This Won’t Be Here Forever, w/ Homesick

Homesick is one of New York City's most prolific writers. We hung out with him for a week in the life of bombing the city and talking about the story behind his name.

Filmed and Edited: Shane Allen

Additional Camera: Joseph Aguirre

HOMESICK’s name comes from a feeling that has followed him for much of his life. Born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he watched the neighborhood he knew change almost completely through gentrification. His family was eventually evicted, and his mother spent years in temporary housing before finding another home. For HOMESICK, the name became a way of describing that loss—not just missing a physical place, but missing the people, neighborhoods and version of New York that disappeared with it.

Graffiti gave him a way to put that feeling back into the city. Before HOMESICK, he wrote N3ST, a reference to growing up on North 3rd and Berry Street. Eventually he realized that HOMESICK communicated something bigger. The word could belong to anyone who had been displaced or felt disconnected from where they came from. His work began appearing across New York, often alongside messages about gentrification, broken homes and the changing city.

Much of his graffiti is also about physically searching for the New York he remembers. He explores tunnels, abandoned spaces, freight tracks and forgotten corners of the city—places that have escaped some of the development happening above ground. “I’m basically looking for my childhood in all these places,” he explains. For him, an abandoned tunnel or old piece of infrastructure can feel like one of the few remaining traces of the city he grew up in.

That idea has pushed HOMESICK beyond simply writing a name. His work has become a personal record of displacement and memory, using graffiti to preserve stories that can easily disappear as neighborhoods change. The more New York transforms, the more the word HOMESICK seems to make sense.