We need a roadmap to housing instead of cruelty — opposing Oakland’s homeless encampment management policy.
By: Margaretta Wan-Ling Lin
Tags: Oakland Public Policy, Housing For All, Homelessness, Racial Justice, Stopemp

Just Cities has served as the City of Oakland’s thought and action partners on many public service priorities from passing the nation’s best Fair Chance Housing policy, creating a recent Re-entry Housing Fund, developing the Oakland Police Commission, to creating the City’s Anti-Displacement safety net. This policy gives us grave concern for the following reasons.

The policy proposal violates the human rights of unhoused residents and Oakland’s standards of racial and social justice and common human decency, as well as public health COVID standards.

In 2018 the United Nation’s report on global homelessness cited Oakland’s policy and practices of removing unhoused people from encampments as “cruel and inhumane” and in violation of international human rights. The proposed encampment policy would also violate these international human rights standards.

The policy would also result in placing people living in 98% of Oakland’s homeless encampments under the constant threat of having their homes, belongings, and community they have formed destroyed. We know from both lived experience and public health research that living under such precarity and aggravated stress can result in mental illness, physical illness, child abuse, domestic violence, hopelessness, and suicide.

In a time when City leaders have stood up for Black Lives, the policy would also result in a disparate impact on Black people given that they represent 70% of Oakland’s unhoused population while only constituting 24% of Oakland’s overall population.

In a time of COVID, the policy would result in dispersing people who are at extreme risk of contacting COVID — increasing COVID risks for both unhoused residents and the general Oakland population. This would be in violation of both the City Council COVID policy on homelessness, on which we had partnered with the City and the CDC COVID guidelines.

2. The City has not followed its own internal racial equity standard of authentic community engagement of unhoused residents.

As a member of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), the City of Oakland seeks to adhere to GARE’s standards on racial equity including community engagement. However, as shared with us by Oakland’s leading unhoused organizations including The Village, East Oakland Collective, and Love and Justice in the Streets, the City has not conducted adequate community engagement with unhoused residents to listen, hear, and dialogue with them.

We strongly recommend that the City Council directs the Administration to engage in respectful and robust community engagement prior to Council taking a vote on the policy proposal.

3. The City has not followed its own internal racial equity standard of conducting a racial equity impact analysis by the Department of Race and Equity.

The Oakland Department of Race and Equity was formed to end the vicious and historic cycle of racially unjust planning and public policy. However, in order for the Council to be informed about potential racial equity impacts, the Department must conduct a racial equity impact analysis BEFORE the policy is enacted. It defies the principles of racial equity and commonsense for the Department to wait until the policy has been implemented and then merely study the harmful effects of the policy, as the City is currently proposing.

We strongly recommend that the City Council directs the Department of Race & Equity to conduct a racial equity impact analysis of the proposed policy prior to Council taking a vote.

4. Instead, the City should provide meaningful alternative housing options including using the available 50 acres+ of public land and millions of new public funds for homelessness to provide immediate, safe, and dignified housing.

Oakland residents and businesses are all united in wanting to see unhoused residents provided with stable and secure housing. However, the government’s inability to provide stable housing for the growing numbers of unhoused people is creating unnecessary land-use conflicts between unhoused residents who are trying to survive and members of the public who are trying to use public spaces.

Oakland is fortunate because unlike some other cities, we are blessed by the ingredients needed to provide safe, dignified, and stable housing for all of the city’s unhoused — over 50 acres of vacant public land and millions of new public funds for homelessness. Two years ago, Just Cities conducted research and issued a roadmap for Oakland on how it could provide immediate housing for over 2,000 residents. This roadmap is still applicable today. We stand ready to assist the City and to mobilize our many partners to do the same.

We need your voice to stand with Oakland’s unhoused residents who include a growing number of children. Please take action by Tuesday 10 am HERE!

In community,

Margaretta Wan-Ling Lin

Executive Director, Just Cities