For so many American families, the first sight of home was Lady Liberty’s golden torch, a symbol of hope for refugees seeking to find new homes in an unexplored country with an uncertain future. To emigrants braving the boat trip across the Atlantic, New York City was a grand castle of countless spires of unseen heights, with enough rooms to house every hard-working refugee with a dream.

Now, everything’s changed. Just past the turn of the century, we live in the shadows of such great towers. There are more homeless people in New York City than during the Great Depression. While such government churns out binary statistics—as if one either simply has a home, or doesn’t—thousands more struggle and hustle every day to maintain meager, sometimes makeshift shelter that falls short of a “home.” These are the voices drowning in the cracks of a country where the tired and poor masses now huddle on the corner.

With Housing is Human Right, Brooklyn-based artist Michael Premo chronicles the lives of these marginalized New Yorkers. A ceiling caves in on a woman’s head while she sits in her own bathroom and no one ever fixes it. A slumlord quietly moves an elderly couple’s belongings, piece by piece, into the basement of the building to make room for another paying tenant. They’ve been living in the mold-infested basement without electricity for the last year.

"I saw my community being blown away,” says Premo, a resident of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. “Everyday there’d be a store that would be closed, every day there’d be a neighbor you wouldn’t see anymore. Slowly, people kept leaving. And with these changes and gentrification I started thinking about how this has happened before, with urban renewal and the great migration and I became fascinated with the idea of displacement.”

So Premo started interviewing, recording, and photographing modern tribes of displaced New Yorkers last year. The first dozen stories were recorded on the bustling streets of Brooklyn and in the backs of buses as they rattled up to Albany this past spring to testify about the importance of rent stabilization to legislators.

A seasoned participant in StoryCorps—a contemporary oral history project modeled on both the Works Progress Administration and the work of radio legend Studs Terkel—Premo’s signature artistic method remixes the rich tradition of oral history into presentations held together with sleek hip-hop soundscapes courtesy of DJ Oja Vincent.

Premo sees Housing is a Human Right as an ongoing project, where the collected testimonies and evidence will be continually remixed and repackaged into “creative testimony” for presentation to Congress, “advocacy packages” for community organizations working directly with citizens, and art exhibits such as the opening hosted by The Laundromat Project this October.

In this way, the opening presentation at a laundromat in Fort Greene is a kick-off to an ongoing series of remixed presentations. Similarly, Premo sees the concept of home not as a goal in itself, but as an opening act to healing communities and neighborhoods.

“Not necessarily having a picket fence,” he explains, “but having a neighborhood that is economically diverse, places in the neighborhood where you can get a job, places where you can eat an affordable meal, where you can access medical services and schools—all those things emanate like a spiderweb, all coming from a sense of home. When there is a sense of home, things are stable, and communities become healthy.”

Tara Murtha is a Philadelphia-based writer, columnist, editor, and occasional video producer, and is into personal amusement, promoting Philadelphia arts, challenging the Man and recreational despair. She’s currently staff writer and resident pen-thrower at Philadelphia Weekly.