Struggle to go from streets into a home
Oakland woman’s case shows more than job is needed to escape poverty
Jenn Oakley is ready to move to a home with basic necessities like power and running water.
But Oakley, who lives in one of the Tuff Sheds set up by Oakland to help shelter homeless people, is running into roadblocks.
Since February, Oakley, 42, has completed a constructiontraining program at Rising Sun Center for Opportunity. She’s currently taking automotive tech classes at Chabot College in Hayward. Her goal is to become a heavy equipment operator and mechanic, and she’s waiting to hear back about a Caltrans apprenticeship.
She’s had a fulltime security job since March, but on Monday she started a fulltime job at a Jiffy Lube in Castro Valley. She told me she’ll work the security job on her days off.
Oakley’s determination to find a home could be an inspiration for others clawing their way out of homelessness, but her story reveals the sobering and sad truth about life in the Bay Area: Having a steady paycheck is no guarantee you’ll be able to afford living here.
Private landlords are wary of her credit and rental history. Meanwhile, her applications with affordable housing programs run by the city aren’t going anywhere.
“I’m doing my own research. I’m applying to all these places, and I’m not getting anything,” said Oakley, whom I met in May as she was fixing her car outside the sheds near Lake Merritt. “I’m not getting a lot of this stuff because I’m not disabled.”
The infrastructure to house homeless people, especially during the pandemic, was designed to help people with health risks and disabilities — people who need a deeper level of support to find and maintain housing — first. Everybody else has to wait in a long, long line. If Oakley can’t be helped quickly, what does that say about our systems to house people?
“It just speaks to the lack of deeply affordable housing,” Lara Tannenbaum, manager of the Oakland’s community housing services, told me. “For many people, that is the solution. They need affordable housing, period.”
Oakley, eligible for a subsidy that will pay a deposit and the first three months of rent, needs more than money. She said prospective landlords and roommates have asked about her rental and credit histories. Before the sheds, she lived in RVs and hotels. She says she’s in the process of repairing her credit score.
After moving to Oakland from Tennessee 14 years ago, Oakley sold insurance. Her slide into homelessness began when her father died in 2009. Her mother is also deceased, and she hasn’t talked to her sister in more than a decade — around the time she started using methamphetamine and lost everything. She has some cousins in Kentucky, and talks to her mom’s exboyfriend on Facebook sometimes. The few people Oakley can count on are in Oakland.
Darin Lounds, executive director of Housing Consortium of the East Bay, an organization that provides housing services and manages transitional sites, including the Lake Merritt sheds, said a person’s past — criminal record, blemished credit report, lack of references — creates additional housing challenges.
“Someone who’s employed and may be in recovery and doing everything else they need to be doing to get back on their feet will still have to kind of correct some of the things from the past,” he said. “And that’s not our rule. That’s the market.”
The stringent shelterinplace rules and the smoke from wildfires have fueled an exodus from the Bay Area. Rental prices are dropping around the region — 9% in San Francisco and as much as 15% in the South Bay, my colleague J.K. Dineen reported — but Oakland’s prices have remained stubborn. In August, the average onebedroom apartment in Oakland cost $2,469 per month, according to Rent
Jungle, a real estate tracking website. That’s only a 4% decrease from a year ago.
Housing experts and developers believe the rental market will eventually become more affordable. That doesn’t mean our neighbors already struggling to pay rent will benefit from the lower prices.
“What I’m hearing from providers is that the market has not loosened up because of the pandemic because of the protections that are in place for renters, which is a good thing for now,” Tannenbaum said. “When eviction moratoriums lift, then the market may loosen up, but that would be also a bad thing, because then more people will be evicted and becoming homeless.
“So it’s kind of a doubleedged sword. At the end of the day, we just need more housing.”
In August, the Oakland City Council approved a bid to buy a dorm from the California College of the Arts for $13 million and voted to partner with local affordable housing groups to acquire two Oakland hotels and 20 singlefamily homes. But, as my colleague Nora Mishanec reported, the initiative depends on Oakland receiving funds from the state, which isn't guaranteed.
“The pandemic has shaken loose in some ways some money, some urgency, some processes that we didn’t have before,” Tannenbaum said. “So are we doing enough?
Absolutely not. Are there people on the streets who are older and sicker and vulnerable? Absolutely. But many hundreds of them are not on the streets now because of the corporate response.”
Recently, Oakley watched money she’d been saving go up in smoke because she rented hotel rooms to escape unhealthy air. And two weeks ago, she rented a hotel room in Sacramento the night before an earlymorning apprenticeship test.
“I’m spending some of my savings, but I feel like I’m doing that for my future, so it’s OK,” said Oakley, who’s lost almost 30 pounds since we first met.
You can see how hard she’s working. Getting a home would be the apex of her decadelong battle with homelessness, including recovering from a stroke in October.
“I just need a little help, and then they can forget about me,” she said. “Just let me get on my feet, and get used to paying bills again.”
“It just speaks to the lack of deeply affordable housing. For many people, that is the solution. They need affordable housing, period.”
Lara Tannenbaum, manager, Oakland community housing services