Advocates for homeless forced to leave Wood Street encampment erect tents at Oakland City Hall

OAKLAND — Protesters pitched tents outside Oakland City Hall Tuesday morning in solidarity with residents recently forced out of the Wood Street homeless encampment.  

The activists are demanding an end to the red tape that is keeping unhoused people on the run throughout the city.

The Wood Street encampment was home to more than 300 unhoused people, with some living there for up to eight years. It caused its share of problems, including a couple of serious fires. Last month, the city moved in and started clearing out the property owned by Caltrans. 

That scattered the members of  the tight-knit community across Oakland and the rest of the Bay Area.

“You come in and dismantle a community that’s come so far and is sort of self-sufficient, and then you want to dismantle that and scatter everyone around the Bay Area. What does that do? That doesn’t help anyone,” said John Janosko, one of the leaders of the unhoused residents still living along Wood Street.

Tuesday morning, supporters of the cleared community set up a makeshift camp in the plaza outside Oakland City Hall. They said they wanted to put pressure on city leaders to come up with a more stable solution.

“The situation is beyond desperate in the streets of Oakland. The 300+ people that lived in just the Wood Street encampment have now been dispersed and displaced all throughout West Oakland and beyond,” said supporter Xochitl Bernadette Moreno. “We need to actually allocate land so that people can have a place to go, a place to call their own.”

The advocates think they know of a property that would work. Known as the North Gateway Parcel, it is 22 acres of land along West Grand Avenue next to the water treatment plant.  

The proposal is to devote eight acres to an established camp with garbage pickup, sanitation facilities and a place for supportive services to operate. But the protesters are frustrated by the bureaucratic roadblocks they’re getting from Oakland city officials.

“It seems like every time we have this conversation, it’s pushed off to another agenda.  And we get tired sometimes asking the same thing over and over and over,” said Janosko. “You can see the need of it. All you have to do is walk to work, drive to work. You see homeless people scattered all over the place.”

The homeless advocates said the city has put off solutions for a long time and they’re appealing to new members of the Oakland City Council to take the lead before they are left to deal with an even bigger problem.

“Homelessness is set to rise in Oakland by nearly 40 percent in the coming years,” warned Moreno. “And so, the people that are coming into office in this next term are going to have even more of a challenge on their hands.”