How a Bay Area Program Helps Unhoused Residents Become Protectors of Their Environment

Outside his tent, among the dead leaves and saplings, Eric Adams keeps a neat stack of bags stuffed with garbage.

“I just try to pick it up and try to do the best that I can,” he said.

Adams is one of twenty-some people who live on a wooded strip of land tucked between a freeway and a busy street in El Sobrante.

The 48-year-old keeps his patch tidy, but all around him the ground is strewn with plastic bags, food wrappers, even a mattress and a tire. He’s so fed up that he’s started confronting his neighbors.

“I’m like, ‘This is nasty,’” he said. “‘I don’t want to pick up this mess for you to throw it all back.’”

Adams doesn’t just pick up garbage. He pulls debris from the creek nearby and yanks out invasive ivy, “because I enjoy it,” he said.

He wasn’t always like this.

“I never thought I would give a damn,” he said. “I’m aware now.”

That changed after Adams joined a pilot program teaching unhoused residents ecological literacy and creek restoration. It’s a novel approach to addressing the environmental harms brought on by the growing number of people setting up camp along creeks and canals as homelessness surges in California.

The eight-week program was put on this summer by the Contra Costa Resource Conservation District, the nonprofit Safe Organized Spaces Richmond and a pair of researchers. It’s part of a larger study examining the intersection of homelessness, climate change, and urban streams across the Bay Area’s nine counties.

The researchers estimate 10% of California’s unhoused population — about 18,700 people — lives along waterways. In the absence of enough affordable housing and shelter, it feels like the best of bad options for many.

“People like to be along streams because they’re out of sight, out of mind,” said Costanza Rampini, an environmental studies professor at San José State University and one of the study leads. She and her students interviewed more than 300 people living along waterways. “They’re not on our sidewalks where they’re going to be confronted more with local residents, with local law enforcement.”

That’s even more true since cities started cracking down on encampments last year. But people are also seeking out water for drinking, bathing and washing clothes, and for shade and softer ground to sleep on.

“The problem is it’s polluting the water,” said Eileen White, executive officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We want to protect our waterways, for the beauty, for the environment, for the wildlife.”

Stewards of their streams

The pilot program Adams joined was designed to test whether encampment residents could become partners in protecting streams.

Rampini’s hope is that the program can benefit the environment while improving people’s well-being and helping them stabilize their lives. “Can we provide opportunities for them to maybe make some income and feel a sense of usefulness and agency?” she said.

On a Friday afternoon this summer, Adams and a group of unhoused and formerly homeless men and women gathered along a stream behind the Pinole Library. They had just finished a class on erosion control and were putting it into practice.

Standing in the shade of tall trees, they trimmed willow branches into stakes and hammered them into the soil to stabilize the banks.

“Ooh! This is the kid in me now,” Adams said, scrambling down to the water.

Knee-deep in the creek, he and classmates Brianni Peters and Ronnie Walker scouted spots to drive the stakes.

“Hey, Eric! Look where I put mine,” Peters shouted. “I did it!”

They laughed as water splashed into Walker’s boots.

“My bad!” Adams said with a mischievous grin.

“I’m having fun, man,” Walker said. “I’m here for the journey.”

The group has also learned about steelhead trout and their habitat, studied invasive and native plants, and practiced other restoration techniques.

“I feel like I’m halfway a botanist right now,” said Walker, who’s 36 and has been homeless for three years. “I love the environment. I love being outside.”

A dire need for cleanups

As more encampments spring up along streams and canals, trash, human waste and chemicals are taking a toll on water quality, drawing pressure from regulators.

Nowhere in the Bay Area is this challenge more evident than in San José, where at least 1,200 people were living along streams earlier this year.

“It was just unmanageable,” said Rajani Nair, deputy director of the Watershed Protection Division of the city’s Environmental Services Department. “The best solution was really to ensure these encampments are not living in the waterways.”

Under pressure from regulators, the city cleared encampments from 16 miles of waterways last fiscal year. Workers hauled away almost 2,000 tons of trash and set up no-encampment zones.

It cost the city nearly $64 million, including the cost of building new shelters.

Officials say their efforts have led to healthier streams. But despite new shelter investments, there are still far more unsheltered people than beds in San José and across the state. And, advocates say, what is available doesn’t work for everyone.

For some, the city’s tiny homes, motel shelters and sanctioned campgrounds offer a welcome alternative to creekside life. For others, giving up their belongings for a short-term placement is a losing bet, said Tristia Bauman, directing attorney of housing at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. “There are also many people who are in far worse situations, who will be far less able to be self-sufficient, who lost a lot of money and lost a lot of trust in the system,” Bauman said.

As long as that’s the case, the researchers say people will find their way back to waterways.

“People are voting with their feet where they want to be,” UC Davis hydrology professor and study co-lead Greg Pasternack said. That’s why he and Rampini are looking for a way to work with encampment residents where they are.

“We have to find a way that the environmental goals of our society and the social goals of our society can coexist,” he said.

As a scientist who’s spent nearly three decades working in environmental restoration, Pasternack admits he didn’t always see things this way.

“I’ve dedicated my life — made major sacrifices — to try to help support the environment,” he said.

The time he’s spent studying encampments and talking with the people who live in them, shifted his perspective.

“I can’t look at the suffering of people and say that we should just ignore that, that the stream in and of itself is more important,” he said.

Restoration as recovery

There’s plenty of evidence that spending time in nature improves mental and physical health.

But, Rampini pointed out, “We haven’t really extended that idea to people experiencing homelessness, who may actually be dealing with … more mental and physical health issues than a majority of housed folks.”

She said the goal isn’t to turn restoration into a career track out of homelessness, but to test whether it can be beneficial for those living along waterways and at the fringes of society.

Walker and Adams say it has.

“I never thought in a million years I’d be out here doing what I’m doing now. It’s so surreal. And it’s so relaxing,” Adams said. “There are a lot of things that went on in my lifetime, and I just get to sit here and just think about it and realize everything’s not all that bad.”

A few years ago, Adams said he was working as a substitute teacher. He has a college degree, a teenage son and he had a partner. Then his life unraveled. He said he got shot, his relationship fell apart, and he lost his closest family members.

“I lost my crutch, my grandmother, and I lost my dad, who was my best friend,” he said. His father had himself been homeless for much of Adams’ life.

After his father’s death, Adams began spending more time on the streets with people who’d known him. He went from couch surfing to sleeping in his car to pitching a tent. He stopped working, and his drug problem got worse.

“I literally just gave up. I sat down,” he said.

After five years of homelessness and often-debilitating depression, he said the creek restoration program has given him motivation again. He was one of three participants kept on after the initial training and now earns $19 an hour doing part-time restoration work.

“They saw something inside of us, regardless of our living situation,” he said.

So far, the part-time work isn’t enough to get Adams out of his tent. But it’s given him something else.

“I feel like I got a purpose now in life,” he said.

Adams said he wants to keep learning ecology. He knows jobs in the field aren’t easy to come by, but if he could, he’d work full-time for the county conservation district — restoring the same creek he lives beside.

“I want this to be my creek,” he said. “I want to take pride in cleaning up this creek.”