Oakland to try ‘safe haven’ homeless camps
A few weeks ago, Mayor Libby Schaaf put on an Oakland A’s hat, an Oaklandish T-shirt with a stylized oak tree, jeans and sneakers to serve salami sandwiches to people living in the homeless tent community underneath Interstate 880 near Seventh Street, one of about 100 bedraggled encampments in Oakland.
She went out with Cityteam Oakland, a faith-based nonprofit that operates a soup kitchen. It serves roughly 8,000 meals per month. Cityteam also runs an emergency shelter and regularly passes out blankets, food and toiletries at homeless camps.
Twice a week, around dinnertime, Cityteam takes sandwiches to tent encampments. Mike Murray, Cityteam’s rescue mission manager, said Schaaf seemed moved talking to the people she met.
He recalled Schaaf spending 20 minutes listening to a homeless woman’s concerns about hygiene.
“I wish more people who worked for the city would do that to kind of get a feeling for what it’s really like instead of what they hear at town hall meetings,” Murray told me. “I think it would open their eyes more instead of hearing people complain about it.
“There’s a lot to complain about, but there’s also a lot that can be done.”
Well, Oakland is about to try something — again.
On Tuesday, the Oakland
City Council voted unanimously to carve out plots for “safe haven” sites. At the sites, residents will camp in secure, fenced-in areas where they’ll have access to health, drug addiction and employment resources.
More important, the sites will be used to funnel people into temporary housing.
The idea was inspired by the Compassionate Communities program, an experimental citysanctioned camp with portable toilets, handwashing stations and trash service under Interstate 580 near 35th and Peralta streets. That camp, guided by Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, was eventually scrapped after two fires and complaints by neighbors.
Here are the proposed locations for the new camps:
A city-owned lot at 3831 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in West Oakland.
Unused land owned by Caltrans at 34th Street and Mandela Parkway.
A city-owned parcel at East 12th Street and 23rd Avenue near the Fruitvale district. It’s already dotted with couches and tents.
Each site will serve 40 people at a time, and there will be 24-hour security, controlled access (only residents will be allowed to enter) and on-site management. The new plan also includes Tuff Sheds, storage units that look like backyard playhouses. Residents will be able to stay in the city-sanctioned camps for up to six months.
According to a report prepared by the city administrator’s office, the annual operating cost to the city will be about $472,000. There’s an added one-time cost of $78,000 for the Tuff Sheds, fencing, office space and storage facilities. The city’s latest budget appropriated $450,000 per year for two years for the program.
The new plan looks great, but I see one glaring problem: The homeless crisis in Oakland affects thousands. It would provide relief to only a fraction of the people on Oakland streets and sidewalks.
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 city’s solution helps 120 people.
What about everyone else?
“We’re not pretending this is a permanent solution or a complete solution,” Schaaf told me. “But we have to start somewhere. And this is what we can do immediately.”
People who drive past encampments daily see the piles of garbage and stockpiles of furniture, clothes and whatever else can be collected. But it’s a different experience when you walk through the camps and talk to people.
That’s where you’ll learn that the narrative of homeless people being lazy drug addicts doesn’t fit everyone who lives in a tent. Many homeless people have jobs. They just don’t make enough to afford a roof over their heads.
“There are as many circumstances as people in those camps,” Schaaf said. “To paint broad strokes or make sweeping assumptions on every single one of these thousands of unsheltered residents who call Oakland home is misguided and unhelpful, because if you want to solve a problem you have to understand the problem.”
Murray, who visits homeless camps daily, said the new camps might be the right step to solving the homelessness problem — if there’s follow-through with these people to get them into permanent housing.
“That way, the public will become more accepting of the situation if they see that there’s a positive outcome afterwards,” Murray said. “As long as there’s followthrough, the public could actually get behind it.”