The Village

By Needa Bee

New Cruel & Unusual Tactics on Oakland Curbside Communities Receives Anger, Frustration and Disbelief

Since December of last year, Mayor Libby Schaaf’s “Encampment Management Team” launched a new approach to their homeless solution plan: demolish self-built homes at curbside communities, for “brick and mortar fire code & building code violations,” and tow and impound entire RV & camper communities. To date four self built home communities have been flattened, and at least four known vehicle dwelling communities have lost their homes on wheels.

More than 300 people have had their homes demolished or towed by Department of Public Works. The City has labeled these actions as “clean and clears.” The residents were allowed to remain, but forced to temporarily move their belongings and downgrade to tents. The City offered no alternative shelters or provided tents to the residents who lost their shelter.

After the destruction of their communities, advocates and health practitioners documented many set-backs, tragedies and medical issues  that resulted from The City’s actions, including:

• Deep depression, despair, anxiety, PTSD
• Loss of medicine & medical equipment
• Death of a pets who were hit by cars, because they were running around confused with no homes to go to 
• Loss of laptops and other electronics
• Loss of jobs or set-backs in self-employment
• Total destruction of stability and safety
• Loss of thousands of dollars in materials used to build homes
• Dozens of incidents of pneumonia and two known cases of people freezing to death

Community members continue to be outraged The City would destroy sturdy shelters in the midst of its homeless state of emergency and not improve people’s conditions. And to do so right before the rains and colder Bay Area weather approaches is a further injury and insult. 

Despite community members calling, emailing and texting City officials demanding a halt each time a community was destroyed, the City ignored the public’s plea and instead moved forward with their plans. The City also lied to the media and public by claiming they provided residents with tents or adequate shelter.

“The Encampment Management Team (EMT) made this plan without speaking to the residents of the curbside community. We are asking the Mayor and her EMT to take a compassionate approach and stop the destruction of the homes,” said Candice Elder, Founder of The East Oakland Collective and curbside community advocate. “Instead The City should prioritize housing and relocating camps to a safer location for all.”

Advocating for the best, but preparing for the worst, organizations like The East Oakland Collective, The Village, and Love & Justice in The Streets headed up drives to replace the destroyed or impounded homes with large 8-15 person tents.

“None of the residents want to lose their homes. And no one can understand why The City would destroy their homes and leave them on the streets with absolutely nothing,” said Talya Husbands-Hankin with Homeless Advocacy Working Group. 

Husbands-Hankin explained residents need support with getting tents; tarps and other weatherproofing materials; palettes, sheet metal and other rat protection materials. 

Legal observers, advocates and community supporters on hand supported residents and responded to what they are calling an inhumane, violent and traumatizing decision that can and should be avoided.

“The reality is there isn’t anywhere for folks to go and The City can’t properly serve us with housing that is affordable. So our people took it upon themselves to house themselves,’ said Needa Bee, unhoused Co-Founder of The Village, a curbside community human rights movement. “Instead of knocking our community members down while they are trying to stand up The City needs to be humane in their practices. And The City needs to immediately find adequate, long term emergency housing, with priority given to mothers with newborns or small children, the sick and the elderly. One night in a shelter isn’t adequate when compared to a tight knit community that takes care of each other.”

The seven sites targeted with this new and inhumane approach to homelessness were: the tiny home community on San Leandro Blvd between 81st and 85th Ave.; Housing & Dignity Village, the curbside community next to the High Street Home Depot; Union Point Park; the vehicle community once located around East Oakland DMV; the RV community once located at Rumaldi Park in West Oakland; Wood Street Collective; E12 between 16 and 19 Aves.

See Notices posted at San Leandro Blvd. curbside community

By Tracy Lee

“This country preaches a love and commitment to Democracy. But government officials and staff send government workers to come and demolish our houses and curbside communities. “Democracy!”, Officials cry.

But decisions hit us like the bombs the United States uses to destroy homes and communities in other countries. Pretending to care and be “heros” to refugees outside this country. Now they done created economic refugee camps in our own backyard. Democracy for some, inhumanity for many.

Literally it’s no democracy at all to the curbside community. City officials not showing our people compassion and human kindness worries me. Immigrants come to America for opportunity. But if you’re poor or struggling or had some bad luck or make mistakes or sick, then you get no opportunities. How can we all ride on the phrase “We the people”? “We the people” from Our Declaration of Independence means one nation, one community, one land, with one solution. Everyone comes as one. No matter if you are young,old, fat or skinny, housed or unhoused to assist one another. No matter what.

City officials need to act like public servants with humanity, not greedy developers and shady land grabbers. The city officials need to realize “Those Homeless” are humans too. Humans who need a step up, not a strike down. Pieces of public land for curbside communities to find sanctuary instead of being sold for condos is a new beginning of a solid solution. So that We the most vulnerable of The People can have a chance for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

By Needa Bee

Two years ago, a grassroots advocacy group called The Village sprang to life to fight for the rights of unhoused people in Oakland. Co-Founder Needa Bee tells the story of the history of the group, and where it’s going next.

In January 2016, me and my daughter started feeding our unhoused neighbors in the streets. Little did we know that simple sharing would evolve into a crew of 70 people called Feed The People. Who knew that Feed The People would transform into a movement called The Village, which fights to decriminalize homelessness, builds emergency shelters, asserts that housing is a human right, and joins the call for another model of urban development that does not displace lifelong residents of The Town. 

Little did my daughter and I know that we soon would be homeless too, victims of an illegal eviction and unable to afford housing in The New Oakland.

But we are not the only ones. For the past year, every first of the month there is an exodus of Oakland natives and pre-gentrification working class and poor residents who lose their housing and leave Oakland. Some of us like myself choose to stay, survive and thrive without a stable home or shelter, and fight for The Town that is disappearing in front of our eyes. 

This is how The Village got its start. But our eviction from Marcus Garvey Park February 2, 2017 created a powerful movement that affected change on many levels. We educated unhoused folks about their rights, and pushed housed folks to show up as allies. We sparked the creation of the Homeless Advocacy Working Group. We pushed the city to finally address the housing crisis with a plan and a budget. We got the city to reinstate a shelter crisis in Oakland, and got City Council to pass a comprehensive resolution to build immediate emergency and permanent housing. 

We got the council to identify a minimum of two public parcels from all seven districts in Oakland as sites for The Village and other community organizations to create community led solutions to the crisis. The City Council unanimously passed a resolution for the Administration to lease The Village a parcel of public land for $1 a year to build a pilot program of a community based response to this crisis. We obtained a plot of land where unhoused people set up tents and built a community.

It all sounds amazing. But what happened in practice? 

The shelter crisis declaration is about to be up for reinstatement and zero units of permanent housing have been built. Mayor Schaaf’s $8.6 million “Emergency Fund for Homeless Services” released the end of 2018 includes zero units of permanent housing. In fact over the next five to seven years, more than 50,000 units of market rate and above market rate housing are scheduled to be built in Oakland. During the same timeframe, a little more than 1,000 units of “affordable” units are being built, and less than 300 units of housing that will be 30 percent below the market rate are scheduled to be built. On January 31, the community we built was ravaged by the city and the encampment was bulldozed.

As for the City Council’s comprehensive resolution—the city administration ignored it and spent thousands of the city’s homeless fund and millions of private dollars on an idea not even in the City Council’s plan: the Tuff Sheds. A toxic, ill-planned, repressive experiment that does not use best dignified practices for the crisis, or for progress forward. Meanwhile, the solutions to the crisis practiced by unhoused folks—resourcefulness, ingenuity, and mutual support—are criminalized, ignored, and even destroyed.

In October 2017, the city granted our group a parcel of land to build a community, on E12th Street and 23rd Avenue, sometimes known as The Village, or Two Three Hunid Tent City Village. But our community was quickly compromised. Without talking to us, Assistant City Administrator Joe DeVries instructed police to herd 6 encampments from five neighborhood onto the parcel. Many residents of the E12th Street encampment had historic and current tensions with these new residents, and should not have been forced to live with each other. Throughout the year, we also heard reports of police picking up individual unhoused folks, taking them to the E12th Street parcel, and threatening them with arrest if they attempted to leave.

The result was disastrous. The level of violence, harm, trauma, and pain caused was out of control. Murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults were common. Neighborhood predators preyed on the women and elderly on the parcel. The land was overpopulated with people living on top of each other which created the conditions for dozens of fires. HIV and a medicine resistant strain of gonorrhea reached epidemic levels. Add to that inadequate and inconsistent trash and sanitation services for the 80-100 people that eventually called E12 their home. The vision we were intending to manifest was never allowed to take seed there. But we continued to advocate for the residents in city hall, be first responders to fires & fights, did trash pick up, coordinated a meal and produce delivery.

At the end of the day, we learned that the E12th Street parcel wasn’t even the city’s to give. It belonged to Caltrans, which didn’t know the city offered us the land. They had plans to use it as a staging area for a bridge construction project area that is supposed to take ten years to complete. So in November 2018, Caltrans reclaimed their land, and the residents of the parcel were displaced. 

In the midst of all this, the City Council urged the administration for a new plot of land to house a third of the E12th residents who wanted to move forward with the original plan for The Village. We also advocated for the folks who wanted have their own plot of land to start their own village or tent city. We advocated for a father to be reunited with his child in Colorado. 

In Fall of 2018, The Administration selected a small plot on Miller Avenue. They decided everyone else was going into Tuff Sheds or The Streets. 

While we got ready to build somewhere safe for the E12th residents, we also cleaned up illegal dumping on a city-owned parcel in Deep East Oakland that had been vacant for at least a decade. We created a clean and sober encampment for women with families and a community resource center for the surrounding neighborhood. We called this beautiful community the Housing and Dignity Village.

On December 6th 2018, The City destroyed Housing and Dignity Village. A majority of these residents are still living on the streets or couchsurfing. As for the two who are housed: one is living in a substandard basement, another is currently in rehab.

A week later, the city took away the Miller Avenue site to turn into a Tuff Shed site. A month later, they began the two week process of destroying the encampment they created on the E12th site. Less than half of these residents have been moved into the Miller Avenue Tuff Shed site. The other half moved back to the areas they were originally evicted from before they were herded to the E12th parcel.

2019 has seen an upswing in encampment evictions. We still don’t have land. Nonprofits and interfaith organizations are being blocked from building on their own land. The criminalization of vehicle dwelling has increased. Destroying personal property happens every month at every encampment eviction.

But homeless people are some of the most resilient, resourceful folks you may ever meet. The City of Oakland spends thousands of dollars to destroy people’s makeshift homes and shuffle people around. A week, or two or three, the people come back and rebuild. 

As for The Village, we currently have a call of action to our housed allies—to build emergency tiny homes on public land to house an unhoused neighbor near you. Let’s get this public land for temporary and permanent homes for The Town before The City sells it to The New Oakland. If that’s too bold for you, build at the encampments that already exist, or build in your backyard or your parking lot. Holler at us to get more info and support in your endeavours. We have blueprints and volunteers to share. 

And we are busy making plans for the future. Our building committee has designed mobile tiny homes since dozens of evictions are still planned for the future. We are working with advocacy groups all over Oakland on policy changes at the City and State levels. Legislation to decriminalize homelessness; enforce and ease the ability to build at least 2,000 temporary and permanent units of housing for the unhoused. We are getting ready to establish new encampments, squat on abandoned private lands, and work in partnership with private landowners to build on their parcels. We are also in an active Civil Rights lawsuit against the City of Oakland, Mayor Schaaf, and Asst. Joe DeVries. 

But the only way we can win—or even call a truce—in this escalating battle of The Town vs. The New Oakland is if we ring the bell and stop the fight. Literally stop developing and housing The New Oakland and start building apartments, tiny homes, and condos for The Town at working class prices. Shift the paradigm. Build for The Town that’s been here and pause building for people not yet here. It the only way we can stop the housing affordability crisis and the homeless state of emergency it has birthed.

By Needa Bee

Short-term charity toward unsheltered people always swells during the holidays, but what I really want for Christmas is to see Oakland’s “anti-homeless” ordinances repealed. 

Weeks ago I was one of thirteen unsheltered women and children evicted from an encampment we’d built on the corner of Edes and Elmhurst avenues. Now with the Christmas holiday a few weeks away our families are trying to find safe, warm, places to sleep. It didn’t have to be this way.

A group of unsheltered women and allies worked hard to turn an empty lot into a clean, sober and women-led encampment where we could safely sleep, eat and provide some stability for our children. We named the encampment the Housing and Dignity Village. We provided meals, medical services, free winter clothing, and a community garden for everyone in the neighborhood. We were supported by residents in the neighborhood, the East Oakland Collective, the Village, the Ron Dellums Institute for Social Justice, the Ella Baker Center, Omni Commons, and other advocates for the human rights of curbside communities.

City officials could have worked with us to find a safe, orderly way to relocate our community. Instead they chose to forcibly remove us using over thirty Oakland police officers and city crew members. As crews threw our belongings into a truck and destroyed our  shelters while the large police presence kept protestors away, I had to wonder how much money the city was wasting on this effort. They put a band-aid on a wound that continues to gush blood, all for the sake of “law” and “order” and for profit developments. 

Modern anti-homeless laws are the cousins of Jim Crow laws, created to control and punish the people who exist on the edge of society. These ordinances include “sitting or lying in the streets,” “obstructing pedestrians,” “sleeping on benches.” They are specifically designed to target anyone who has no option but to live outside. They are ineffective, costly, inhumane, and — according to a recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling — unconstitutional to enforce if the city does not provide adequate shelter.

Unless the city shifts its focus toward long-term solutions and away from criminalization, Oaklanders like me will continue to be punished for trying to survive when there are no other viable options available. And if you wonder about how limited my choices are, let me paint you a picture:

On any given night in Oakland there are more than two thousand people in need of shelter, but only 350 emergency shelter beds available. For women like me there are even fewer options. Many of the places that provide beds do not accept children and will not allow occupants to leave at night even if you work a graveyard shift.

Gordon Walker, director of Utah’s Division of Community and Housing estimated that criminalizing Utah’s unsheltered cost about $20,000 per person in state services, jail time and police costs. By adopting the Housing First program, where the priority is to place people in permanent housing instead of locking them up or sweeping them away, Utah saved millions and dramatically improved the number of unsheltered people in the state. 

But it will take years for Oakland to shift away from its current money-driven development. City officials can start heading in the right direction right now by repealing the city’s “anti-homeless” laws.

By Needa Bee

On the crisp and sunny Sunday morning of November 24th, unhoused leaders & activists, and housed allies and advocates created a protest camp in front of City’s Hall in the historic protest plaza known as Frank Ogawa or Oscar Grant, or as famed author Jack London once called it – The Commons.

The protest camp was set up to demonstrate against The City’s inhumane and cruel treatment of Oakland’s unsheltered communities. The activists agreed to leave once their 9 demands were implemented into City policy and enforced.

Rather than meeting with the protest camp to discuss their concerns and answer burning questions like “How did you spend $30 million towards homeless prevention and solutions from 2017 – 19? And how did homelessness double during that same time?”, the Mayor decided to destroy the encampment, and arrest and jail 22 housed and unhoused protestors. Arrestees were given citations for camping in a public park past 10 pm. In addition, they were arrested on various criminal charges including resisting arrest, obstructing an officer and obstructing justice. Bystanders who were not part of the direct action were also swept up in the arrests and spent the night in Santa Rita Jail.

Homelessness is not a crime. But the bureaucrats and their system are criminal. While protestors assembled,  Oakland’s Czar of Homelessness Joe De Vries submitted a proposal to increase criminalization of curbside dwellers. Amongst other things, his pilot program would give Oakland Police Department the authority to cite our people for sleeping on the sidewalks and parks.

While the Mayor and her agent push for the escalation of their already cruel and unusual torture and murder of the unhoused with inceased criminalization of sleeping curbside, ther is no plan to build deeply afforable housing in site. 

In this crisis of homelessness we face, there are many fronts to fight. Not just to alleviate the lack of access to the basic human right of housing, but to eradicate the very existence of homelessness from our society.

One front is the legal and policy battles we need to engage in to stop making homelessness a crime. And rather than question the people fallen victim to a society that allows homelessness to exist, we should be questioning the criminal nature of such a society. And change bad laws that uphold that society.

One such way we go about doing this is getting rid of anti-homeless laws that criminalize people who are surviving in a system designed for a few to succeed while the many suffer.

Modern anti-homeless laws are the cousins of Jim Crow laws, created to control and punish the people who exist on the edge of society.  When we consider nearly 80% of Oakland’s unhoused are Black, this comparison is even clearer. These anti- homeless ordinances include “sitting or lying in the streets,” “obstructing pedestrians,” “sleeping on benches”, “using an open flame.” They are specifically designed to target anyone who has no option but to live outside. They are ineffective, costly, inhumane, and — according to a recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and a Supreme Court response — unconstitutional to enforce if the city does not provide adequate shelter.

Unless the city shifts its focus toward long-term solutions and away from criminalization, Oaklanders like me will continue to be punished for trying to survive when there are no other viable options available. And if you wonder about how limited my choices are, let me paint you a picture:

On any given night in Oakland there are more than two thousand (Alameda County 2017 point in count), six thousand (Feed The People 2016 intake data), or nine thousand (Alameda County Health Care For The Homeless 2015 report) people in need of shelter. But only 350 emergency shelter beds available. For women like me, there are even fewer options. Many of the places that provide beds do not accept children, pets, families and will not allow occupants to leave at night even if you work a graveyard shift.

Gordon Walker, director of Utah’s Division of Community and Housing estimated that criminalizing Utah’s unsheltered cost about $20,000 per person in state services, jail time and police costs. By adopting the Housing First program, where the priority is to place people in permanent housing instead of locking them up or sweeping them away, Utah saved millions and dramatically improved the number of unsheltered people in the state. 

But it will take years for Oakland to shift away from its current money-driven development. City officials can start heading in the right direction right now by repealing the city’s “anti-homeless” laws while building permanent housing.

By Needa Bee

Yesterday we figured out where our important belongings were. We regrouped. Rested. Worked on a statement in response to the traumatic eviction and lying devils. Enjoyed Life. Brushed the rubble from our shoulders and laughed at the devil’s.

Where are we? Two of us are crashing at temporary spots. One of us is in a basement. One of us is in a tent. The rest of us are living in vehicles on the street. But I bet if you asked the city and staff who lied about giving us shelter and lied about not destroying our property they couldn’t tell you where we are or how we are doing. Cuz there has been non follow up to our whereabouts and safety since they destroyed everything and kicked us literally to the curb. But they would probably lie about that too. 

For now, our home base is the street outside of the gates where the housing and dignity village. We are a community, a family, a unit. The bonds we have created are like the frame and rafters of a home. They cant crush and destroy that.

Last night a reporter was looking for a sob story. He asked me “how is everyone doing”. I said “we are strong and resilient”. He didn’t like my answer. I didn’t give him tears. The lying devils probably don’t like that either.

The first time Libby and her administration bulldozed the promise land village in West Oakland in 2017 they only made us stronger. They awoke a movement. Clearly the devil don’t learn from her mistakes.

We are already regrouping. We are already multiplying. We will be coming back. From 100 different angles.

There are at least 14,000 unhoused in Libby’s oakland. And we have support from our housed neighbors all the way to the federal government.

We aint done. We aint dismantled. We aint silenced. We aint stopping.