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Caron Creighton [00:02:16] So the city of Oakland built a cabin site at Wood Street. They’ve definitely improved their tiny cabins. It’s one person or you can choose to have a roommate. There was laundry on site, there were showers, there were toilets, there was a small kitchen, a little bit of a space for people to sit and hang out. But I still wouldn’t call it a home. I mean, people can’t have keys to their own space.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:52] But basically what they were offered were these tiny homes with showers and a kitchen, not a key, but a roof over their heads. What exactly were people promised when they moved into these tiny home? Because they weren’t necessarily expected to live there forever, right? They were supposed to be temporary.
Caron Creighton [00:03:11] When folks moved into these tiny homes, they were told that they could stay for 90 days with the option to extend for another 90 days. And some folks have stayed there for the entire two years they’ve been open. The city of Oakland often does not have enough shelter beds available, so this site was created for the people at Wood Street. They were essentially told that this is the way that you get into permanent housing is by moving into this cabin site, and then if you get your documents ready, if you work with us, we can get you in the pipeline for permanent housing.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:46] How did the people that you met at these tiny homes describe what it was like to live at these tiny homes?
Caron Creighton [00:03:54] I spoke with a couple of different folks who are currently living at the cabins. One of those people was Larry Coke. He’s someone who kind of keeps to himself.
Larry Coke [00:04:04] Well, I’ve been in this one, Wood Street encampment for a long time.
Caron Creighton [00:04:09] He was okay with living at the cabins.
Larry Coke [00:04:11] It’s not bad because we have showers and stuff, you know, so that was a plus they tried to help us, you know with as far as getting also security cards and stuff like that all our documents.
Caron Creighton [00:04:22] He didn’t mind not having a key. I think he mentioned not liking places that have a lot of rules that kind of feel infantilizing, but he was definitely happier to be in the cabins than on the street, for sure.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:37] And I know you met one woman who had a sort of less positive experience. Tell me about Tamra Lynn Rosselli.
Caron Creighton [00:04:44] So I spoke with Tamara Rosselli, who I had met from living at the 1707 Wood Street lot before it was evicted. Tamara has a very typical experience to, I think, what a lot of unhoused folks have, which is, you know, she was living at The Cabins for what she said was 16 months, and she was informed by another housing service provider, folks who were not running the cabin site that she was not on the list for housing yet.
Tamara Rosselli [00:05:10] And I’m like, excuse me? She was like, no. She’s like, you’ve been doc ready since the second week you were there, correct? I said, yes. She said, they never put you in the housing queue. So all that time.
Caron Creighton [00:05:22] One time I sat there for nothing, you know. And so that person helped her get on the housing list. Eventually she moved into another apartment, but she felt like, you know, she didn’t really like this place.
Tamara Rosselli [00:05:34] I had crazy neighbors that broke our glass windows in front. She knocked on my doors and windows all night long, screaming, and their answer is call the police.
Caron Creighton [00:05:43] You know, she didn’t like her neighbors there. She said that someone tased her dog, like it was not a space where she really felt like she wanted to stay.
Tamara Rosselli [00:05:50] I mean, it was more uncomfortable than the encampment. It was just, that place, it just wasn’t for me.
Caron Creighton [00:06:00] And so she eventually left that placement and came back to the cabin site. But at that point, I think she couldn’t get an official cabin there, so she kind of ended up just squatting.
Tamara Rosselli [00:06:11] And I say, I’m not leaving, you do what you have to do, but this is a place for homeless people that need housing and I’m homeless and I need housing. You’re asking me to go live on the streets so that you can hold this empty until you guys leave? That’s insane.
Caron Creighton [00:06:24] I’d also like to say, like, it wasn’t necessarily, like permanent housing. Like, she was moved into, you know, a housing spot for domestic violence survivors. She had also been offered SROs. I don’t think these are things that you or I would consider permanent housing. It’s still kind of a transitional space. Even the way she talked about, you know, being kicked out of the cabin site now was that, you know, she really stressed out about it at first, but she, I think she’s experienced so much. Instability in her life that she can handle it.
Tamara Rosselli [00:06:56] I’ve learned in the last five years not to become attached to things.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:04] Coming up, why the cabins are closing down, and why the process has been so messy. Stay with us. I mean, now these cabins are closing sort of officially, right? What does it mean now that these are closing? What happened?
Caron Creighton [00:07:30] Yeah, so what I can gather from what the cities told me is that, you know, they need to close the cabins because they have to clear the site to give it back to the actual landowner. The city’s leasing it from a private developer. And so they need have a certain amount of time to clear a lot again, get everything off of it before the end of the year when it has to go back to them. So the cabs were definitely set to close at the end June. It was really just the there was a lot of back-and-forth about when that would happen and whether the service provider, BOSS – Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency, would stay there.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:08:11] For the last few months, people living at the cabins have been jerked around by the timeline of its closure. First, the cabin’s nearly shut down in March, three months early, because of several missed payments from the city of Oakland. The service provider, Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency or BOSS, said it wasn’t until it started sending out layoff notices that the city sat down with its CEO, promising to make good on its debts. So BOSS rescinded its layoff notice with the intention of closing down as planned at the end of June. But then, at the end of May, people living at the Wood Street cabins got another piece of unexpected news.
Caron Creighton [00:09:05] BOSS pulled out of the cabins last month because they said they weren’t being paid by the city of Oakland. They said they would lose $400,000 if they had to spend another month working there unpaid. On May 30th, folks at the cabins got notices on their doors that said 24-hour notice, no trespassing. And that was kind of the big indicator. That was when Boss stepped out. The city says that they think BOSS put up the signs. BOSS says they think the city put up signs. I know a lot of folks who live at the cabins were pretty disturbed when they got those notices. It didn’t state a time of day when they would have to leave. And then, of course, the city came by and took down the notices, said, you don’t have to live now, but you do have to on June 30th.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:48] What has it meant that BOSS has been unpaid for the last couple of months? What has that meant for the services that this provider is supposed to offer and also the timeline of how this closure even happened?
Caron Creighton [00:10:02] Since BOSS has pulled out, there are other people who’ve kind of moved into the cabin site and are maybe squatting there. Those folks probably won’t get a placement even though they’re still homeless. Over time, residents complained about the toilets and bathrooms not being cleaned up. The photos looked really disgusting. And so I think it’s just created a lot more chaos for folks who were really hoping to kind of get rid of some of that chaos in their lives.
Tamara Rosselli [00:10:25] Here, we were never like really informed of much, you know? They weren’t really telling us anything.
Caron Creighton [00:10:33] When folks got those notices. I think they were pretty stressed out for about 24 hours and then realized they’d been abandoned by the service provider. And that’s when Tamara tried to step up and help take care of her friends who were living there and kind of tried to organize people to keep things clean together while they were kind of waiting to see what their next steps would be.
Tamara Rosselli [00:10:57] I know a lot of people from when I lived in the encampment, I used to be really involved and maybe this is my time to get re-involved. And I said, I’ll make some phone calls tomorrow and see if I can get us some resources. And so that’s when I started.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:11:09] I mean, that sounds so chaotic. How does Larry describe what it was like to get that notification and what has been explained to him about what is even happening?
Caron Creighton [00:11:21] Yeah, I spoke with Larry the day that they that the notices had been put up and has anybody like come to talk to you in person about the notice?
Larry Coke [00:11:28] No, they just taped a piece of paper on the door and that was it.
Caron Creighton [00:11:35] He was pretty confused. We were heading into a weekend. It was a Friday. He wasn’t sure if he would, I mean, he assumed that he’d be able to stay the weekend at least, but you know, he thought maybe he’d be kicked out on Monday. But I think like so many unhoused people who face such instability, again, like he was just like, well, whatever it is, I’ll deal with it.
Larry Coke [00:11:56] I’ll take anything really, as long as I’m by myself, not sharing spaces with anybody. But, you know, I just need a place that’s decent and I can have my dog with me that allows animals and stuff like that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:14] Caron reached out to BOSS, the service provider for the cabins, but didn’t get a reply to calls or emails. The City of Oakland provided a written statement and did not respond to follow-up questions. In their statement, the city says that as of May 30, there were roughly 37 residents in the Safe RV and cabin sites. The statement also said that the city is providing, “short-term emergency support” through June 30. But it’s still unclear just how many former Wood Street residents will be permanently housed.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:56] Going back to two years ago when the Wood Street encampment folks were told that this was the only pathway to housing, if you move into these tiny homes, I mean, how many people actually got that?
Caron Creighton [00:13:09] When I asked the city about how many folks had moved into permanent housing this year, reporting for this story, they said basically that since the spring, more than 50 people had either left the program or transitioned into alternative programs. So, you know, that’s not information on how many people had moved into permanent house, that’s just, you now, 50 people went somewhere. So, as you can see, it’s kind of tough to get this information from the city. I spoke with someone at Alameda County Healthcare for the Homeless who told me that they’re working with the City of Oakland. To try to get folks into placements, but getting folks into permanent placements can take a long time. I don’t know how many people have moved into permanent housing from this program.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:50] So, I mean, now that the cabin sites are closing, Caron, what are the plans for this specific location at Wood Street for this land?
Caron Creighton [00:14:00] The neighborhood has been changing a lot since the Wood Street encampment’s been evicted. There’s the Prescott Market, there’s the Ballers Stadium, there’s some new housing developments, there’s plans to build a new beer garden up there. So I don’t know what’s happening at 2601 Wood Street where the cabins are. I would assume, based on everything else that’s happening in that neighborhood, that they’re probably going to build housing, but I couldn’t say exactly.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:31] I mean, you’ve been covering Wood Street for a long time now. What do you make of this latest chapter, I guess, in the Wood Street saga?
Caron Creighton [00:14:42] It really feels kind of like, you know, the perfect ending for the Wood Street saga. I mean, it was really disorganized when the city was talking to folks and trying to get them to come to the cabins. When they first started evicting people off of the lot on state land, the cab ins didn’t even exist. There was nowhere for them to go. And when they talked to people, there was so much miscommunication about what would be at the site. Would they have kitchens? Would they had bathrooms? Would they get keys? It’s clearly still very disorganized. So yeah, it makes sense to me that it would end this way.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:19] Well, Caron Creighton, thank you so much.
Caron Creighton [00:15:30] Thank you.
