Fiery finale to Oakland’s encampment experiment

City couldn’t keep pace with homeless population

I watched as Oakland city workers broke down the homeless encampment under Interstate 580 on the Emeryville border.

Residents — yes, that’s how I’m referring to them, because this is where they lived — slowly grabbed piles from tents and tossed them into black plastic bags, the kind used to collect yard waste. The cleanup crew brought plastic storage bins, but many of the folks already had their own. They also had duffel bags and suitcases.

Water bottles were handed out, and a police officer arrived with pastries and cartons of Starbucks coffee for the residents.

This camp clearance was supposed to happen at the end of March. The camp had been adopted by Oakland officials as an experiment to see if they could find homes for everyone. But it didn’t work out as planned.

When the end of March came, however, the camp was allowed to remain because Oakland’s

shelter system was full. A fire at a San Pablo Avenue halfway house that killed four people had displaced almost 100 other residents.

But then the camp had its own fires — two in two weeks, and the result was an eviction date.

No one was hurt last Monday in the latest fire, which destroyed about 20 tents. According to my colleagues Matier & Ross, authorities believe it was set by a woman who had argued with her boyfriend.

About 15 residents from the camp were moved into temporary housing Friday.

The people who don’t stick with temporary housing will probably wind up pitching their tent somewhere else in the city. At least two of them already did — just across the street from the camp that was cleared. In Oakland, encampments are like restaurants: They open and close with little notice to the surrounding community.

This city-backed camp had portable toilets, sanitation stations and frequent visits from social workers. It was supposed to be a different way for the city to deal with homeless camps. And it was when it began with about 40 people several months ago. City employees hosed off sidewalks and emptied trash cans, because the goal was to have the camp shrink as people moved into temporary housing.

Once some moved, though, others replaced them, and the population swelled to around 60 people. The newcomers weren’t getting their cases managed, and there was a spike in break-ins reported on nearby streets. And many of the camp’s residents are addicted to heroin, The Chronicle’s Rachel Swan reported.

In 2015, the county had an estimated 4,000 homeless people, with more than two-thirds living without shelter. The updated count, which will be released in a few weeks, is expected to be significantly higher.

There simply isn’t enough housing available, and until the dearth of affordable housing is addressed, people will continue living in roadside camps.

Joe DeVries, an assistant to the city administrator, watched the cleanup Friday, telling me some people with housing vouchers are homeless because they have nowhere to use them.

“We don’t have enough housing for the people that live in Oakland, and we don’t have enough housing on the entire West Coast,” he said. “We’ve seen the housing crisis from Seattle to San Diego, and Oakland’s right in the middle. Again, housing costs too much, and there’s not enough of it.”

Still, DeVries sees the city’s efforts with this camp as a success because it got homeless people into housing faster. But what the camp lacked was on-site management to control who came and went — and the objects people, who spent the day scavenging, brought home with them.

“The load of fuel for a fire that came into this area is unacceptable,” DeVries said. “It would be unacceptable in your own house, and it’s unacceptable here.”

The neighbors have tried to be tolerant, Raymond Lankford, the pastor at Voices of Hope Community Church in West Oakland, told me. He lives a block away on Magnolia and 34th streets. Lankford watched as a city worker used a utility loading vehicle to scoop up charred fencing and shopping carts, remnants of last week’s fire.

“The truth is that we have a serious housing crisis, and we have people that are literally living in the streets,” said Lankford, who also runs Healthy Communities Inc., an Oakland organization working to decrease violence and health disparities for people of color.

“We have to be supportive of those people that are in those situations. It’s everybody’s issue, and we need to address it together.”

As we chatted, a man who was preparing to move urgently checked sneakers that were in a box, pulling each shoe out and inspecting the insides before slamming them to the ground.

Nobody cooked breakfast at the camp on this morning, but I saw at least two charcoal grills and the kind of aluminum trays used at big family cookouts. When I looked up, I noticed the concrete underneath Interstate 580 was stained black like the inside of a fireplace.

One woman, who didn’t want to give her name, was upset about losing the place she considered home.

“Here you’ve got air,” she said. “Constant air. You’ve got trees. I’m not doing anything to anybody.”