Vanessa Rancaño [00:01:55] Yeah, this is an industrial area on the western edge of the city. It attracted people living in RVs over the past few years, but eventually got to the point where there were RVs, cars, broken down busses, tents and structures that people built just for blocks and blocks along Second Street and some of the cross streets there. Trash started piling up. There were problems with rats. There was rotting food. There was feces. The data I saw was that in 2023, police were called to the area about 250 times. And there were 20 fires reported to the fire department. Eventually city officials declared this area an imminent health hazard and the city council actually directed staff to focus on cleaning up this area and another large RV encampment nearby that’s on Harrison Street.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:06] I know you met some people who were living on Second Street before the city decided that they wanted to clear it. Who did you meet and how did they describe life on Second street?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:03:19] I met Fannie Hall when I was down there early this year.
Fannie Hall [00:03:24] Yeah, all these little guys. Plus I got my daughter’s dog. He’s a little smaller. So I got 11, really.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:03:31] She was poking her head out of this vintage blue and white RV that she has. She shares it with her adult daughter and granddaughter and so many Chihuahuas, nine puppies and two adults.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:45] Oh, my goodness.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:03:47] Her son was also living across the street in another camper that she has. She said that she’d been there about six years and the family ended up there. After this house they were renting in San Pablo got red tagged for code violations.
Fannie Hall [00:04:04] My landlord was one of those landlords that tried to do everything cheaply and it cost me my home and I had to move out with them. They came on a Monday, I had to be out by Friday.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:04:18] She claims that they were some of the first people down on Second Street, that it was quiet at first, and she tried to keep the area where she was clean and keep a low profile. She works three days a week as a home health aide, and she has a car, so she said she would use that to haul garbage to a dumpster down the street. But over time, more and more people moved in, trash started piling up.
Fannie Hall [00:04:47] Rats became a problem. I’ve had my camper chewed on and I’ve killed multiple rats up in my camper and I keep a clean camper.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:04:54] So it became increasingly difficult, but she seemed to like the independence and she’d been there for quite some time, you know, so while it was certainly not ideal and she talked about wanting housing, I think she had figured out a fairly manageable life for herself and her family under really hard circumstances.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:22] Yeah, and I imagine her family unit, it’s very important for her to keep them all together and that they were, it sounds like they were really able to do that. And then I know you met someone who moved to Second Street a little bit more recently. Tell me about Elvia.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:05:38] Elvia Guzman told me that she and her husband ended up on Second Street last year after bouncing around a couple different RV encampments.
Elvia Guzman [00:05:48] Second Street was a place where there was a lot of RVs and a little community there, so we just came down here.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:05:56] Briefly been around Harrison Street in that big encampment in Berkeley, recently got swept. Before that, they were in Richmond, where she had lived for a long time. And they ended up in an RV there until the area, the encampments they were living in there got cleared. Then she came to Berkeley.
Elvia Guzman [00:06:19] Police wasn’t moving us as much and they weren’t really bothering us over here.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:06:30] In general, she made it sound like she never felt fully safe or comfortable living in an RV. She talked about how they always had to park in sort of sketchy areas. She also talked about ways in which life was just hard in an RV.
Elvia Guzman [00:06:49] Everything is like ten times harder. Sometimes you don’t have water. Sometimes, you know, it’s too cold or too hot not enough space and I Think it’s frustrating a little bit for like it was frustrating a lot a little it for me because I get anxiety.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:07:06] She seemed much less comfortable than Fannie living in an RV, although she was really grateful for the shelter it provided and the security, you know? To the extent that it provided security, she was very grateful for that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:28] How long was Elvia living in an RV on Second Street?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:07:32] Elvia and her husband moved to 2nd Street around six months before the city started moving in earnest to close down this encampment.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:45] I want to talk more about the city’s effort to close down this encampment. Tell me about what the city began offering to people living in these RVs on Second Street.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:07:59] So what they did is offer people cash for their RVs. So if participants agreed to move indoors into this motel shelter they were offering, they would get $175 per linear foot of RV. That pencils out to about $6,000 for a 35-foot RV. And the way it would work is that people would get some of that money when they first moved into the motel. Then they do this trial period. To see if they felt comfortable at the shelter, if they wanted to stay. And if they decided they wanted to stay, they’d get their RV towed. And at that point, they got the rest of the money. If they decided to leave, they would keep the initial 15% of the payout that they’d already gotten, and they got to keep their RV. RV encampments are hard to deal with because people are reluctant to leave their RV for shelter. And that had been the case on Second Street.
Peter Radu [00:09:00] And so, we’re just giving folks another choice in their choice set, right? About how to navigate this reality that we had to close this encampment.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:09:08] Peter Radu, who oversees the city’s homeless response team, told me that he saw it as a way to build trust with people and overcome some of that reluctance.
Peter Radu [00:09:24] Anything interim or anything time-limited, I think they were very rationally and rightly afraid that if they moved in and that didn’t work out, they would be back out on the street, but this time without their largest remaining asset, which is their vehicle.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:09:38] They were out there for about three months, hearing them out about their concerns and trying to find ways to accommodate their individual needs, right? So some people, initially, I was told the motel was gonna only accept one dog per room. It quickly became clear that that wasn’t gonna work because so many people had. Dogs. So they found ways to accommodate more dogs. They found ways to place people together in rooms, not just couples, but friends.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:16] And I mean, that’s pretty unique, Vanessa, I feel like you don’t often hear of efforts like this that feel and sound very individual. Usually it feels like a one-size-fit-all sort of solution, just throw folks into shelters, but it seems like there was a real effort here to accommodate people.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:10:36] That’s right, but I think Peter Radu would say that they’ve known for a long time that a low barrier model, right, which is what they would call this shelter, is crucial. But what really made the difference in this case was really the buyback program.
Peter Radu [00:10:57] The hypothesis, I suppose, in wanting to pilot this is what if we could liquefy that asset for them? What if we can buy it for them, would that change their decision-making, and would that changed their willingness to engage with us in the homeless system?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:11:15] I think it’s more than just an incentive, I think that it’s building trust by promising these people a bit of a safety net. People are very distrustful that they will actually end up getting permanent housing. So if they give up their RV but they at least have a few thousand dollars in their pocket, that’s a big difference, right? I mean, I talked to multiple people who told me that. That gave them a bit of reassurance and made them feel more comfortable taking the city up on this shelter offer.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:01] It sounds like a really big decision to make for many of the folks living on Second Street. How many people were offered this buyout program and how many took it?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:12:21] So Radu told me that outreach workers encountered 32 vehicles out there during the closure process. In all, 36 people and 26 dogs ended up moving into this motel. Of those 32 vehicles they encountered, only three of them are still on the streets.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:51] The housing market is not great. That’s the reason why I’m still where I’m at, because who can afford the high cost of living?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:12:58] Fannie’s two RVs, hers and her sons, are among those three.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:03] I’m one of the people that can go in, but I don’t want to go in. I’d rather stay where I’m safe and I’m familiar with, and I want to do the RV buyback, but I think they could come up with a little bit better.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:13:18] Fannie told me she was worried about the unknowns at the shelter, so would she feel safe there? Who would be there? She worried about restrictions, not being able to cook in her motel room, not be able to have guests. She knew that however accommodating they were going to be, she was never going to to take 11 dogs.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:41] You know, there were criteria that they require for you to move in. They want to get into too much in your personal business. You know that doesn’t require them to do that.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:13:49] They ultimately did not take the offer and they ended up moving to the Oakland-Emeryville border. She’s working with outreach workers and says she is in the process of trying to get housing. It sounds like if that doesn’t happen in the next couple of years, she’s seriously considering moving out of state.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:12] So it sounds like Fannie Hall decided not to take the offer because there was a sense of stability in her current situation, and giving up her RV felt like a huge risk. But the vast majority of people did actually take the offer to sell their RVs, including Elvia Guzman. What did she tell you?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:14:38] Elvia, though she was really ready to get out of an RV and into permanent housing, she was so scared to give up this shelter and security that had caught her when she’d lost everything else.
Elvia Guzman [00:14:56] The RV was like our everything, like I was just nervous about the whole thing because that’s where we lived and that’s all we had. I want to say we almost got about $3,000.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:15:07] And I did not seem like it would work.
Elvia Guzman [00:15:10] It seemed, I think it was more than enough.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:15:15] When I met her, she was at the motel shelter on a busy street in Berkeley, and she said that it was going pretty well so far.
Elvia Guzman [00:15:25] It’s safer here and it’s just way better to be in a real place, like have a real roof over your head.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:15:35] Said she was working with staff there to get all of her paperwork in order so that she could apply for housing. She seemed to be feeling, you know, at least somewhat optimistic and just reiterated how ready she was to be off the streets.
Elvia Guzman [00:15:58] Hoping to just you know end up with our housing like we’ve been wanting for so many years now and be stable. I just want an boring normal regular life, you know? That’s all. I’ll be happy with that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:16:17] Right, because this is ultimately not a permanent living situation, being in these motels. So I’m curious for Peter and the city, was this a success?
Vanessa Rancaño [00:16:33] He sees this as a resounding success.
Peter Radu [00:16:37] We had almost four in five, I believe 79% of the people that we encountered moved in indoors. And we didn’t have to do a big enforcement operation at all.
Vanessa Rancaño [00:16:50] Like I said, of those 32 vehicles, there are just three that are still on the streets. None of them are on Second Street. Compared to past efforts to close encampments like this, Radu said that they had a much higher success rate. And so this is something that he says they’d like to try to build upon going forward.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:17:13] And also, we’re just talking about people who are living in RVs, but what do you think there is to learn from this when it comes to addressing all forms of homelessness in the Bay Area?
