It has been almost one year since the Grants Pass ruling in the Supreme Court, which effectively gave American cities more leeway to crack down on homeless encampments. During that time, encampment sweeps have increased by more than 600 percent in Oakland. So what’s changed in the Bay Area since last summer?
KALW’s Homelessness reporter Alastair Boone takes us to a recent sweep around Lake Merritt in Oakland to look at how the city’s encampment management strategy has changed.
REPORTER: The state describes encampment closures as “resolutions” — the absolute end to an encampment, tied up neatly with a bow. And to people walking by, encampment sweeps may look or sound like an ending: Heavy machinery plows through wooden structures. Workers break down tents and stuff them into trash compactors. And forklifts load vehicles onto tow trucks, which take them away.
But for me, there is always a specific moment during the sweep that symbolically unties that bow.
CITY STAFF: You said you was gonna be out this morning!
ENCAMPMENT RESIDENT: I’m still in the process of moving!
REPORTER: A moment of bare, uncanny humanity that slows things down and challenges this sense of resolution.
At Lake Merritt, it was a rooster.
It sat stubbornly behind the caution tape as bulldozers crept closer and closer. Someone said that the person feeding had left, to find a new place to live.
The Lake Merritt encampment sweep started back in April. It's just one of many that have been happening since the Grants Pass legislation about a year ago made it easier for cities like Oakland to clear encampments.
It’s not hard to measure the quantitative changes in encampment closures since Grants Pass. Like the fact that in Oakland, the number of closures has increased exponentially. For example, in May of 2024 the city completed eight encampment closures. But in May of this year, the city closed 190 encampments, according to their own data.
REPORTER: As I was reporting on the sweeps at Lake Merritt, I wanted to know what these statistics mean for encampment residents. And I noticed three major trends.
First, unhoused people nowadays—they have most likely moved around a lot in recent months. Sometimes moving back and forth, from an encampment, to a shelter, to another encampment in a short period of time.
MICHELLE: My name is Michelle…And we are here at the lake, um, at Lake Merritt. And I've been staying here for like, maybe a month or two now.
REPORTER: Michelle Wade describes moving at least three times in the last 8 months.
MICHELLE: I just was, um, taken from another encampment off of, um, Northgate, so I had to be moved from there. So we came over here. So we're moving again.
REPORTER: Before that she was in a “Community Cabin,” one of the transitional housing programs offered by the city. The idea is that cabin residents work with case managers to find permanent housing during their stay. But that didn’t happen, in Michelle’s case. So her time ran out, and she says the program evicted her.
MICHELLE: Being homeless without anywhere to go, it's really, it's not good, you know? Then we have to put our, get our stuff together all the time and keep moving and stuff here and there, you know, back and forth, and it's really challenging.
REPORTER: Moving people around like this is expensive. According to a 2021 audit, the average sweep costs the city almost $1,500 per hour.
And because the number of homeless people living in Oakland far outpaces the available shelter, many people just end up moving somewhere else on the street.
But when I meet Michelle at Lake Merritt, she’s hopeful about breaking this cycle. She got a shelter bed. She told me about it while rolling a suitcase up to a van that was waiting to take her there.
MICHELLE: So, it's pretty much they give you six month program, you know, you can help you find a job and stuff like that. So. We'll take a chance with that to see how it works this time. 'cause I've been through that before, so hopefully I'll go, you know, go. More for the win this time to give it permanent housing.
REPORTER: Others around the lake didn’t get a shelter offer. This led to another trend I noticed. A lot of people just seemed really confused about what was going to happen.
JIMMY: What, what's, what's going on?
REPORTER: On the East side of the Estuary, residents were huddled together, trying to figure out when the city would reach their side of the encampment, and what kind of resources might be available by then. I talked to somebody who introduced himself as Jimmy.
JIMMY: No one's talked to me about anything about really, like sweeping or like, or any housing or anything.
REPORTER: When I tried to ask the city about this, I also got confused. Even about the basic stuff, like who I was supposed to talk to.
Police officers told me to speak with the city’s on-site representative, Ivan Satterfield. But he didn’t want to talk.
IVAN: Um, nah I'm gonna direct you to our, uh, PIO to answer any questions.
REPORTER: Oh. You're not gonna be answering questions?
IVAN: Yeah…[I'l] Forward you to the PIO, Sean Maher…His number is area code 5 1 0…
REPORTER: So I called Oakland’s Public Information Officers. A bunch of times.
VOICEMAIL MESSAGE: [Ringing] You've called Sean Maher, I can't get to the phone right now...
REPORTER: But they never responded to my messages or emails.
Residents we’re also having a hard time getting information from city staff and outreach workers. There wasn’t enough shelter for everyone around the lake. But some of the shelter that was available had specific requirements.
OUTREACH WORKER: Good morning, sir.
ENCAMPMENT RESIDENT: Good morning.
OUTREACH WORKER: Hey, quick question. Are you military?
ENCAMPMENT RESIDENT: No, sir.
OUTREACH WORKER: Okay.
REPORTER: After most of the available shelter had filled up, there was a team of outreach workers left offering shelter specifically for veterans. But they didn’t really explain why these beds were only for veterans.
AIDAN: Like they send the outreach team to only come to get the veterans, you know, like they targeting certain, specific people and then it's like, okay, now the rest just fend for themselves, you know?
REPORTER: This is Aidan Wells. Aidan was in the middle of expressing frustration about the way these workers interact with him, when another worker walked by to ask the same question.
WORKER: Do you know of any veterans?
AIDAN: No, not the military.
WORKER: We help veterans, homeless veterans.
REPORTER: The workers leave some mini bags of chips, and continue along with their search. This interaction led to the last big thing I noticed: Mistrust.
AIDAN: They got the money and, and, and the, the means to house everybody. It is gotta be based on something else. You know? It's more of a discrimination thing to me, you know?
REPORTER: Several residents expressed this sentiment: The outreach workers who come out during the sweep, they don’t really care what happens. They just want the encampment to disappear. And, if they’ve got all this money, there must be something insidious that makes it so hard to get help.
This lack of trust makes Aidan and others feel like living outside is the most reliable option.
AIDAN: It's always better out here versus being promised something that you don't get, you know, like, you know, can’t nobody take outside from you, you know?
REPORTER: But the premise of an encampment sweep is exactly this — to take living outside off the table. Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened to withhold funding from California cities that don’t get serious about closing encampments. And in recent months, he also encouraged cities to pass policies that would ban encampments altogether.
But Aidan says that without anywhere else to go, this will not end homelessness. It will only perpetuate the challenging cycle of having to start over again, and again and again.
AIDAN: I done been through a lot of these, a lot of these, like I been through damn near a lot of these sweeps. Like it's, it's fatigue, you know?
You gotta be in a certain zone to survive out here, you know? And sometimes it may cause for you to like, put a blockage on like the rest of your life.
REPORTER: I took a walk around the lake at the beginning of June. Aidan still lives there, so I stopped by to say hey.
The walkway on the west side of the Estuary is spotless, between two new black metal gates, 10 feet tall with curved spikes at the top. Nobody lives there anymore. But the East side is jam packed with people, some of them, like Aidan, who moved there during the sweep.
The rooster was still there too, down by the water. While Aidan and I were talking, it squeezed its body through the bars, into the closure zone and started pecking at the sidewalk.
