Police, D.A. promise stricter measures in wake of Oakland Chinatown violence.
The Oakland City Council voted Monday to open a cogoverned homeless encampment to provide shelter for 40 people in West Oakland — making it potentially the second site that residents and service providers would operate together.
Officials also have plans for a cogoverned encampment at East 12th Street and Second Avenue on a vacant lot.
The city will lease a vacant lot from Caltrans at Third and Peralta streets at no cost for three years and provide woodenpallet shelters to residents as part of an effort to address its skyrocketing homelessness crisis.
In 2019, the most recent data available, Oakland counted more than 3,200 unsheltered people on city streets out of a total homeless population of more than 4,000 — a nearly 68% increase from 2017. That number has likely increased during the pandemic.
The Third and Peralta streets site is expected
to open by Labor Day, said Justin Tombolesi, an aide to Councilwoman Carroll Fife. The site is in Fife’s district.
Tombolesi said the city will canvass current encampments under threat of displacement by Caltrans, which has indicated it wants to clear some encampments on its land in Oakland, to move to the cityrun site.
The city has struggled to help its growing homeless population. A scathing April report from the city auditor’s office found Oakland officials lacked an effective strategy in dealing with a growing number of unsheltered residents living on city streets and failed to provide policy direction and adequate funding to handle the crisis.
Since then, city council members and the administration have worked to find alternate solutions to address the need. In March, the administration released a report that listed vacant cityowned sites in each council district that could be used for homeless interventions.
The report stated that $3.9 million of unused funds allocated for homelessness are available. All of those funds will be used to pay for the Third and Peralta streets cogoverned encampment and a second one planned for near Lake Merritt. The Housing Consortium of the East Bay will operate both sites.
City leaders have long expressed a desire to open a cogoverned encampment, where the residents would work with service providers to maintain the site.
James Vann, one of the founders of the Homeless Advocacy Working Group in Oakland, said cogoverned encampments can be key in providing emergency shelter. And a “cogoverned” model allows residents to have autonomy and responsibility, he added.
The exact details of how the cogoverned encampment at Third and Peralta streets will run have not yet been determined.
Other Bay Area cities have pursued similar interventions. San Francisco has citysanctioned tent encampments. Berkeley also wanted to open an outdoor citysanctioned tent site, but instead decided to open an indoor tent shelter earlier this month. But these interventions are different than Oakland’s cogoverned encampment model, which relies on residents to maintain the properties and provides woodenpallet shelters.
“In a more democratic fashion, it turns over a lot of the responsibility for the arrangement — the management, the upkeep of an encampment — to the residents themselves,” he added.
Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas also has plans for a cogoverned encampment at East 12th Street and Second Avenue on a vacant lot. A developer eventually plans to break ground on 361 homes at the site, but until then, Bas said she plans to build pallet shelters with electricity for 60 people.