Oakland shut down a portion of its largest homeless encampment, starting the daunting work of clearing a massive, sprawling camp that has been plagued by fires as the city prepares to transform the area using a $4.7 million grant from the state.
After posting hot-pink signs warning of the impending operation along Wood Street in West Oakland, city crews towed vehicles, used machinery to tear down plywood shacks and shoveled debris into a trash compactor while a handful of residents packed up their belongings and spoke with city workers about getting aid.
The clean-up targeted Wood Street between West Grand Avenue and 26th Street last week, leaving intact much of the camp that extends for blocks of Wood Street and onto nearby vacant land owned by Caltrans, a railroad and private owners. But the city says it’s a first step toward a new state-funded shelter set to go up on the site in the near future.
“This closure is an important part of the plan to set up an emergency shelter program that will serve the residents on Wood Street and bring calm to this area,” city spokeswoman Karen Boyd said in an email. But activists and residents were dismayed the city was pushing people out before the new shelter was ready.
Meanwhile, Caltrans on Friday said it plans to close all Wood Street encampments on its land by the first week of August. The agency estimates about 200 people will be displaced, and said it is coordinating with the city and with Alameda County to offer them shelter.
“Caltrans’ responsibility is to ensure the safety of the traveling public and to protect and maintain California’s highway infrastructure,” spokeswoman Janis Mara wrote in an email. “The department is taking this action to address the increasingly serious safety risks to life, property and infrastructure at the encampment.”
The move comes after a fire at the camp sent black clouds of smoke billowing through the area last week and closed portions of Interstate 80 and 880 that run above the encampment. Leah Van Winkle of the activist group Essential Food and Medicine estimated about a dozen people were displaced, but no injuries were reported. It was the latest in a series of blazes at the camp.
Earlier this year, Oakland won $4.7 million in state funding to help clear the camp and house or shelter its occupants. The money was part of the Encampment Resolution Grant program initiated by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has made clearing homeless encampments a priority. Daniel Cooper, Oakland’s new homelessness administrator, recently said the city hadn’t received the money yet, but he hoped to use the funds within the next few months to build a shelter on the site — potentially a collection of high-end tiny homes — for at least 100 people.
There are more than 5,000 unhoused people living in Oakland, according to a count this year. After a hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has ramped back up its clearing of encampments, with a special focus on Wood Street and an East Oakland camp on East 12th Street.
Van Winkle was upset that the city didn’t wait to start removing the Wood Street camp’s inhabitants.
“Why are you clearing now, when you just got granted all this funding and don’t actually have anywhere for people to go?” she asked.
Clearing the rest of the camp is sure to be a difficult process. The unhoused people living there have formed multiple well-organized communities and have resisted displacement before. A group called Cob on Wood built their own unpermitted multi-building community center. In 2020, a group of people living on vacant, privately-owned land nearby negotiated a deal that granted them thousands of dollars in exchange for vacating the property — which the city then turned into a sanctioned RV park for unhoused people.
Estimates of how many people were displaced during the preliminary partial closure on Wood Street this week ranged from less than 10 to 20, while activists said another several dozen people were displaced when workers cleared an extension of the camp on nearby BNSF Railway property.
BNSF did not respond to a request for comment.
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The city has been reaching out to people camped on city-owned portions of Wood Street for more than a year, and has intensified efforts over the past few weeks, Boyd said. As of Thursday, she said the city has engaged with about a dozen people, half of whom have agreed to move into one of the shelter sites offered by the city — which, depending on availability, may include cabins, a safe RV parking site or a repurposed hotel. People who declined those options could move into other areas of the Wood Street encampment that haven’t yet been cleared.
Ebony Reed, 43, moved her trailer from the street into the sanctioned RV park the city opened on Wood last year. “It’s kind of OK for now,” she said.
The site is quiet, and the staff said they’d help her get a new ID and find housing, Reed said. After about a decade of homelessness, Reed said she’s ready to be housed so she can reconnect with her 11-year-old daughter, who has been living with her father.
Mavin Carter-Griffin, who has been a fixture on Wood Street for years, said she was heartbroken when the city tore down a make-shift structure she’d built. She said she wasn’t offered shelter, but even if it was offered, she wouldn’t take one of the city’s cabins because they don’t allow residents to cook for themselves. Instead, she said she’d relocate into a broken-down trailer down the street.
She vacillated between tears and defiance as she contemplated her next step. Carter-Griffin was part of the group that fought efforts to remove them in 2020.
“I refused to move,” she said. “And I still refuse to move.”
