The city of Oakland is closing one of its largest homeless shelters and opening another in its place.
On Tuesday, the City Council approved a nearly $7 million grant for a nonprofit to lease the Jack London Inn and run a shelter for seniors and medically vulnerable residents there. The first occupants of the 110-room building on Embarcadero West will be the current residents of the Lake Merritt Lodge.
The city’s lease at the grand yellow building on Harrison Street is ending June 30.
“Lake Merritt Lodge has become an unsustainable location for this vital program,” Scott Means, interim director of the city’s Human Services Department, wrote in a report to the council. He cited high rent and a lack of parking.
Originally a boarding house, the 92-room property was used as a business school dorm before the pandemic. Alameda County attempted to buy the building in 2020 to house medically fragile and homeless residents but the deal fell through. The city stepped in the next year and opened the lodge as a shelter. Oakland used COVID-19 relief money to lease the property and contract with the Housing Consortium of the East Bay to operate a shelter there.
For many homeless people moving off of the streets, the Lake Merritt Lodge is the most desirable temporary location to land. According to the city, 268 residents have come through the program, 105 of them transitioning into permanent housing. Most spend more than eight months at the lodge.
It’s “one of the highest performing programs in the Oakland shelter system,” according to the city report, with less than 5% of occupants returning to homelessness after their stays.
Some residents have complained of dirty conditions and poor treatment and insufficient oversight.
The city described the decision to leave the facility this summer as a “mutual” one between Oakland and the property owner, Mahnaz Khazen.
“She recently notified the city she is no longer interested in continuing the lease and has listed the property for sale,” the city staff report says.
Khazen did not respond to a request for an interview. She had previously indicated she wanted to continue the program at the Lake Merritt Lodge, but with a different nonprofit operator.
On Tuesday, the City Council awarded the Housing Consortium of the East Bay $6.8 million to lease the Jack London Inn and operate a similar shelter program there for the next year. The deal includes an option for the city to extend the agreement for a second year and another $6.8 million, depending on Oakland’s finances.
The item was on the council’s “consent calendar,” a package of legislation approved in one sweeping vote, without debate or discussion. The item also never came before one of the council’s issue-based committees, where legislation is workshopped before coming to the full council. City staff said urgent approval was needed so that the Housing Consortium of the East Bay could be in a strong position to lease the property and ensure that Lake Merritt Lodge residents have a place to move to.
At a meeting of the council’s Rules and Legislation Committee, where items are scheduled on upcoming meeting agendas, some councilmembers urged staff to do more outreach to their offices and to the community about decisions like closing and opening shelters.
“This was news to me,” said Councilmember Carroll Fife. The Lake Merritt Lodge is in her district.
The Jack London Inn opened in the 1960s and has operated as a budget hotel in the decades since. In the 2000s it fell into notoriously dirty and dangerous conditions. The ownership has changed since then. The current owner listed in county records is Roseville-based Moraya Investments.
Leaving Lake Merritt Lodge “provides the City with the opportunity to reexamine and redevelop the process by which we develop and fund homeless interventions,” city staff wrote in the report to council. Instead of leasing the shelter property directly, the city will serve as a funder, giving the grant to the Housing Consortium of the East Bay to rent the hotel and run the program.
The lease for the Jack London property will be significantly less than what Oakland has been paying for the Lake Merritt Lodge, Means said. The Jack London Inn also comes with space for 20 additional residents, larger rooms, and more parking. The hotel will provide 24-hour security, according to the city.
The property was also the site of the Home of Chicken and Waffles restaurant until recently. The former restaurant space will be used as a multi-purpose room for the shelter.
