“They said we have to leave… today… I’ve been here for four years and I’ve never received help or resources or even a referral of someone to talk to about housing.” Dennis, a houseless resident, was talking about the eviction of the 3rd and Peralta tiny home community in Oakland.
From the beginning of RoofLESS radio reporter Dennis’s placement into the Housing Consortium of the East Bay tiny home community, Dennis had an understanding that he would receive some kind of help to find permanent housing. Four years later, he is being evicted back to the streets.
Some Peralta residents got matched with housing. Many, like Dennis did not, partly because like Dennis noted, “When we don’t have access to email, like most of us out here, we can’t even receive the information when it is sent to us. This is just one example of the failure of service provision that is not poverty-scholarship informed.
The stated reasons for this closure was because HCEB lost its funding from the city, which allegedly said the nonprofit wasn’t doing the job it promised to do…Which even if this well-funded non-profiteer wasn’t doing its job, is that really the solution, City of Oakland, to kick houseless people back out to the street.?
“The city cut off funding for the Peralta cabins and 71st Ave safe parking lot claiming poor outcomes/low rates of people getting into permanent housing. Which is true,” said Sathya Baskaran, street warrior and advocate with Sweeps Defense in Oakland. “But in practice they’re basically using HCEB’s misconduct as a way to punish the residents.”
In one 48-hour period there were a total of three closures of these “solutions” in Huchiun (Oakland): Mandela House, 71st and San Leandro and 3rd and Peralta, which resulted in literally hundreds of already swept, evicted, houseless people being spit back out to the streets with nothing, only to face sweeps, criminalization and arrest from a city government that doesn’t care what happens to its houseless residents.
It seems blatantly obvious to me that temporary solutions are convenient when the city wants to erase communities of houseless people in neighborhoods targeted for gentrification, like MLK and West Grand, Wood Street, Mosswood Park and East 12th St., and are not worried about depositing them back to the streets, months and years later when they think no one is watching because they have no basic investment in caring for houseless people.
All of this non-profiteer violence is happening with the backdrop of the looming re-proposal by Councilmember Ken Houston’s Encampment Abatement Policy, which this povertyskola has written about before. This is the third time this councilmember, who has built his career on hating houseless peoples , has proposed a deeper level of anti-houseless violence, which would include arresting people for the act of being houseless in public when they move to another location after being swept.
Over the last year and half, the Holland Hotel and the Henry Robison, both mangled (I mean managed ) by BACS, were also closed, throwing over 300 houseless out to nowhere. Again.
Before that, the tiny home village run by Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency, which was set up to temporarily “house” the hundreds of violently swept residents of Wood street commons also closed after being “abandoned” by BOSS.
One after the other the “solutions” ended, all created by large non-profits, funded by the city, that base their budgets on “service provision” for people in poverty with flowery mission statements like…
…we fulfill our mission by providing programs and services for the unhoused; resident service coordination; developing and operating permanent supportive housing and partnering with other developers…
These non-profits are in the “business” of solving poverty, which in my humble opinion is a crime of Capitalism, as money in the millions are spent paying executives to “manage” people just trying to stay alive and safe, who ourselves have little or no money at all.
There are people with great love in their hearts that do service provision and many solid and real non-profits doing the real work—but something has gone very wrong in the ‘management” of us poor people in these big non-profits, and the hands of the disinterested and hateful government are not clean in all of this.
The principals of Poverty scholarship* has informed the street advocacy that us poor, houseless and formerly houseless advocates at POOR Magazine, Manna From Heaven, Self- Help Hunger Program and Wood Street Commons are doing to support fellow houseless poverty skolaz where they are. We know what and how to get what’s needed for folks because we have all been in crisis with housing, hunger, sweeps, and unattainable services ourselves.
These acts of radical street service, or what we at POOR magazine call “Love-work,” aren’t tied to salaries and government grants; they are informed by us, for us.
For example the HOMEfulness Hotel Fund formally launched in 2024 when the violent Grants Pass v Johnson sweeps amped and morphed into daily, hourly violent sweeps on houseless communities all across the Bay Area.
It’s only a temporary fix, as it supports houseless, disabled elders and families get into a motel room for up to two weeks. The funding comes directly from housed people with resources who learn about radical redistribution and community reparations and poverty-scholarship informed redistribution. Something as simple as temporary hotel and motel housing vouchers barely exist within the city support network.
Aunti Frances and Omowale Fowles and I have sat down with these big non-profits and told them to give us, the street workers, access to the vouchers so we can make sure they are getting to the people who need them all the time. That conversation went nowhere.
Another example is the powerful street outreach led by Wood Street Commons, providing healthy, home-cooked food, groceries and haircuts to folks on the street and POOR Magazine’s RoofLESS radio— a street based food and media distribution system for folks struggling with the violence of sweeps and Sliding Scale Cafe, a free grocery and food distribution project launched at HOMEfulness 1 in Huchiun every Thursday. We have added every Friday at HOMEfulness 4 in Yelamu (San Francisco). Manna from Heaven and the Self-Help Hunger Program, also poor people led movements, provide street based food, medicine and support wherever and however its needed.
In addition, we poor and houseless folks are working as hard and fast as we can to build more HOMEfulness projects—rent-free forever, healing housing projects in Huchiun, Yelamu and Tovaangar, the first one of which now houses 24 houseless youth, adults and elders in Deep East Oakland with permission and guidance from the First Nations Ohlone Lisjan people of this land.
The goals of the HOMEfulness projects is not to “own” or buy or control Mama Earth, not to raise “equity” or profit, but to rather un-sell and steward these small parcels of Mama Earth and permanently remove them from the commodities market, so land doesn’t continue to be a source of profit, loss, debt and gain, which leads to evictions, homelessness and deadly gentrification. Hence the name HOMEfulness.
Multiple cities have claimed to be listening to poor people’s solutions. We hear lots of talk about Measure W funding in Oakland under Mayor Barbara Lee, and providing real community services in San Francisco under Mayor Daniel Lurie, and yet poverty-scholarship-informed programs like City Vitals in SF are closed, violent sweeps and criminalization continue in both cities, all the so-called housing solutions all across the Bay are still closing and HOMEfulness is still getting no help in the city permitting process,
Our pro-bono architect is trying to submit building plans for HOMEfulness2, another location in Deep East Huchiun, and the city has already thrown multiple roadblocks in our way. And HOMEfulness 4 Yelamu (SF) is right behind, as we are struggling right now to find a licensed engineer who can help us before we can even submit the plans to San Francisco. In both cities, no help, no love, no support for this homeless people’s solution to homelessness.
This love-work is hard, because capitalism isn’t a human system and more people are becoming houseless. It’s time for these settler governments to operate with more basic humanity. Stop closing and evicting, and ending and erasing. This is an emergency. People are dying. What will it take for these towns to listen and support poor and houseless people with our own solutions? We have them.
Please show up at 9:30am, April 14th to Oakland City Council’s special meeting about Ken Houston’s Encampment Management Policy- The only response to this state violence is the truth from the people
Stay tuned – April 28th POOR Magazine and Wood Street Commons and Manna From Heaven and Self-help Hunger Program (and More ) are planning a Speak out /demand action at Oakland City Hall to demand houseless people’s resources come back to the houseless people-led solutions- for more info email poormag@gmail.com. To support the HOMEfulness Hotel Fund and or the HOMEfulness project & Bank of ComeUnity reparations go to poormagazine.org/donate
