Home is a Human Right media series: Rebranding homelessness

Concept, production, messaging, art direction, copy

Home is a Human Right is a media series about homes, wealth, and racial inequity, produced in collaboration with homeless activists and housed allies in New York City.

Being “homeless” is shorthand for losing the game of capitalism, a category of sort of no longer being a person. There is scant media representation of protagonists who are homeless— nowhere is fighting for the right to have a home portrayed as a human and normal experience. This is particularly problematic, as nearly 90% of New Yorkers in the shelter system identify as Black or brown: homelessness is a racial justice issue and it deserves a lot more exposure. I heard a formerly homeless woman at a zoom panel last year say, “Homelessness needs a makeover,” and she was exactly right. Recognizing this feeling of social invisibility (or worse, dehumanization) from my experience of growing up queer in the ’80s, I conceived of a media project sharing the wisdom and perspective of the leaders of New York City’s homeless rights movement. Throughout the last year, I have slowly helped foster a volunteer media collective to produce this, an interwoven network of housed and unhoused people sharing knowledge, resources, and relationships. Together we are producing media illustrating the unequal foundations upon which New York City is built that determine which populations have access to wealth and security, literally realized in the form of homes and properties, and which don’t.

The series began during quarantine as a curation of biweekly zoom conversations featuring people with direct experience of being homeless and is currently being rebooted in the form of higher-production video segments compiled into thematic episodes. A formerly homeless friend offers a cooking tutorial and talks about what it’s like eating in the shelter (he says it’s terrible), a collective member who finally gets housing hosts a design-challenge makeover with the help of our collective members The Moving Support Project, turning his empty apartment into a place to really call home. This project is the coolest and most radical thing I’ve ever been involved with. It has that tangible feeling of working on something that might actually make a difference in the world.