Over three years ago, the Oakland City Council passed a controversial homelessness policy that spells out where unsheltered people can and can’t sleep outdoors in Oakland, and when and how the city cleans or shuts down encampments.
Since then, the city has closed 537 homeless camps and cleaned hundreds more, according to a new report. But over the same period, Oakland’s homeless population continued to grow. City staff say that the policy has made positive change, but many more resources—including more shelters—are necessary to address the estimated 1,486 camps that remain.
However, for unhoused people in Oakland and their supporters, better enforcement of the policy shouldn’t be the goal. Some showed up to a meeting of the City Council’s Life Enrichment Committee last Tuesday where the report was presented. They said the Encampment Management Policy mistreats homeless people and fails to offer permanent solutions to their challenges.
The Encampment Management Policy was passed in October 2020, by a unanimous City Council. The policy divides Oakland into “high-sensitivity zones” and “low-sensitivity zones.” In high-sensitivity areas, those near houses, businesses, schools, busy roads, and more, homeless people are not allowed to sleep, and the city prioritizes camp closures.
The Encampment Management Policy also describes the specific steps the city must take to clean or close a camp, including the kinds of services and outreach offered. It requires the city to provide 72 hours’ notice before closing most camps, but the city agreed to extend that time to a week after Oakland settled a lawsuit that homeless people filed against the city several years ago.
Nobody can be arrested for simply camping or being unhoused, the policy says. And the city is required to offer residents alternative shelter before a camp is closed. This rule is based on landmark court decisions Martin v. Boise and Johnson v. City of Grants Pass. But one of those decisions is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which could uphold, overturn, or modify it, and there are persistent debates over what qualifies as adequate shelter.
At the time the policy was written, there were an estimated 140 homeless camps in Oakland, housing one or more people. The city reports that this number climbed rapidly, up to 1,486 at the end of 2023. Ninety percent of Oakland’s homeless camps are located in high-sensitivity zones. The latest count of homelessness in the city also found 5,490 people living without permanent housing in Oakland.
District 3, which includes West Oakland and downtown, has by far the highest concentration of camps—29% of the total—according to the report.
Over the three years covered in the document, Oakland received 9,600 requests for service at homeless camps from members of the public. The number of requests increased each year.
But Oakland only has 1,300 shelter beds, distributed among group facilities, tiny-home sites, and RV parks. And only some of those are available for moving homeless residents to when their camp is scheduled for closure.
The number of shelter beds in Oakland has not grown at nearly the same rate as the city’s unhoused population, said Assistant City Administrator LaTonda Simmons, who previously oversaw encampment management and wrote the new report. Neither has staffing in the city department that works on homelessness issues.
Speaking at last week’s committee meeting, Simmons said unhoused residents bear the brunt of rising crime and other harmful conditions at camps. In the report, she describes an “alarming increase” in reports of crime at encampments. Substance use makes up nearly a third of the reported crimes, and drug distribution is over 20% as well. Theft, violent crime, and prostitution make up the rest.
“The ultimate impact of encampments is really to the unhoused people,” Simmons said.
Homeless residents say the city’s policy backs them into a corner
Opponents of the encampment policy say that making most of the city off-limits to unhoused residents leaves them with nowhere to go. They find the policy punitive and the city’s shelter options insufficient in both number and quality.
“When I tell you the solution to homelessness is housing, I know what I’m talking about,” said a member of Moms 4 Housing, the group of unhoused mothers who took over a vacant, investor-owned house in West Oakland. Speaking at the meeting, she said she recently treated a homeless woman who had maggots in her legs and had to bathe in an old tub dumped by an encampment.
“There are thousands like her,” she said.
The Encampment Management Policy is “filled with what people cannot do, where they should not be,” said James Vann, a longtime advocate for homeless residents, “but it does not produce one site where people can be…We really need to stop the sweeps, stop the tows, stop removing people’s property, and really think about how we can get people into housing.”
City staff say the policy is not intended to tackle the root causes of homelessness or create affordable housing. Instead, it narrowly lays out methods for addressing camps. Other city programs look at the bigger picture, they say.
The new report found that Oakland conducted 844 “operations” at homeless camps from January 2021 to December 2023, including 537 closures.
Homelessness disproportionately affects Black residents, who make up roughly 60% of the homeless population in the city but 20% of Oakland’s overall population. The city report says 71% of people who received homelessness services and shelter over the past three years were Black.
“The city needs additional tools that assist the African American community in addressing their challenges, accessing shelter, and attaining permanent housing,” the report says.
The report is the first detailed analysis of how the Encampment Management Policy has played out in Oakland.
District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife said she asked for the report in the name of “transparency,” so elected officials and the public could “be clear about what the city is doing and what we could be doing differently.” The report was first requested in 2021, but was only presented for the first time last week.
Fife called homelessness a “manufactured crisis in this country,” the result of discriminatory housing policies. “We need to have much deeper conversations than the Encampment Management Policy—we need more conversations about solutions,” she said.
In 2021, an audit of Oakland’s management of homeless camps painted a scathing picture of the city’s response to people living on the streets. City Auditor Courtney Ruby said Oakland was unprepared to handle the rise in homelessness, throwing lots of money at the issue but lacking systems and structures. However, the audit mainly looks at data from before the Encampment Management Policy was passed.
The new report reviewed at last week’s meeting is the first of two analyses of the policy that are in the works. The second installment, expected in the fall, will seek input from the federal government and Oakland’s Department of Race and Equity.
After that, the city may consider amendments to the Encampment Management Policy.
