Oakland Built a Shelter for Unhoused Residents of Wood Street. Now, It’s Evicting Them

Updated 2:05 p.m. Friday

On Monday, Oakland officials are expected to begin evicting residents of two city-run homeless shelters along Wood Street, the site of what was once the largest community of unhoused people in Northern California.

The two sites — a safe RV parking site with 40 spots and a 100-bed cabin community — were always meant to be temporary shelters, but ceased operation in mid-May, when the shelter operator abruptly left. While some residents have found permanent housing, others have already left to find shelter in tents, RVs or other makeshift homes, according to SheMika Crawford, who was living in the cabins until she moved out on Thursday. At least five residents remain, city officials said.

Two weeks ago, Crawford signed the lease on a new home. She was only meant to stay at the cabin for 90 days, but June marked two years living there.

“You’re looking at the cabin falling apart,” she said. “We fix it ourselves.”

After BOSS stopped managing the sites in May, Crawford said, “We’ve been winging it.”

In 2022, the city and Caltrans began evicting unhoused residents from a sprawling, nearly milelong encampment on a vacant lot underneath Interstate 580 that runs parallel to Wood Street.

Most of the RVs and makeshift homes were on Caltrans’ land, which the agency closed in the fall of 2022. A portion of the encampment, which was on city-owned land, remained there until the spring of 2023, when the city moved many of the remaining residents into the newly opened cabin community.

It partnered with nonprofit Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) to operate both sites. Along with RV spaces and cabin beds, BOSS also promised to provide services to find stable housing and employment opportunities. During its two years of operation, 185 people lived between the two sites.

But in late May, the nonprofit stopped operating the sites after months of late or missing payments from the city of Oakland. In June, the City Council voted to decommission the two sites and return them to the owner by December. According to a city notice, residents remaining after 5 p.m. on Monday will be arrested. Any belongings will be discarded and vehicles will be towed.

“The city estimates that the work to restore the property to returnable condition will require up to six months,” Sean Maher, a spokesperson for the city of Oakland, wrote in an email to KQED. “Work to implement this closure and find alternative support for the program residents has been underway for the last several months.”

BOSS started providing housing and employment services for people living at the RV safe parking site on Wood Street in July 2022, according to the company. From then through late May, the nonprofit served 48 people. Of those, 75% found permanent housing before the nonprofit left the site.

But the numbers look more grim for those who lived in the cabins. Of the 137 residents, fewer than a quarter found permanent housing and nearly 84% went to other shelters.

Donald Frazier, CEO of the nonprofit, said the program had its issues — the roads leading to the sites were riddled with potholes, staff slowly left and services dwindled as the city’s payments to the nonprofit grew less frequent. Though people are remaining on the sites, he said it’s not for a lack of trying on BOSS’s part.

“We were brought in from the beginning to provide housing navigation services, clinical services and just day-to-day services, food and making sure that everything is operational,” he said. “A vast majority of people were successful.”

According to the city’s latest count, roughly 5,480 unhoused people were living in Oakland last year, about two-thirds of whom were living in tents, cars and RVs.

Maher said the city is working with Alameda County officials to place those remaining at the sites into temporary housing. In the meantime, John Janosko, a former resident of the Wood Street cabins, hopes the city and the county consider the solutions he and other housing rights advocates proposed to address housing insecurity.

“The city needs to really start listening to us,” he said. “We have an opportunity because of Barbara Lee right now to change the narrative, to change how things are being done, how we treat unhoused people in Oakland right now and in Alameda County and be a leader in change.”

KQED’s Beth LaBerge contributed to this report.