HOUSING: The City of Oakland is Engaging in a Dangerous Practice of Repeated Displacement, Exclusion, and Trauma of the City's Most Vulnerable Residents

The City of Oakland is engaging in a dangerous practice of repeated displacement, exclusion, and trauma of the City's most vulnerable residents.

While the housing crisis is a statewide and national crisis, Oakland's houseless population has grown exponentially over the last several years and surging in recent years.  Reports estimate that up to 80% of those who are houseless are Black/African American residents.

The City has initiated "solutions" including the Mayor's Tough Shed program and the overnight parking lot program in partnership with local churches.  However, these efforts expect to serve tens of residents and have barely put a dent in the visible tent cities and curbside communities that have been in existence for years with new ones popping up on almost every street in the City.

The City's common "solution" for communities that either refuse the limited options offered by the City or have no other option is to evict them from their outdoor communities.  To be clear, evicting people from the public street is inhumane and uncivilized.  When you evict people from the streets who have already been displaced from their homes, priced out of the local housing market, and have what little belongings they can maintain with them, you are evicting them from the social and human sphere of our City life.  Where they go and what they do next will still be the City's consequences. In fact, most of them simply move to other existing encampments or create new ones elsewhere in the City. A cycle of constant displacement and trauma because the City has communicated that there simply is no place at all for those struggling to live, work, and attend school here despite their inability to afford the current housing market.   They include our elders, mothers, children, pet owners, disabled residents, veterans, and/or residents who have chronic health conditions.

The City recently evicted the curbside community located between 81st and 85th Avenues on San Leandro Blvd.  However, immediately on the other side of the railroad tracks between 81st and 83rd Avenues on G Street, there is an even larger tent community that the City has mostly ignored. Like most things, these evictions are political.  They target the largest and most visible encampments to forcible remove while allowing others to flourish and grow.  The City prioritizes those around public transit, profitable businesses, and those near white and affluent areas of Oakland.  Mayor Schaaf even targeted the curbside community near Home Depot right after a white supremacist engaged in a vulgar demonstration attempting to remove the encampment himself.  This is not an ethic of equity nor of justice.

The City determines that these encampments and tent cities are a public nuisance and/or violate public safety.  The City issues eviction notices then proceeds to forcibly remove encampments, residents, and tear down any structures they have built for shelter.  The City expends monies each time it does so to pay law enforcement, city workers, and contractors to place notices of evictions, enforce the eviction, and to destroy the shelters.  The City has also spent legal fees and costs defending its evictions in court when residents and advocates have been successful in obtaining emergency restraining orders preventing evictions based on Constitutional arguments.  While advocates like the East Oakland Collective scramble to raise funds, collect item donations, and make public pleas for shelter, tents, and basic necessities, the City continues its eviction procedures.  The City makes no efforts to partner with advocate groups to obtain basic items like water, canned food, weather gear, hygiene kits, blankets, and/or tents for the residents that they are evicting.

In reality, nuisance law and eviction rights were never intended to deal with this mass of City residents and housing displacement.  The existing law and courts cannot solve the housing crisis and the City's attempts to do so have led to a miserable cycle of violent displacement that is wasting public dollars and eroding public trust and confidence that the City's elected leadership can and will effectively address the housing crisis.  Instead, it seems the City will continue with its campaign of temporary solutions, of attempting to disappear away those caught in the crisis, of passing more restrictive laws and policies that will limit peoples' ability to survive, and of cycling the most vulnerable residents around the City with its evictions.

When the City's leadership is willing to listen and to take a different approach, solutions have already been articulated by those closest to the problem, their advocates, and places like the state of Utah who reduced their homeless population by 91% as of 2015 by simply providing housing.

--Victory for Oakland
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