Inside a Homeless Encampment — as It’s Being Torn Down

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/us/inside-a-homeless-encampment-as-its-being-torn-down.html

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Today, we have a special dispatch from my colleague Conor Dougherty, who writes about housing and economics. He’s based in Oakland, where tensions over gentrification and homelessness have been rising. Here’s his piece:

Nobody who lived in the homeless camp on Wood Street in Oakland was surprised when police cars and helmeted motorcycle officers started driving up and down the block early on a Tuesday. Their arrival was promised by bright signs, and city workers had spent the weeks prior going from resident to resident to prepare them for eviction.

But it wasn’t until a city front loader started tearing down plywood shanties that people started moving in earnest. The front loader was followed by a dump truck with an overhead grappling arm that consumed leftover piles of dirty blankets and splintered furniture. Residents scurried away with wheelbarrows of belongings and bikes hitched with trailers.

“It’s important to get the basics,” said Mahnaz Saberi, 44, who lives in a shed on a nearby dirt lot and rushed over with a dolly to help those being evicted. She had been moved several times by the city, she said, and had something of a strategy. “Extra blanket, your flashlights, your grill. Like things that you know that you’re going to need that night.”

Recent stories have shed light on the growing pressure to close California’s multiplying homeless camps or prevent them from popping up, reflecting a central tension for California and its liberal cities. Elected officials generally want to approach homelessness in a compassionate and service-oriented manner. But they have to manage the health and public safety issues that homelessness brings, as well as complaints from homeowners, tenants and merchants.

[Read more: Who would fire bomb a homeless encampment in Los Angeles?]

This tension was present on Wood Street, in an industrial stretch of West Oakland sandwiched between Interstate 880 and a residential neighborhood. Many of the camp’s residents had come from a park cleared by the city in May, reassembling their makeshift homes not far away along a chain-link fence at the park’s western boundary. The city later trucked in portable toilets and hand-washing stations, and soon a dense little community had formed, attracting newcomers like Tommy Goodluck.

Mr. Goodluck is a 55-year-old former carpenter from Wisconsin who has been in and out of prison for drug arrests. He survives on late-night scrapping jobs, lives in a trailer and uses improvised amenities like a fire-heated bathtub that he fills from hydrants.

His space on a dirt lot along Wood Street was snaked with orange extension cords to pull electricity from the lights on a nearby frontage road, allowing him to charge his phone and chill Mountain Dew in a hip-high refrigerator. The power worked only when the streetlights were on, so during the day the camp got no electricity from them and was mostly quiet, with the vaguely oceanic sound of distant cars passing at 70. Then, each evening, when the electricity started flowing, classic rock began to blare from a pair of rehabbed speakers while the ground was illuminated by a cracked white lamp mounted on a metal pole with an old belt.

The noise was only one of the complaints the city received. A recreational vehicle caught fire. Someone had started a pop-up marijuana farm. A soccer team had its backpacks stolen from the park. Parents were unhappy about there being a sports field next to a litter of old needles and empty liquor bottles.

“It was almost like an invasion,” said Marcus Johnson, chairman of the Prescott Neighborhood Council, who was among those urging the city to act.

It’s a complicated situation, for Wood Street, for Oakland, for California. Camp clearings placate neighbors, but don’t solve the problem and just move complaints to other neighborhoods.

Also, researchers say that as unsheltered people are repeatedly forced to move on, they grow suspicious of the government and its systems, making them less likely to accept shelter. After the city offered the Wood Street residents a chance to move to a shedlike shelter nearby, Ardis Hayes, 63, said he would rather be outdoors than in “a mini-concentration camp.”

[Why homeless populations are surging in California.]

Before the clearing, Alfredo Penante had one of the camp’s more elaborate dwellings: a wooden structure with walls and doors, a table and chairs, and a dresser topped with a microwave. It took about 10 seconds for a front loader to reduce it to rubble. Mr. Penante pulled a water jug and old pan out of the mess. Another resident, David Ayala, returned later for a silver cross. It took an hour of digging, but he found it.

By the next day, Larry Coke had moved across the street and was staying in a tent that Mr. Hayes had given him. Mr. Hayes slept nearby in a blue minivan. Talia Winn, a former home health aide who subsists on welfare payments while applying for disability insurance, had relocated her recreational vehicle a block away.

“I’m not moving until they tell me I got to go,” she said. “Because there’s nowhere else to go, really.”

We often link to sites that limit access for nonsubscribers. We appreciate your reading Times coverage, but we also encourage you to support local news if you can.

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Almost 300 drinking wells across the state have tested positive for chemicals that have been linked to cancer. [The Los Angeles Times]

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Uber laid off 350 people on Monday, bringing its total cuts to more than 1,000 since July. [The New York Times]

Our friends at the On Politics newsletter put together everything you need to know and read ahead of tonight’s Democratic presidential debate, including a quick conversation with Marc Lacey, The Times’s National editor, who will help moderate.

But he’s not spoiling any of the questions — not even for his colleagues.

San Francisco is graying — literally. Neighborhoods where homes were once a rainbow of pastels and buildings were covered with vibrant murals are being painted gray. Some say it’s another potent symbol of gentrification. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

Take a peek inside the ornate Trinity Broadcasting Network’s headquarters in Costa Mesa, which is set to be totally remodeled to become an English language school. (Right now there’s a lot of gold.) [The Orange County Register]

Here’s a guide to leaf peeping across the U.S., including in California. [The Washington Post]

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Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.