This Graffiti Artist Is Tearing Down Billboards and Turning Them Into Shelters for the Homeless

After earning notoriety in Oakland’s street art scene, PEMEX dreamed up a bold new way of robbing the rich and giving to the Bay Area’s neediest residents.

In the dead of night on February 12 in Oakland, California, an enormous black mass plummets from the sky and lands in a crumpled heap on the sidewalk below. Lofted up on a billboard frame high above the city, graffiti artist PEMEX wastes no time watching it fall. Ski mask in place to protect his identity, he pockets his razor blade and climbs down the frame after it with practiced ease.

As one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s preeminent graffiti writers, Pemex has plenty of experience making his mark on hard-to-reach places – he’s been at it for over ten years.

He stuffs the billboard vinyl into the trunk of a rented minivan, slams the trunk closed, and hops in.

Over five hours, Pemex and a six-person crew cut down three weather-resistant, tarp-like billboards, with average dimensions of fourteen by 48 feet, adding to the seven others they’d already recently hoarded. A Chase Bank home mortgage ad and a Budweiser billboard reading, “You just struck cold,” are among those now in Pemex’s possession.

The vandalism spree may seem senseless to bystanders – if there were any around at this hour. But to Pemex, who will soon repurpose the billboards into a series of tents for some of the local homeless population, this is a mission with a noble purpose.

At its core, the project he calls “A House in Oakland” is something out of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood – steal from the rich, give to the poor. The big business billboards targeted by the crew have been selected intentionally for their ability to speak subversively to the Bay Area’s homeless crisis.

There are an estimated 2,100 homeless people in Oakland alone, according to a January 2017 count conducted by Alameda County. The city has only 350 shelter beds and they’re full nearly every night. A 2015 report issued by the real estate website Trulia states that between January 2014 and January 2015, rents in Oakland were the second fastest-rising in the U.S., up 12.1 percent.

The 'House in Oakland' team makes some custom revisions to one of the tents. (Photos courtesy Indecline)

“I’m not a politician,” says Pemex, who, because of the illicit nature of some of his work, asked to be identified only by his pseudonym. “I’m not a city council official member that knows the statistics and the numbers of what works and what doesn’t, but I know what I see, and I know what I feel [and] I know that people getting kicked out of their homes to get other people who have more money to move in is wrong.”