April 21, 2010 - Meet Frank Morales, Housing Organizer at Picture the Homeless
Picture the Homeless Housing Organizer, Frank Morales has preached, squatted, protested, and organized in New York City for over 30 years.
Morales was born and raised on the Lower East Side. After studying at both Hobart and Cornell, he attended the General Seminary in Chelsea in 1973. Three years later, Morales was ordained an Episcopal minister, which profoundly impacted his work and politics.
“All I do is tied to my self understanding of ministry,” Morales said. “I see my work centered around the creation of a loving community, a heaven on earth, an egalitarian community where love of neighbor is made real, and justice is manifest by a people who embody the justice of the loving and creative spirit of the universe.”
Morales began squatting in 1979 while he was an assistant pastor in the South Bronx. He witnessed how poverty and homelessness affected the community and realized that squatting was a moral necessity, an extension of his desire to serve others.
“[I] saw people suffering the indignities and violence of the unjust and unnecessary hardship of homelessness,” Morales said. “I saw the empty buildings and common sense and a loud conscience dictated the only way forward: an ethical demand to squat.”
Morales returned to the Lower East Side in 1985, where he was a housing activist and led a squatter movement in the East Village until he joined St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery as an associate pastor.
Six years later, the foreclosure crisis was looming and Morales started on his journey back into the realm of housing activism. In 2010, Picture the Homeless (PTH), a membership-lead non-profit in the Bronx, hired Morales in July 2010 as a housing organizer.
As Housing Organizer, Morales and PTH employ many tactics.
On the legislative front, he is an advocate for the New York City Council’s Intro 48, which was developed by PTH to identify vacant properties around the city. Morales hopes that Intro 48 will help low-income New Yorkers find affordable housing. He also advocates reviving new “sweat equity” legislation, which gives those willing to renovate otherwise uninhabitable spaces the right to occupy their new homes.
Morales, along with PTH members and staff, is also working hard to establish a Homeless People’s Trust Fund and Community Land Trust (CLT). PTH has pressured entities like JPMorgan Chase, that possess vacant and warehoused properties around the city, to contribute these properties to the CLT.
In addition, Morales and PTH actively identify vacated houses that could be accessible and viable squats. He has also formed alliances with members of religious communities, linking housing activism and moral responsibility.
Finally, Morales advocates on behalf of both homeless and homeowners’ rights with the hope that solidarity can be built through collaboration across the socioeconomic divide.
“Picture the Homeless aims to prevent more people from becoming homeless and to create bridges between homeowners and the homeless poor,” Morales said.
To Morales, housing is a human right and, as he has shown throughout his life, he is willing to operate both inside and outside of the legal process to keep it that way.
Picture the Homeless - www.picturethehomeless.org