Sometimes even a home isn’t enough
Marcus Emery called me every few weeks to update me on his life — and to give me his new phone number. I’ve got four numbers saved under his name in my cell phone.
“Mr. Otis, this is Marcus,” he’d say in his slow, velvety baritone that made his name sound like “Maaarcus” when he left messages.
I met him when he lived on the streets in Oakland, homeless, and followed his story for two years — watching him move from a tent into a box — yes, a box — and then, finally, into his own apartment last fall. He was so grateful to be off the streets.
It was inside that apartment that he died. He was found dead on July 16. He was 55, and would’ve turned 56 on July 24. Instead of seeing him at a birthday party, his family and friends gathered Monday for his funeral.
I first met Emery on Northgate Avenue in 2017 when he was living in a tent that he secured with a padlock and surrounded with rat traps baited with globs of peanut butter. After the tent, he moved into a wooden box on
the street, and we’d sit on milk crates or scavenged office chairs. Emery was the first person to move into the temporary housing sheds the city of Oakland built in a lot on Northgate Avenue.
The last time I saw him in June, we sat on couches in the living room of his apartment on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland. He gave me a goodbye hug.
Emery’s death is a reminder that just because a homeless person gets housed doesn’t mean their rehabilitative journey has ended. Many people stumble in their adjustment from sleeping outside to sleeping with a roof over their head, because it’s hard to break the habits formed to cope with life on the streets — the drinking, the drugs, the doing whatever it takes to survive another day.
New tenants can feel isolated from the communities they developed in encampments under highway overpasses and on city sidewalks. People like Emery need more than just keys to their own apartment. They also need counseling and other supportive services, because the trauma from being homeless can’t be relieved by hot showers.
Michael London befriended Emery when they both lived in tents on Northgate Avenue. After Emery’s funeral, London, who now lives in a shared house in deep East Oakland, said there’s always difficulty adjusting to a new home.
“Some people have been in the streets for so long they lose the respect they have for themselves, let alone a house,” said London, 50, who spent more than a decade homeless.
London has had to deal with complaints about not cleaning the kitchen well enough.
“I have no choice but to do it because I want to be back in society,” he said.
I noticed Emery losing weight in recent months, as his wellworn sweatshirts hung off his frail body.
“He had some drinking, of course. That was mostly the cause of his death,” Verdell Emery Rosalez, Emery’s older sister, told me. “He had internal bleeding.”
Emery, the youngest of 10 children, was raised on Chestnut Street in West Oakland. He was known as Chucky to a family that’s seen a few members endure homelessness.
When the rent on the Milton Street apartment he’d lived in for 18 years jumped from $800 to $2,100, Emery, who lived on Supplemental Security Income, could no longer afford it. Emery’s nephew, Shaun Moses, set up a tent for him on Northgate. Emery’s older brother, Dennis Emery, would sometimes sleep in a car near his relatives on Northgate.
Rosalez, now 60, said she was homeless when she was 17 and pregnant with her son. Her son, now 43, lives at a homeless shelter in Berkeley, she said.
“They get used to living a certain way,” Rosalez responded when I asked why her son didn’t live with her. “They don’t like to follow the rules. They’ve been on the streets so long.”
We’re likely to see more families and people rooted in Oakland struggling to maintain a place in the city. Oakland’s homeless population rose 47% between 2017 and 2019, according to Alameda County’s PointInTime homeless count. Oakland had an estimated 4,071 homeless people, more than half of the countywide total of 8,022 homeless people.
According to the data, black people made up 50% of the homeless population, despite being just 11% of the county’s total population.
I want to see Oakland’s approach to solving homelessness make a dent. Since opening the first of five temporary housing shed sites in December 2017, 373 people have moved in, and 139 people, including Emery, have moved into permanent housing.
He was a shortlived success. He had less than a year in his apartment. The city needs to move faster.
Mayor Libby Schaaf met Emery in May 2018 at a meeting for residents at the Northgate sheds. She went to Emery’s apartment after he moved in, recalling the Bible he kept on a stool in the kitchen area.
“It’s just a reminder of how much work we have to do,” Schaaf said about Emery’s death in a phone call before his funeral, which she attended. “And that even when we get people off the streets, it’s often too late. Too much damage has been done to their bodies and their minds before we can give them what should be a right in our country: the basic human need of shelter.”
Emery’s friends — the housed and the homeless — are having a block party on Northgate Avenue on Tuesday to celebrate his life. There will be plenty of hugs.
“When he opened his arms and put them around you and hugged you and he buried his head in your shoulder, you were there in that moment with him,” said Nathan Moon, a friend of Emery’s who owns a home on Northgate Avenue. “He wasn’t scheming. He actually needed that love and that connection. He was so deeply lonely.”
That’s why he called.