Change overwhelming for homeless Oakland resident

Ebony Reed will soon have to leave the home she built on the corner of Fifth and Castro streets in West Oakland.

Her home is part of a large homeless encampment that stretches for blocks along the sidewalks of the area. Soon, the city will clear it out and declare the area a no-camping zone.

Reed, 39, can move into a shed for six months, one of 20 sheds opened by the city this week inside a “safe haven” site a block away. Or she can move her home — a portable cannabis grow tent — elsewhere.

Both ideas seem overwhelming to her.

If she moves into a city shed, she’s afraid she would have to leave behind many of her belongings. And she would have to sign in and out every time she comes and goes.

Her tent has a plywood front door, which she swung open to reveal the reflective Mylar interior that’s like shimmering wallpaper. A frame of white metal rods holds up the tent — and Reed’s clothes and castiron skillets.

She has a leather couch, and keeps the mattress she sleeps on raised on wood planks to keep it dry. She even has blinds to block the sun from the cutout window next to the bed.

She’s known on the streets for fixing cracked phone screens and feeding others in the encampment with food she digs out of a grocery store dumpster. Reed spends her days scavenging, which is why

she had a bag of flour sitting on a barrel. She found it in the trash, unopened.

“They throw a lot of food away,” she said. “Everything I get is there.”

A typical weekly haul includes fruit, eggs, juice and frozen meat.

“I cook it all when I get it,” said Reed, whose curly black tresses sneaked from underneath her hooded sweatshirt. “I let it thaw and then throw it on the grill. I feed the whole neighborhood.”

The city’s shed site opened Monday on an empty lot on Sixth Street between Castro and Brush streets. There, residents will live in a secure, fenced-in area where they’ll have access to health care, addiction treatment and employment resources. And there will be 24-hour security.

Instead of tents, residents will live in modular units — storage sheds with ranch-style roofs. Each shed, which comes with two cots, can house two people for a total of 40 people at the camp, according to the city’s plan.

According to Joe DeVries, an assistant to the city administrator, officials hope to attract residents who are living in tents and makeshift structures crowding the sidewalks on Brush, Castro and Fifth streets, the people living around Reed. The goal is to maintain a sense of community, and there’s no application or rental fees.

Reed told me she’s on the fence about the camp, even as she lamented the lack of safety on the streets.

“It kind of feels like being in jail. You have to sign in and sign out,” she said as she fiddled with a plastic cover of an obsolete word processing disc. “You can only bring clothes, and I have all this stuff.”

Reed said she’s been homeless for six years. She said she was told by a site manager that if she moved into the camp, she’d get to see her 8year-old daughter more.

But there’s a big problem: Her live-in companion doesn’t want to leave their home on the street, and he’s threatened to leave Reed if she goes.

“He said, ‘We’re done,’ ” she said. “He don’t want to do that. He’s got lots of negativity about it.”

Reed’s dilemma speaks to a larger issue facing the new camp: How does the city get people to move in instead of moving on to another camp in the city?

As of Wednesday, only three people had moved into a shed. When I visited the shed site, there was a table with chairs, water bottles, coffee and a microwave set up in front of the rows of homes — an open house for the homeless.

“There’s still uncertainty,” Lester Vender, a site manger, told me. “We have them step inside and make a feel of it, because it’s a big adjustment.”

Vender will get people settled, then Tony Montesinos, a housing navigator, will help them find jobs, starting them on the way to securing longterm housing.

“Eventually, I’m going to try and get them gigs, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, whatever it is they need to get to that next level,” Montesinos said.

But first, people like Reed, who Vender said he’s met, have to get through the door. Oakland knows it will be a slow dance.

“We’re dealing with people that are very vulnerable,” DeVries said. “They’ve lived unprotected. They’ve tried to create community. Anything new is scary.

“Changing your lifestyle, I think, is intimidating for any human. Though this looks like a better option, you’ve got to go through the process in your head.”

I mentioned Reed’s fear of rules to DeVries. He said that residents can come and go as they please, but they do have to check in. And they can have visitors during the day, though no overnight guests.

Residents will be able to stay in the city-sanctioned camp for up to six months. They can even furnish their sheds, which have porch lights, door numbers and, most importantly, door locks.

“There’s going to be a negotiation about how much stuff you can bring in,” DeVries said. “At encampments, you have to trust someone to look out for your stuff. Now you’ve got a key. Part of this is helping people live a normal life again.”

Time is running out for Reed to decide what to do. Next week, the city is scheduled to clear the tents on Brush Street between Fifth and Sixth streets, according to DeVries. The following week, the tents on Fifth between Market and Brush streets will be cleared.

“Systematically, we’re going to close what’s here, and the police will be enforcing a no-camping zone,” DeVries said. “And we’ve made that clear to them from the very beginning.”

I’m sharing this to show how people like Reed have carved out a life on the streets — and that after years of scraping to get by every single day, it’s going to be hard for many of them to let go and trust people they don’t know.

I hope the city’s plan works.

“It’ll be good for me,” Reed said when I asked if she’d move to the camp. “I could see my baby.”