A local nonprofit that advocates for the rights of homeless residents is facing scrutiny after the New York Post  ran a story about the group last month, alleging one of its board members gave a “crash course on squatting,” instructing people on how to break into vacant buildings–an accusation the organization says is completely false.

Picture the Homeless (PTH) is a citywide nonprofit headquartered on Morris Avenue in the Bronx, just south of Fordham Road. The group, run largely by homeless or formerly homeless individuals, works to organize the city’s homeless population, advocating on policy and social justice issues that affect them.

On March 25, the New York Post ran an article titled “City-funded activist group teaches homeless how to invade apartments,” saying PTH board member Andres Perez taught a group of people outside a Brooklyn housing complex “how to wrest ‘control’ of vacant apartments,” the article reads. It went on to allege that Perez was encouraging his audience to break into vacant, city-owned properties so they could squat there.

A week later, the City Council’s law department requested that the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, which administers funding provided to PTH, put a hold on any city funds to the group and to investigate them for wrongdoing, citing the Post story.

But Ryan Gibbs, another PTH board member, said the article was completely false and “inflammatory,” down to even the location where the reporter says the event took place. Perez was talking at a protest PTH and Occupy Wall Street activists were holding outside of Brooklyn City Council Member Erik Martin Dilan’s office, Gibbs said–not outside a nearby public housing complex, as the story said–and that Perez was merely telling the crowd about his past experiences being homeless, and what he would do when he was desperate for a place to stay.

“He was only speaking from his personal experience,” Gibbs said. “The Post took it and ran with it.”

A spokesman for HPD said the agency is currently “reviewing,” PTH’s funding contract, but would not comment further, because the investigation is ongoing.

PTH members protested outside the offices of the Post last Thursday. In a press release, the group accused the paper of “racist, reactionary,” news coverage and for having a bias against the homeless. Over the last decade, the Post has published four editorials criticizing the group, calling them “smelly,” and “vagrants with lawyers,” PTH says.