A show now open at Syracuse’s ArtRage Gallery explores the desperate conditions in which many people live as well as solutions that offer hope for improvement.
The show, called “A Place To Call Home,” features photographs by freelance journalists Michelle Gabel and Mike Greenlar. The project grew out of assignments each worked on for Central Current, the Syracuse-based online news publication.
The photos show people trying to do their best in the worst possible conditions. One woman sits on a bare mattress in a home on Shonnard St., while the couple that lives with her sleeps on the bare floor. There’s no running water and the ceiling is crumbling. Another shows a run-down bathroom. On the bathroom door, someone has written this plea: Please repair me.
“We wanted to just have this exhibition and create a discussion about housing in Syracuse,” Greenlar said. “We all kinda know what’s going to happen in the next year or two. We’re going to lose Pioneer Homes and McKinney Manor and what’s going to take its place?”
He notes that the potential Micron factory in the northern suburbs will place even more pressure on scarce housing. Rents are already so high that many lower-income people cannot afford them, even with public subsidies. Greenlar is hopeful that the Syracuse Common Council will adopt the Good Cause Eviction law approved by the state and added to the policies of several larger upstate New York communities. The measure gives tenants some rights in a potential eviction. Councilors tabled the measure recently, delaying any action.
Gabel did most of her work on successful efforts to place low-income Syracusans in safe, stable homes. She focused on a non-profit called A Tiny Home For Good, which has built several tiny homes and rehabilitated some rundown existing homes, serving as the landlord afterward.
Gabel photographed Jeanette Kilmartin, who moved into a tiny home in 2019 on Matson Ave. One photo shows Kilmartin, “greeting the morning with meditation, as she does every morning.” Gabel said that Kilmartin told her, “‘When I walked in these doors I was flabbergasted to be given such a beautiful gift.’ She said, ‘I didn’t realize that before I’ve only lived in houses. I never lived in a home. This is home.’”
The exhibit runs through March 22.