrifield
2002). It is no small accomplishment when gardeners are able to hold off developers
and preserve some five hundred gardens citywide, fifty alone with a handful of squats in
a gentrifying neighborhood (Mele 2000; Sites 2003).
Like the previous narratives, the organizing used to build a coalition to defend the
community gardens represents a best practice in the study community organization. This
case example highlights the use of a practical claim combined with a willingness to
mobilize and use multiple media forms, including street theatre, and play to support the
campaign. Community gardens are places for neighborhood members to meet, share a
space, work on a common project, and to plant the seeds of community. These are spaces
for people to be introduced, be creative, problem solve, and discuss issues of mutual
interest. Yet, like many such spaces in the era of globalization, they are under attack
often because of this.
Conclusion
The four narratives here constitute success stories in a broader movement to build
community. They show that globalization from above is not a forgone conclusion for
urban spaces (Brechner 2000). As the narratives suggest, when local community
organizers continue to compile research, provide data, preach, scream, pressure targets,
and use direct action to communicate their messages to the multiple policy bodies
necessary to create change, they have a chance to succeed. While not distinct in and of
themselves, what connects these projects is a willingness to: lay out a clear campaign
target, be flexible, mobilize constituents, use street theatrics and other innovative means




to communicate their campaign goals, compile research about their issue, outline legal
strategies, and infuse their campaigns with as much fun as possible. The examples of
LESC and Housing Works highlight the need for ideological flexibility, even if it meant
building models that ran in stark contrasts to conventional ideological expectations.
From the Community Labor Coalition picket line to the Bridges and Tunnel action to the
fights against the garden auction, each narrative demonstrates the efficacy of mobilization
with a jigger of direct action, to propel a campaign. From ACT UP to Housing Works to
More Gardens theatrics, each made use of sophisticated techniques to communicate a
message and a policy solution. NYCAHN worked with Housing Works to research a
long-term legal strategy to save the right to access shelter for people with HIV/AIDS in
NYC. LESC used it Ministry of Love while More Gardens! used dirt to build on the
importance of play in a campaign. Housing Works and More Gardens! articulated a clear
goal that began with the very names of their organizations: Housing does work for
people; New York City does need more gardens. What started as small bits and pieces of
organizing stories took on the dimensions as life saving narratives. Stories are reality-
creating machines. The result of these narratives is a snapshot of what effective urban-
based activism can look and feel like.
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1
Rather than a sexual identity, Crimp (2002) suggests such queerness speaks to the stigma any number of
outsider feel in their experience of HIV/AIDS.