This story aired in the April 28, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Living in the Bay Area isn’t cheap. The rising costs of living and lack of affordable housing has left more than 30,000 residents of the Bay Area without homes. But on a street corner in West Berkeley, a wooden makeshift hut is helping one street encampment feel at home.
Click the play button above to listen to the story
TRANSCRIPT:
STEFAN: Grab that little chunk right there. And then we're gonna put it behind…And in front of the wheel over here.
Sound of lava rocks being moved.
So there's no chance of it rolling away once it gets weighted up with people drinking coffee.
REPORTER: It’s an early morning in West Berkeley, and Stefan Kaiter-Synder is carefully gathering large lava rocks. He’s placing each behind the wheels of a trailer, carrying a wooden shed-like structure.
Sound of street dogs barking.
REPORTER: He’s parked it on the corner of 8th and Harrison. Tarps, belongings, and R.V.s line the north and east sides of the street in the shape of a backwards L. It's one of the city’s longest-standing encampments.
Sound of an electric drill untightening the ramp part of the hut, the ramp then drops.
REPORTER: Stefan begins unscrewing a latch that lets down a makeshift ramp. A small crowd of regulars gather. They watch as Stefan starts prepping for a day of service.
Sound of dogs barking and people talking.
STEFAN: Everybody on the corner right now usually is out here. When I do the coffee, when it's raining, I usually get more people who are like roaming through who like, want to be under the shelter, you know?
REPORTER: These sounds have become a signal. This is the warming hut. It’s a drop-in day shelter that Stefan hauls in every Friday to provide the unhoused residents of this camp with a warm place to sit and sip coffee or tea. It's an established routine, one that starts maybe like yours, with a steaming cup of coffee.
STEFAN: Alice, do you need a cup of coffee?
Sound of coffee pouring into a cup.
STEFAN: Cream sugar?
VISITOR: Oh yeah.
REPORTER: Stefan offers a cup to anyone in his path. The groggy group conversation and barking dogs are enough to wake up the entire neighborhood, one he’s gotten to know pretty well. He’s been bringing the warming hut to this encampment since last February, after a heavy rain season hit the Bay Area.
ALICE: Stefan will come and say, ‘Alice, we're here. We got coffee, and I got a cup right now.’ I'm like, here, let me have it. Put my hand out the tent. He hands it off. I'll be right there. I'll get some more.
REPORTER: Alice is a resident at the camp and is hard to miss. She’s wearing pink cowgirl boots and stands with a coffee in one hand and a leash holding her two dogs with the other. She says it’s a place that feels easy to be in.
ALICE: It's very comfortable. It, it feels like home. It's, uh, it makes it easy to talk about whatever it is that we're talking about. Yeah. You know, um, candid conversation is the best thing.
REPORTER: The hut has an overhanging roof, and is enclosed on 3 sides; its wooden walls are lined with layers of painter’s plastic. Inside, there’s a curved wooden bench that can fit seven people comfortably. And there’s a space heater offering temporary relief from the Bay’s unpredictable microclimates.
ALICE: This is the only place in the whole wide world that I've ever been on my birthday, July 3rd, and had to wear a winter coat.
REPORTER: Yeah…
ALICE: 'Cause it was that cold.
Sound of outdoor chatter.
REPORTER: And on sunny days like today, it's even able to provide a breezy shade. Stefan says that on average, more than a dozen people will come and hang out throughout the day.
Sound of people chatting inside the hut.
REPORTER: Stefan says he came up with the idea of the hut when he was experiencing homelessness himself — he had to live out of his car during college. The feeling of waking up in the bone-chilling cold never fully left him. And even after he found stable housing, he began to look at encampments differently; he couldn’t ignore how a lack of warm, safe spaces was affecting the unhoused. So when he became a woodworker and welder, he knew he had the skillset to do something. He initially started handing out tarps, but then realized he could build something that would create a bigger impact.
STEFAN: I really think that. This has a lot of promise for like, connecting unhoused communities with housed communities and like making that bridge
REPORTER: The day before a heavy rainstorm, Stefan gathered friends and community members. They used donated two-by-fours and built the hut in a day and a half.
STEFAN: When we did this on the build day, I was like, we need shelves for books. We don’t have any cool books up there yet, but you know I want this whole, the inside of here to have books that people can pull off the shelves.
REPORTER: Inside, Stefan points at designated spots. There’s phone charging stations in one corner.
STEFAN: Um, we have snacks, we have first aid stuff.
REPORTER: Warm dry clothes, socks, sleeping bags.
STEFAN: I try to keep tarps on hand as well, in case people need to shore up their living situations here. Whatever seems important at the moment.
REPORTER: In another corner of the hut, there are feminine hygiene products, first aid kits, fentanyl test strips, and Narcan. But more important than the coffee and its supplies is the community that surrounds it.
STEFAN: Oh my God. Alice, who lives in a tent, uh, down Eighth Street over there. Yeah. She gave me this little broom, and it's been super handy for cleaning up after we deploy.
REPORTER: Awwww.
REPORTER: Draco, a regular, decorated the inside with bouquets of fake flowers. Another regular offered to clean cobwebs inside the hut. Oftentimes, Stefan can leave the hut and return to find it’s still in perfect shape.
STEFAN: Catch you back over here. Thank you for, uh, watching the space. Yeah. Appreciate that.
Sound of dogs barking and people talking.
REPORTER: This sense of care and community is something that city shelters and transitional housing programs sometimes can’t offer. Many day shelters require visitors' documentation and impose strict rules. And those who get into housing programs eventually lose the familiarity of relying on a tight-knit community. A visitor named Quinton tells me it’s something no one can prepare you for.
QUINTON: I mean, you take people off of the streets, put 'em into a studio apartment where they don't have any visitors, they don't have any friends.
REPORTER: He tells me he felt this way when he lived in transitional housing for two years. He’s back on the streets now and says he understands why others also choose to stay outside. Stefan chimes in.
STEFAN: My, my friend is in a transitional hotel program right now. So I helped her move a whole bunch of her stuff into our hotel room, but she still comes. So that's another thing is everybody's friends with each other here. Right. So she's still coming back here every day to hang out with her friends, even though she has like a place to sleep and shower now.
REPORTER: The hut lets visitors come as they are. But earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the city of Berkeley can clear the encampment, threatening to disrupt everything. Stefan understood its impermanence - that’s why he built the hut on wheels, belonging to no one and moving with everyone.
STEFAN: If it wasn't for that, I'd be kind of like struggling with like having this live in a place that's like safe and secure. The wheels was sort of like a means of being able to bring it out when it's necessary, bring it to where it's necessary.
REPORTER: I meet Erin Spencer while he’s grabbing a second cup of coffee. He’s been homeless for ten years but has been a part of this community for three. He tells me sweeps are an unavoidable part of living on the streets, where nothing is ever truly yours.
ERIN: That's not how anyone is supposed to be treated, period. I don't like it, so I just do something about it.
REPORTER: He fights back by giving public comments at every city council meeting he can attend.
REPORTER: While no one can predict where this encampment will end up, Alice tells me that the future doesn’t scare them. She’ll continue to take care of others, the best way she knows how, by cooking hot meals. She’s learned that she can quickly make any place feel like home.
ALICE: If people get to have that little bit of something that is normal or even half-ass normal, like I did biscuits and gravy one day right here, um, on the fire, did, uh, biscuits in a frying pan, um, gravy. All for everything from scratch.
Sound of people laughing inside the hut.
REPORTER: Right now, Stefan is paying out of pocket to keep the hut stocked with coffee and its fixings. But he eventually wants to create an in-person donation station to collect clothing and raise money for this hut, and one he hopes to build in Emeryville. He’s even making a zine to teach people how to do the same in their neighborhoods.
STEFAN: It could literally be as simple as like going out and buying, like whoever's on your corner coffee every now and again, and like talking to them. That's kinda like what this came out of, right? Is just like wanting to engage with people.
REPORTER: He says, it’s just not that hard to get out there in the morning, with a warm pot of coffee, and take care of your neighbors.
