by Tiny
Closure of small house community forces several previously unhoused residents back to the streets
“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” said Dennis houseless resident of Third and Peralta tiny home community.
From the beginning of RoofLESS radio reporter Dennis’ placement into the Housing Consortium of the East Bay (HCEB) tiny home community at Third and Peralta, 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 reason for this closure was that HCEB lost their funding from the City, who allegedly believed the nonprofit wasn’t doing the job they promised to do … Which even if this well-funded nonprofiteer wasn’t doing their 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 Avenue safe parking lot claiming poor outcomes/low rates of people getting into permanent housing. Which is true … but in practice they’re basically using HCEB’s misconduct as a way to punish the residents,” said Sathya Baskaran, street warrior and advocate with Sweeps Defense in Oakland.
In one 48-hour period, there were a total of three announced closures of these poltrickster designed, nonprofiteer created “solutions” in Huchiun (Oakland): Mandela House (closure planned for April 22), 71st and San Leandro, and Third and Peralta, (both closed last week) which will result 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 who doesn’t care what happens to its houseless residents.
What seems blatantly obvious to me is these temporary solutions are convenient when the City wants to erase come-unities of houseless people in neighborhoods targeted for gentriFUKation, like MLK and West Grand, Wood Street, Mosswood Park and East 12th Street. Then they deposit 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.
Looming in the background of all of this nonprofiteer violence is the Encampment Abatement Policy (EAP) re-proposal by politrickster Ken Houston (which this povertyskola has written about before). This is the third time this council member, who has built his career on hating houseless peoples, has proposed a deeper level of anti-houseless violence. When houseless people respond to a sweep by moving to another location, politrickster Ken proposes arresting those people for the act of being houseless in public.
And just in case you may think that’s all there is to it, that’s just the tip of the pillaging, evicting and closing iceberg.
Over the last year and half, the Holland Hotel and the Henry Robison, both mangled (I mean managed) by the Big Poppa of all the nonprofiteers, Bay Area Community Services, were also closed, throwing over 300 houseless out to nowhere. Again.
And then before that as some readers might remember, the tiny home village run by Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS), 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 nonprofits, funded by the City, with budgets based 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 nonprofits are in the “business” of solving poverty, which, in my humble opinion, is a crime of krapitalism. Money in the millions are “spent” paying executives to “manage” people who are just trying to stay alive and safe, who themselves have little or no money at all.
In addition to the fact that many CEOs and CFOs of these huge nonprofits get triple digit “salaries” for the job of “managing” us who have no jobs, or homes, or money. Many of them aren’t even doing the jobs they claim to be doing.
That said there are people with great love in their hearts that do service provision and many solid, real nonprofits doing the real work – but something has gone very wrong in the ‘management” of us poor people in these big nonprofits and the hands of the disinterested and hateful government are not clean in all of this.
I call it a krapitalist crime because the principals of Poverty Scholarship-informed 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 means doing whatever needs to be done to support fellow houseless poverty skolaz where they are at. 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.
In addition, 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 comeUnities 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 ComeUnity reparations and Poverty Scholarship informed redistribution. Something as simple as temporary hotel and motel housing vouchers barely exist within the City support network.
Myself and Auntie Frances and Omowale Fowles have sat down with these big nonprofits 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 in Huchiun, 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 to 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. Now we have added every Friday at HOMEfulness 4 in Yelamu ( SF). Manna from Heaven and Self-Help Hunger Program are also poor people led movements providing street based food, medicine, and support wherever and however its needed.
Not to mention Tent City 3 and the sanctuary land projects in Seattle led by poor and houseless people and in Huchiun – Derik Soo’s sanctuary houseless community in East Oakland and a new self-determined project on a parking lot “owned” by Laney College. With stewardship support by Wood Street Commons and many of us poor people-led movements.
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 Huchiun (Oakland) with permission and guidance from the 1st 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 unSell and steward these small parcels of Mama Earth and permanently remove them from the commodities market, which means we are actively decolonizing and decommodifying land so it doesn’t continue to be a source of profit, loss, debt and gain, which leads to evictions, homelessness, and deadly gentriFUKation. Hence the name HOMEfulness.
“I’m Ifalayo and I was houseless on Wood Street for 10 years, now I am HomeFul at HOMEfulness.” Ifalayo moved from homelessness into HOMEfulness last year, and I, who was chronically houseless for most of my life beginning in childhood and then later as an adult after surviving violent gentriFUKation in the Mission Dist of San Francisco with my son, became forever Homefull for the first time in my life in 2022 when the City of Oakland finally granted HOMEfulness a Certificate of Occupancy after a 10 year fight with them to get approved for permits and all the endless costly requirements they placed in front of us. Ifalayo and I spoke to the KPIX in this moment of so much eviction violence by HCEB.
Sadly, four years, thousands of sweeps, evictions, closures and deaths of our houseless relatives later, nothing seems to have changed in the City process to make poor peoples solutions actually happen.
Multiple cities have claimed to be listening to poor people’s solutions. Lots of talk about Measure W funding in Oakland under Barbara Lee, and providing real community services in San Francisco under 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 peoples solution to homelessness.
This Love-work is hard and everyday, because krapitalism isn’t a human system and more people are becoming houseless with some of the cuts in Huchiun and in San Francisco where they are proposing to end the pandemic housing support, which will result in hundreds, maybe thousands, more people facing eviction. So 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.
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 poeple’s resources come back to the houseless people-led solutions – for more info email poormag@gmail.com.
