Oakland bracing for long struggle
With little affordable housing in pipeline, street camps projected to be an ongoing, widespread problem for city
Lee Smith was one of the first homeless people to pitch a tent near 26th and Wood streets in West Oakland. Now, four years later, he has 100 neighbors, including two pregnant women.
The place looks like a Third World shantytown, a village for the city’s poorest on the fringes of its bustling center. It’s one of about 100 such sprawling encampments in Oakland, and they’re not going away anytime soon. They’re likely to get even bigger. Just as the Bay Area’s tech boom has reshaped Oakland in different ways than it has San Francisco, so has its homeless crisis. But unlike San Francisco, Oakland is just beginning to tackle the problem.
San Francisco has a mature infrastructure to help the homeless — from cutting-edge Navigation Centers that help people find shelter to a recent $100 million charitable donation to support the chronically destitute.
Oakland is still experimenting with how to respond to the crisis. The city has a sliver of the money San Francisco has — its budget is about one-tenth the size — and little of the coordinated philanthropic and corporate support that San Francisco enjoys.
And Oakland has something San Francisco doesn’t: a vast network of desolate industrial back roads that have become ideal locations for out-of-sight, out-of-mind homeless villages. Most are clustered in West Oakland.
The city’s perennial problem of illegal dumping has fueled encampment sprawl with tons of unwanted tables, chairs, mattresses and sofas.
“People give the folks here a couple of bucks as, you know, a donation to help them” unload their trucks, Smith said, looking at a pile of garbage nearby where someone had just dumped a freshly killed rooster.
“The city comes by to clean it,” Smith said. “But people keep dumping their stuff there.”
Smith lives in a thicket of tents, vehicles and generators walled together by wooden pallets, tarps and discarded furniture in the shadow of an Interstate 880 flyover.
Many people there keep dogs for protection from their more drug-addled neighbors and raise cats to keep away the swarming rat population. For the past few months, the city has supplied portable toilets, picked up the garbage and offered housing outreach until more permanent help arrives.
For now, there is nowhere else for people to go. Oakland is experiencing an unprecedented demand for housing that has driven up the median price of an apartment by nearly 60 percent over the past three years. During that time, little affordable housing has been built.
Meanwhile, the homeless population in Oakland jumped by 25 percent to 2,761 between 2015 and 2017, according to a recent point-in-time count.
The count also provided a distressing portrait of who’s on the city’s streets: Nearly 70 percent of homeless people are black, although African Americans made up 28 percent of the city’s 2010 census population.
More than 60 percent of Oakland’s homeless people lived in homes in Alameda County for more than 10 years before they landed on the streets. And nearly 60 percent said money problems, not addiction or mental health issues, were the primary cause of their homelessness.
“Every Oaklander ... has been taken aback by the recent visibility and size of encampments,” Mayor Libby Schaaf said. “People will hopefully begin to see a noticeable difference — that an improvement is beginning — a year from now. I do think it will take that long.”
The crisis in Oakland has analogues in every major city on the West Coast, from Seattle and Portland down to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. In San Jose, the homeless population is roughly twice as large as in Oakland, with more than 4,000 people counted in 2015, the most recently available data. A key difference from Oakland: San Jose’s camps usually grow around creeks, causing sanitation issues in waterways, said Ray Bramson, who’s in charge of the city’s Homelessness Response Team.
Schaaf said her city has learned from the failures and successes of other cities, including San Francisco, whose homelessness crises hit earlier. Among the lessons: If city crews clear a camp and order its occupants to leave, they will just set up somewhere else nearby.
“We recognize that we don’t have enough safe places to move people to, so at least in the short term, we will have to make safety and cleanliness improvements to encampments where they are,” Schaaf said. “Taking a problem and pushing it into someone else’s neighborhood or someone else’s city is not responsible, and frankly, it’s not efficient, either.”
Since March, Oakland has provided portable toilets, food and garbage service at the Wood Street village where Smith lives, as well as concrete barricades to protect the camp from the semi trucks that rumble dangerously close to the tents.
Just as the city is trying to provide small quality-of-life improvements to the camps until more housing becomes available, so, too, are county health care workers. A 40-foot van outfitted as a mobile health clinic has been supplemented in recent years with “backpack doctors” — medics who go into the camps to provide evaluations and follow-up care on scene — and a new downtown Oakland clinic designed specifically for homeless people.
“People are stuck. It’s very, very rare that somebody chooses to be homeless,” said Mark Shotwell, director of Alameda County Health Care for the Homeless, which sends doctors to camps to provide medical care. “Are we making life a little more comfortable? Yes. We’re trying to create a little more dignity and humanity out there.”
At the Wood Street camp and others around town, the nonprofit Operation Dignity hands out meals, water, hygiene kits, condoms, trash bags and fire extinguishers on a daily basis under a contract with the city. Every day, its crew loads supplies into two vans, prints a stack of pamphlets detailing housing opportunities and drives to the camps, greeting occupants with a melody of car horns and shouts of, “Mobile outreach!”
Few at the Wood Street camp say getting food is a problem. Besides the plastic-wrapped meals Operation Dignity offers, several faith groups and wellmeaning individuals regularly drop off food donations.
Cherelle Benjamin, 49, who has been living there for several months, said some of it goes to waste. She points to a bag of Acme bread that someone left the day before. The food, often leftovers on the verge of molding, tends to draw rats to the camp. Her neighbor Smith is among those who has started raising cats to keep them away.
Smith, a former handyman and carpenter, lives in his 1990 Ford Aerostar van along the Wood Street fence line, hidden from view by a large tarp.
Underneath, his television and DVD player run from a generator he shares with his homeless neighbors. Several of them have functioning gas grills, one of the many pieces of camp equipment that worry fire safety experts. In recent months, a string of fires — including at least one suspected arson — have destroyed swaths
of camps and threatened people’s lives.
Oakland got to this point through a confluence of factors.
Schaaf said homelessness in the city is a byproduct of income inequality and rapid job growth in the region without corresponding housing development.
When Gov. Jerry Brown — a former Oakland mayor — eliminated local redevelopment agencies six years ago, Oakland lost a major source of affordable-housing funding. In 2016, permits were issued for 2,121 housing units in Oakland; only 40 were classified as affordable. Exacerbating the crisis, the number of landlords in Oakuntil land accepting federal housingassistance vouchers dropped from 5,286 in 2011 to 4,254 last year, said Michele Byrd, Oakland’s housing and community development director.
The pressure forced the city’s most economically vulnerable people onto the street.
“I really don’t think this is something that is going to leave us overnight or get resolved quickly,” said Gloria Bruce, executive director of East Bay Housing Organizations, which advocates for low-income residents. “It is the accumulation of years and years of affordablehousing shortages. There is just no place for people to go.”
So for at least the next year — more housing units and shelter beds can potentially come online and temporary housing measures are approved — Oakland officials and housing leaders concede that the camps are likely to grow.
“We’re playing catch-up,” said Elaine de Coligny, executive director of EveryOne Home, the nonprofit that organizes the homeless count in Oakland and Alameda County. “The problem with housing is that it is expensive to site and build. We’re years away from having a house for everybody.”
But some help is coming soon. Among plans to bring relief to the homeless crisis in Oakland:
Money from a $580 million affordable-housing bond that Alameda County voters approved in November is about to become available. Some of it will go toward acquiring housing for extremely low-income people.
In the next couple of months, Oakland expects to use money from another voter-approved measure to buy a motel or single-room-occupancy hotel and transform it into a shelter for 300 people a year.
Oakland is considering a pilot program called Safe Haven, which would create three citysanctioned camping areas where up to 40 homeless people per camp could park their cars and RVs and receive services.
City staffers have proposed extending services offered at the Wood Street camp — toilets, food and garbage service — to 10 other encampments over the next two years, at a cost of $180,000 a year.
However, some options are likely to face community opposition. And even if they were implemented, de Coligny doesn’t want the temporary measures to become permanent.
“A Third World tent city is not what we want to be,” de Coligny said. “We want to make sure that we don’t create this
permanent underclass of people who live outdoors.”
Meanwhile, as the camps expand, the patience of business owners is fraying.
On an early June day, Tak Tam looked across 12th Street from the East Oakland tire store he has owned for 26 years at one of the city’s most dense homeless encampments. Oakland Department of Public Works crews removed 50 tons of garbage that morning from the camp on a median along two blocks of 12th Street near Interstate 880. The trash had accumulated in the month since Public Works’ last big cleanup there.
“That is today,” Tam said, shaking his head. “And if you come here tomorrow, maybe the next day, it will all be back. Just like yesterday.”
Frank Foster oversees the cleanup of illegal dumping sites and homeless camps for Public Works. Last year, he said, the city collected 29,370 piles of illegally dumped garbage — a 100 percent increase from five years earlier.
“It can be disheartening for the crew,” he said. “It’s like a neverending battle. Plus, there’s the human element. These are human beings out here.”
It’s not unusual for Oakland residents employed by Public Works to know the people in the camps. That makes it even more gut-wrenching to ask them to leave their possessions behind, Foster said.
“Sometimes, they grew up together,” he said.