Revealed: how companies made $100m clearing California homeless camps
This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Wayne Barrett Project
On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California, Silicon Valley’s largest city. As jets roared overhead, garbage trucks and police squad cars encircled Ortega’s hand-built shelter. Heavy machinery operators stood by for the signal to bulldoze Ortega’s camp.
As the workers closed in, Ortega grew increasingly upset.
“They’re going to have to drag me out of here,” he said.
The camp, one of the largest in California, was cleared between 2021 and 2023 in part by a private company named Tucker Construction. Public spending on private sweep contractors is soaring across California.
In total, private firms have been paid at least $100m to clear homeless camps, an investigation by the Guardian and Type Investigations has found. The 14 municipalities and public agencies from which spending details could be obtained represent a small slice of such spending in the state.
Astrid Stromberg, who oversees encampment cleanups for Tucker, said its business has expanded dramatically since 2020. The company had about a dozen laborers working full-time on encampment cleanup. Now there are 30, and its clients include roughly a dozen municipalities and public agencies across Silicon Valley. “[Tucker] basically created the industry here,” she said. “I could talk about it for hours.”
Pete White, the founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a homeless advocacy group based in Skid Row, says he’s observed a steady increase in the privatization of sweeps in recent years. “The growth of a private industry geared towards removing and dismantling informal settlements and houseless encampments has grown steadily in Los Angeles and across the country,” said White. “Not only are we seeing a growth in the loss of property, but also the loss of rights.”
Litigants in ongoing or recent court cases allege that the destruction of belongings in sweeps violates the fourth amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and the 14th amendment, which guarantees due process under the law. A case currently before the US supreme court also argues that laws banning homeless people from camping or sleeping in public spaces violate the eighth amendment, which safeguards against “cruel and unusual punishment” by government actors.
Some of these cases are persuading courts. A case in San Francisco, for instance, has resulted in a city-wide injunction against sweeps while the city has a shortage of shelter beds. In a 2021 case in Los Angeles, a federal appellate court ruled that every mattress, couch and shack removed by crews must be preserved. But the issue remains a legal gray area.
Gabriella Aguirre, whose camp was removed from the Crash Zone around the same time as Ortega, rues the sweeps she has been subject to.
“You feel devastated, you feel in a rush, you feel like your whole world is coming to an end,” said Aguirre, who works at a restaurant cleaning and washing dishes. During the clearance of the Crash Zone, she alleges,
Tucker crews violated city policies by disposing of items she had asked to keep, including key fobs for her car and her daughter’s car.
“It’s not so much the loss of the material things, but that they are the only things you own.”
How sweeps became a lucrative industry
The dusty fields of the Crash Zone once had houses on them, including one where Ortega’s family lived when he was born in 1976. Around this time, the neighborhood was deemed unsafe for habitation by virtue of its proximity to the runway. By the early 80s, 630 homes were bulldozed from the site through eminent domain.
Ortega moved to the Crash Zone in 2015 after losing his job as a property manager. At the time, there were just a smattering of tents across the fields. When the population of the camp exploded to about 300 people in the first year of the pandemic, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it would withhold funding for airport improvement projects if the city didn’t clear it out.
In recent years, California has approved more than $700m of funding for camp clearance, part of its strategy for grappling with a growing unsheltered homeless population of 123,000, according to a recent count.
To better understand the nature of the new industry dedicated to clearing camps like the Crash Zone, and ascertain how much spending has gone to private contractors as opposed to city crews, the Guardian and Type Investigations sent public records requests to dozens of local jurisdictions and public agencies. The requests focused on the state’s five largest cities and also on Silicon Valley.
The records show that firms vying for contracts to sweep encampments in California include mid-size construction companies that also do home renovations, as well as large environmental services firms that specialize in cleaning up hazardous waste and responding to public emergencies.
The company Ocean Blue, for instance, says on its website it cleared out more than 300 encampments in a year in southern California. “Because of our specialty in handling hazardous wastes – bio hazardous (i.e. feces, urine, vomit, needles), oils, acids, aerosols – we now perform homeless encampment cleanups for some of the largest government agencies in Southern California,” it says.
Tucker Construction was founded more than 40 years ago by a longtime San Jose resident, Mark Tucker. The company’s portfolio includes remodeling kitchens and building public works projects for the city. Stromberg said the expansion to sweeps started with a call from the city to clean out a hoarder’s
house, and grew from there to include camp cleanups. Some of Tucker’s employees are formerly unhoused themselves, Stromberg said.
According to public records, the city’s contracts and purchase orders with Tucker total more than $10m in the past decade. Part of this money was drawn from federal emergency funds intended to combat Covid-19.
This is despite the fact that the city publicly stated it would not displace people during the pandemic, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. When asked about this use of funds, the city said some camp clearances were necessary to reduce the risk of Covid spreading among inhabitants, among other reasons.
Across California, the largest single contract unearthed was a $23m deal with the Singh Group, a major construction firm, to clear camps along statemaintained roads in the cities of Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville.
At the other end of the scale the city of Santa Clara, a suburb of San Jose, signed a three-and-a-halfyear, $1m contract with Tucker in 2019, despite having documented only 264 unsheltered residents at the time.
It can cost millions to clear a single camp. Marinship, a Bay Area construction company, received $3.4m to dismantle an unhoused community with about 200 residents.
The scores of contracts reviewed do not account for spending on the city employees and police forces that typically accompany private contractors on sweeps. The police presence at one sweep in Los Angeles cost an estimated $2m.
The pain – and destruction – of sweeps
For homeless people, these sweeps take an enormous toll. And they allege that private companies such as Tucker are breaking, or at least skirting, rules intended to ensure they are treated fairly.
Many unhoused residents report being swept over and over, often multiple times in a year. Modeling based on data collected in Boston has shown that hospitalization and death rates are expected to increase significantly among encampment residents after sweeps – researchers projected that overdoses would rise 30%, for instance.
A study of the health impacts of sweeps in Santa Clara county, where the Crash Zone is located, found that unhoused residents often lost medicines and other “health necessities” and that sweeps “drove unhoused people into hazardous, isolated, less visible spaces”. Sometimes they are even arrested and put in jail.
“Having to go through that – it’s trauma, physically and psychologically,” said Ortega. “It messes you up.”
While efforts are made to provide services and shelter to those being displaced, the vast majority start a new encampment nearby, their already tenuous stability upended in the process.
The San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, acknowledged in an interview that this kind of sweep is a questionable use of money.
“Our goal is not to just shuffle people around the city. I think it is a terrible use of taxpayer dollars, and it is horribly disruptive for our most vulnerable neighbors.” Doing so, Mahan added, would be “the definition of insanity”. San Jose aims to get residents the shelter they need. But San Jose, like most large American cities, does not have nearly enough shelter for its unhoused residents.
As well as the loss of their homes, they allege the destruction of belongings that rules are meant to protect. At the Crash Zone, a couple named Theresa and Dave lost a bike and furniture. A man named Jose lost scrap metal he sells for income. Fujio Maeda lost the tent he was sleeping in. Rudy estimates he lost about $5,000 worth of personal property. And, he said, “I lost my trust in the city.”
Unhoused residents and their advocates say that the systems in place to prevent the loss of personal belongings during sweeps are often not effective.
In an email, Mark Tucker, president of Tucker Construction, said his company works under the supervision of city staff during cleanups. “We collect personal property, catalogue it, load it into our trucks and deliver it to a place for storage until 90 days has expired,” he wrote.
According to San Jose’s instructions to Tucker, obtained via a records request, “If there is any uncertainty regarding whether an item should be thrown away or stored, it should be stored … Unless an item is trash or poses an immediate threat to public health or safety, it should be retained for storage as potential personal property.”
But the notices to vacate posted by Tucker throughout the camp defined storable items in very different terms to the city. They specify that nothing “dirty” will be kept, which in a dusty field with no running water could conceivably be applied to most things.
According to the signs, nothing “broken or disassembled” is eligible for storage – which encompasses a high percentage of possessions in a community where scavenging is the norm. This includes “bike parts, pallets, or wood or other metal parts”. Yet for many residents who were interviewed, cobbling together parts from multiple non-functioning bikes was essential to their mobility. Pallets are upcycled into walls. Metal equals money at the recycling yard. A scrap of wood can be burned to cook dinner or keep residents warm at night.
In interviews with more than a dozen Crash Zone residents, no one said they were told that their belongings would be placed into storage. Nor did anyone successfully report retrieving belongings seized during a sweep in San Jose.
During the Crash Zone sweep, a Tucker worker who did not provide his name shook his head when asked if any belongings were being stored.
Another man sat in an unmarked pickup truck loaded with what appeared to be items from the sweep, including an acoustic guitar. He said he “sometimes” worked on the clearance crews and that he made money by selling belongings removed from the camp. Homeless residents of the camp alleged this was a regular occurrence.
Both Tucker and a city spokesperson said they had not received any reports of theft by employees or former employees at sweeps. Tucker wrote in an email that these allegations were “hearsay and not factual”.
One resident who goes by CL said he lost jacks, wrenches and other tools that he uses to work on cars, a source of income for him, after they had been thrown away by workers during sweeps. “Tools” are named by the city as items to be held in storage for residents. Following the instructions on eviction notices, the Guardian and Type called BeautifySJ, the city program that oversees sweeps, to ask where they could be retrieved.
A week later, the city replied that the tools could not be located.
The city says that it conducts sweeps within the bounds of the law and that it provides adequate oversight to ensure that contractors like Tucker abide by its policies for storing belongings. “City staff and vendors place collected personal property on tarps to identify, photograph, log and sign each item,” said Elizabeth Castro, a city spokesperson. “Once documented, items are bagged and taken to a city facility by the vendor and City staff.”
The city declined to provide a tour of its storage facility, but did offer a photo showing a small room with few shelves holding about a dozen bags of belongings.
Tristia Bauman, a housing attorney at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, who has studied the criminalization of homelessness across the country, says that, “from a legal standpoint, having a storage facility that is not resulting in people having a meaningful ability to get their property back is the equivalent of permanent deprivation of the property”.
Ortega sues
Ortega eventually had his day in court. Unable to find a firm willing to take his case pro bono, he represented himself. He requested a temporary restraining order to prevent his belongings from being taken during an upcoming sweep. The judge granted a series of hearings and told the city to let Ortega stay put while his case was heard.
The once-crowded fields around him emptied out as the bulldozers swept through. Many residents escaped to a much smaller adjacent field, which quickly became a densely packed encampment, until that, too, was cleared.
The judge expressed sympathy for Ortega’s situation and instructed the city to repair the secondhand camper that Ortega had obtained and tow it to a location that was not slated for active sweeping. He said the city had to ensure that any possessions that could not fit in the camper were safely stowed in a self-storage facility nearby.
Ortega saw it as a small victory, but says the legal pressure doesn’t seem to have made a difference as he observes ongoing sweeps in San Jose. “They’re still doing the same thing,” he said, “just quieter.”
It’s not so much the loss of the material things, but that they are the only things you own
Gabriella Aguirre
buildings. But producing the material wasn’t legalized in the US until the 2018 farm bill removed hemp from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) controlled substances schedule.
Although the concept of creating affordable, environmentally responsible homes – and in turn, jobs – for the Lower Sioux seemed like a no-brainer, getting things off the ground was quite the undertaking. The tribal nation first needed to develop an agricultural program, invest in equipment and set up a basic processing facility without many strong models out there to emulate.
In 2016, tribal members planted 20 acres of hemp as a test run and have since expanded to 100 acres. “We don’t have that much tillable land here at Lower Sioux,” said Pendleton. “And you can’t plant hemp year after year, so it has to be put into rotation with corn and soybeans. But we can process up to 2,500 acres of hemp with our equipment, so there’s the possibility of contracting with area farmers to expand the program.”
Agriculture might be a new venture for the Lower Sioux, but construction is in the community’s wheelhouse. That’s where Danny Desjarlais, a carpenter by training, comes in. In 2022, Pendleton convinced him to become project manager of the hempcrete initiative instead of pursuing a career shift into long-haul trucking.
Desjarlais is now part of a sixperson construction crew (all paid tribal members) that has built three hempcrete houses in the span of seven months, with more in the works. These construction projects have been supported by community and grant funding. The homes will soon host their first residents, as determined by tribal leaders based on need.
Despite initial skepticism, community members are starting to recognize the program’s potential.
“Just the word ‘hemp’ has a stigma surrounding it,” said Desjarlais. “Some of the elders didn’t like that we were even growing hemp before we started building with it. Earl had an uphill battle to get the program going, but once we had a building that people could walk through to see the end product, the community really rallied around it.”
“There were a lot of people who didn’t believe we could do it,” said Pendleton. “But soon, we’ll have first-hand accounts from people who are living in these structures that will help the rest of the community really see the benefit.”
The Lower Sioux is limited in land to build new housing, but the tribal nation recently acquired 200 acres of nearby state and private land to help address that. That area still requires infrastructure development such as roads, sewers, water and electrical hookups, but it presents an opportunity to put the hempcrete construction initiative to the test, with about 60 houses slated to be built there. There’s also talk of incorporating a school and other amenities. By keeping much of that construction work in house rather than outsourcing it to contractors, the community stands to save considerable money.
“All these years, I thought the issue was going to be keeping costs down assuming that hemp was going to be 20% to 30% more expensive than conventional materials,” Pendleton said. “But Danny and his crew built the emergency shelter and the duplex for 20% less than what conventional would have cost. It’s amazing that they pulled that off.”
The Minnesota lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who is currently the highest-ranking Native American woman elected to executive office in the US, recently visited the reservation’s newly constructed hempcrete buildings alongside Tim Walz, the governor, and called the tribal community’s efforts “powerful to witness”.
“This program is a great example of a housing project that was driven by the community,” said Flanagan, “and one that can inspire the state as we continue to invest in housing preservation, creation, affordability and sustainability.”
If the construction crew is able to start manufacturing prefabricated wall panels and blocks, the building timeline would shorten considerably and allow for year-round productivity. The tribal nation could also eventually sell those materials to outside customers, said Pendleton, and perhaps even provide construction services off the reservation.
To that end, he sees a future where the hempcrete program – which he calls “seed-to-sovereignty” – drives meaningful revenue for the Lower Sioux community to supplant casino dollars, which have been the tribal nation’s main income source for the past 35 years. And there’s even more money to be made by selling off the unused portions of the hemp plant, such as the grain and fiber, because hempcrete only utilizes the hurd, the inner-core fiber of the stalk that’s actually considered waste.
“There are 20,000 products you can make from hemp; this is just one of them,” Pendleton said. Long term, the tribe aims to expand processing capacity, which would probably create more jobs for tribal members while also making this climate-smart building material more readily available in the
US. The positive impacts could reach far beyond the Minnesota reservation – and far beyond today’s generation.
“As the historical caretakers of the environment, Native communities should be leading the change in how the world is built,” said Pendleton. “We’re trying to prevent our world from hurtling toward that 2.5C mark and offering the younger generation something more sustainable so they can live better lives decades from now. Hemp is part of that solution, and we’re building a blueprint for other Native communities to follow.”
First, however, the Lower Sioux community is focused on addressing its own housing needs. “At the end of the day, we’re putting a roof over our people’s heads and giving them healthier homes,” said Desjarlais. “That’s a win-win, no matter where we go from here.”
If we could cut down on our members’ energy costs, we had to try it
Earl Pendleton
The Czechs, through a team of government officials and private companies, have vowed to deliver Ukraine critical ammunition rounds from countries around the world, with first deliveries to Kyiv expected by June.
The Czech plan, which has received support from about 20 countries, is meant to solve Ukraine’s dramatic lack of ammunition at a time when Moscow is ‘‘outshelling’’ Kyiv by a five-to-one ratio. The innovative scheme works by European countries buying the shells from countries in Africa and Asia, such as South Korea, which are unwilling to supply them directly to Ukraine but happy to sell to a third party such as the Czech Republic.
On Monday, the Czech prime minister said his country had already contracted the first 180,000 rounds of ammunition and was working to secure a further 300,000 rounds.
The plan is seen as a temporary measure to fill Ukraine’s ammunition gap, until Europe can produce enough ammunition on its own. The EU has previously admitted that it expected to meet only 52% of a target set last year to deliver a million shells by March.
How is Nato planning to help?
Earlier this month, Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, proposed an unprecedented five-year, 100bn euro package of military aid to Ukraine. The initiative aims to alleviate future uncertainty over US military aid to Ukraine by shifting more responsibility to the Nato bloc in coordinating arms support for Kyiv. Currently, most Nato members provide weapons to Ukraine on a bilateral basis, while the bloc has restricted itself to sending non-lethal aid for Ukraine out of fears that a more direct role could lead to an escalation with Russia.
Experts and diplomats have cautioned that Stoltenberg’s plan is at a very early stage and it is unclear whether the 100bn total would be accepted or how it would be financed.
The secretary-general’s plan would upend Nato’s current role and would require consensus among the alliance’s 32 members. Hungary, the most pro-Russian Nato country, has already voiced opposition to the plan.
How would the US’s $60bn aid package help Ukraine?
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has previously warned that his country “will lose the war” if the US Congress fails to approve military aid, indicating the critical importance Kyiv places on the stalled military assistance package.
While US Republican critics of the aid package have voiced anger over what they perceive as excessive assistance to Ukraine, a significant portion of the funds allocated to Kyiv will remain within the US.
Of the $60.7bn for Ukraine, about $20bn would be used by the US to replenish its military stockpiles previously depleted by the push to arm Ukraine. This could open the door for future US military transfers to Ukraine.
Another $14bn will be allocated to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a special program in which the Pentagon buys new weapons for the Ukrainian military directly from US defence contractors.
The US president, Joe Biden, has stressed that the Ukrainian aid bill would boost the US economy, telling voters that almost two-thirds – or nearly $40bn – of the money for Ukraine would actually go to US factories spread across the country.
A third chunk of the funds, roughly $15bn, will be spent on enhancing the capabilities of the Ukrainian military, fostering intelligence collaboration between Kyiv and Washington and bolstering the US presence in eastern Europe.
The support also includes nonmilitary assistance, with about $8bn likely going to help Ukraine’s government continue basic operations, including the payment of salaries and pensions.
The US has so far sent Ukraine roughly $111bn in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid since the start of the war more than two years ago.