The City of Oakland is Making us Homeless Again
For Immediate Release:
Contact:
John Janasko: Wood Street Commons (510) 712-7639
Tiny garcia : POOR Magazine/Homefulness (510-435-7500
After claiming the City of Oakland had created a housing “solution” to homelessness they make us homeless again. Wood Street Commons, Oakland Homeless Union and POOR Magazine hold a press conference in front of the failed, abandoned and dangerously neglected “housing solution” in West Oakland known as the “cabins”
On Monday March 24, 2025,at 11 am, residents of the cabins, along with houseless and formerly houseless leaders from Wood Street Commons, Oakland Homeless Union, and POORmagazine/Homefulness, will be holding a press conference at 2601 Wood Street, Oakland, CA, the site of the RV park and Community Cabins that will be closed at the end of the month.).
"The complete lack of oversight from top to bottom is nothing unique; it's the fabric that holds together the homeless industrial complex. It's time for the city to start listening to the residents and resident leaders, who have been fighting to be heard this entire time" Freeway, former resident of the Cabins and organizer with Wood Street Commons and The Oakland Homeless Union..
Residents of the Wood Street Community Cabins and Safe Parking Site were informed by management that the “Cabins” or interim housing site will be closed because the city has stopped paying the non-profit service provider operating the site, Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS) Residents have been given no indication that they will be allowed to continue residing on site or offered alternative accommodation, and approximately 80 people are now at risk of becoming unsheltered.
"I'm not sure how I could be disappointed, when I never had high hopes from the beginning," “J” a houseless resident of the “Cabins” who will be on the street again after they close the cabins.
Wood Street Commons, the Oakland Homeless Union, and POOR magazine, are declaring that the site should become a self-governed sanctuary community in which residents will be granted security of tenure until they receive permanent supportive housing and be empowered to manage the site autonomously. Wood Street Commons invites all grassroots community service organizations and frontline service providers to support the residents in the face of their abandonment by the city by helping provide food, services, donations, camaraderie, friendship and solidarity.
“The politricksters & LIEgislators refuse to listen to houseless people when we present our own practicable, affordable and healing housing solutions like Homefulness and Wood Street Commons and instead resort to endangering our lives with violent, expensive sweeps and inhumane, uninhabitable,life-threatening so-called housing.”said tiny gray-garcia, formerly houseless cofounder POOR Magazine/Homefulness “The feces gushing out of the cabins plumbing is just the final proof they would rather kill us than listen to us.” concluded tiny
The organizations call on all allies and supporters of unhoused people to advocate to the City of Oakland and Alameda County to embrace the self-governed sanctuary model, pledge not to displace Wood Street residents before they can receive housing, respect resident autonomy in the management of their community, financially support a nutrition program, and improve residents’ access to healthcare.
“Preliminary agreements made by the City to Wood Street Commons community were not met with the cabins being built,” aid LaMonte Ford, one of the formerly houseless residents of Wood Street Commons and survivor of the violent eviction by the City of Oakland
The city of Oakland’s 2022 homeless services audit found that more people exit from the cabins to homelessness than to housing, falling dramatically short of their “positive exit” targets. In 2023, the District 3 Councilmember requested an official report by C’mon Falls, the then Homelessness Coordinator for the City of Oakland. This report was supposed to include the rate of successful exits into permanent housing, as well as the services that were then being offered at all emergency intervention sites, such as the Wood Street Cabins. This report was never produced and since then C’mon Falls has resigned from that position, leaving many more questions than answers for residents and allies alike.
BOSS and the city have demonstrably failed to provide safe and dignified living conditions at the Wood Street cabins. In a series of press conferences last year, residents and allies called attention to abusive staff and roiling staff turnover; ignored disability accommodation requests; ineffective housing navigation; mold growth in many of the cabins; disrepair of bathrooms, s; kitchen and laundry facilities, including nonfunctioning toilets and showers and kitchen ranges that residents are unable to access or use after certain hours; sewage seeping out of the ground; paperwork lost by staff; lack of employment training; insufficient access to healthcare. One resident described the site as a mere “storage area for homeless people.” Another said residents are treated as an inconvenience when they ask for help with paperwork and documentation. Resident demands for accountability have been ignored, and those lucky enough to get permanent housing placement had done so with the help of outside service providers, not the onsite staff
Recent investigative reporting by Cal Matters has confirmed what unhoused residents and advocates have already been saying, which is that emergency shelters are unsafe, lack oversight, and are ineffective at getting people out of homelessness. And one study found that the increased unhoused mortality risk of 350% is the same for both sheltered and unsheltered individuals, demonstrating that emergency shelters do not constitute effective public health interventions. Wood Street Commons and partner organizations, advocates that all interim housing and safe parking programs be subject to the shelter monitoring system designed by Ian Cordola Morales, from the advocacy organization Where Do We Go?, with the assistance of unhoused and formerly unhoused advocates with Wood Street Commons, to provide independent oversight and hold service providers accountable for ensuring high standards of safety and care for residents.
The non-profit service providers operating city-managed emergency interventions such as BOSS, Operation Dignity, BACS and Urban Alchemy have little trust or credibility in the community due to their dismal track records of providing safe and dignified conditions, which is why Oakland and Alameda County should move towards resident self-governance of interim housing sites based on the model outlined in the Homeless Advocacy Working Group’s “Self-Governed Sanctioned Communities” policy proposal.
Furthermore, we are demanding that the City of Oakland, immediately implement a moratorium on sweeps, until at such time a thorough investigative report is done on the success rates of these so-called “transitional housing” programs. In said audit, we insist that an independent audit into the appropriation of funds towards contracts with non-profit service providers that have been in operation for more than 10 years, be included.
Click on this link for sanctuary solutions/demands created by houseless and formerly houseless residents and leaders of Homefulness/POOR Magazine and Wood Street Commons
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