Settling in the Scars of the City
While embedded with Alameda County (Calif.) Vector [pest] Control this summer, I visited six homeless encampments in Oakland in various states of cohesion and dispersion. My research was for the United States’ Historic American Buildings Survey as a part of an initiative to document and record temporary structures of historic significance. The city has just evicted and scattered most of the colossal, twenty-block long Wood Street encampment, and those who were able to relocate their dwellings were setting up at a new spot, just blocks away (Figure 1). The 5th Street encampment built in 2018 by the West Oakland BART Station, by contrast, was still intact, small enough to avoid serious scrutiny. With Wood Street evicted, the High Street, or Home Depot, encampment was now the primary focus of municipal attention. I followed Vector Control trappers into its walled, city-state of a compound, with its extensive gardens of Home Depot plants. They retrieved traps, now occupied by softball-sized Norway Rats, which screamed and hissed at us on approach (Figure 2).
Figure 1. One cob tiny house structure, formerly a part of the Cob on Wood community center, survived the Wood Street encampment eviction in April 2023 and moved several blocks away. In July 2023, its inhabitants demarcated their front yard with a forklift pallet fence. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, July 2023.
Figure 2. Alex from Alameda County Vector Control carries traps filled with Norway Rats past an improvised shading structure at the center of the Home Depot encampment. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, July 2023.
Later that day, I had a hunch that if I overlaid a New Deal Residential Security Map (popularly known as redlining maps) atop one of Oakland today, these encampments would line up with previously redlined and “white” (or no)-lined zones (the latter for areas with little housing or targeted for new highways and commercial and industrial use). Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was correct (Figure 3). The landscapes of environmental racism and dispossession of the mid-twentieth century are contiguous with today’s, with the judgements rendered in the 1937 map serving as just one potential bookend in the past. Current encampment zones were all, in fact, within or adjacent to areas of planned racial dispossession, from redlining to major urban renewal and highway projects, whose advocates used the militaristic language of “attacks” and “wars,” as well as ecological metaphors, as covers to target racialized “slums” and “blight” (conditions, ironically exacerbated by redlining and no-lining). In short, today’s homeless encampments settle in the scars of Oakland’s twentieth-century environmental apartheid.
Figure 3. U.S. Home Owners Loan Corporation Residential Security Map of Oakland, 1937, annotated by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore to indicate six present-day homeless encampments. Courtesy Mapping Inequality.
As urban renewal demolished predominantly Black and Asian neighborhoods in the 1960s, the California state department of transportation (Caltrans) bisected and surrounded historically Black West Oakland with the Nimitz, Cypress, and Grove Shafter Freeways (Interstate Highways 880 and 980), each drawing comparison to the Berlin Wall. (In further, if coincidental, parallel, the Cypress Viaduct collapsed during the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the same year that the Berlin Wall fell.) Myriad homeless encampments now occupy the zones of dispossession, poor air, contaminated soil, and extreme noise created by these freeways, including the open lots and buffer spaces at their peripheries. Today, the Brush, 5th, and Wood streets encampments line these freeways that surround and isolate West Oakland.
The Brush Street encampment lies in the divergence point of 880 and 980 (Figure 4). It occupies one of the many lots claimed and cleared using eminent domain for the highways’ construction. The state demolished five hundred houses so that 980 could separate “blighted” West Oakland from Downtown in an effort so revitalize the latter. The 980 freeway would simultaneously funnel suburban motorists to the (unrealized) City Center mall planned for Downtown (Figure 5). Today, in recognition of the damage done, calls for 980’s demolition are growing. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities program, funded by the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, granted the City of Oakland and Caltrans $680,000 to study ways to replace it.
Figure 4. Brush Street encampment with Interstate Highways 980 on the left and 880 (the Cypress Freeway) the far right. An encampment fire charred the 980 overpass. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, July 2023.
Figure 5. Rendering of 980 cutting through demolished blocks separating West Oakland from the unrealized City Center complex on the left. The Brush Street encampment lot is outlined in yellow. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Center, ca. 1975.
The 5th Street encampment sits one block away from a former entrance to the original Cypress Freeway, which bisected West Oakland before its 1989 collapse. This is also the site of the former Red Star Yeast factory that polluted West Oakland’s air for a century before closing in 2003. Encampment residents first settled the periphery of the lot in 2018, occupying the sidewalk and bike lane. What is invisible from outside the encampment, however, is that this “sidewalk” hardly exists, having been partially reduced to rubble, leaving uneven ground interspersed with chunks of intact concrete (Figure 6). This was the result of environmental remediation efforts in 2011 to remove two underground storage tanks to prevent future soil contamination, in anticipation of a new infill apartment complex that burned down before construction was completed. The encampment settled in the resulting postindustrial scar.
Figure 6. Looking west inside the walls of the 5th Street encampment one can see rugs covering the dirt where the sidewalk was removed in 2011. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, 2021.
The Wood Street encampment also occupied landscape scars, including the vacant lot adjacent to the defunct 16th Street train station, under an old train trestle, and spaces under the Cypress Freeway replacement project created when, after the 1989 earthquake, Caltrans diverted the freeway around West Oakland’s periphery, in part to right its previous environmental sabotage. The encampment settled land that was both spatially and legally complex, with strips and strata of vacant land owned by private developers, the City of Oakland, Caltrans, and the BNSF Railway. Below the overpasses, the encampment comprised numerous pseudo-gated communities of RVs, vans, and tents, surrounded by salvaged chain link fence, in addition to a tiny-home community called Cob on Wood (Figure 7). One skilled builder constructed a two-story house in the dense Wood Street Commons lot and another built a dwelling suspended off the ground in the defunct Southern Pacific Railroad train trestle, with a dumb waiter for access (Figures 8 and 9). At its peak, the encampment became a neighborhood of around three hundred people, stretching dozens of blocks, in part because law enforcement had long encouraged residents evicted from other encampments to relocate there (Figure 10). From the Cypress Freeway in the mid-twentieth century to the unhoused in the twenty-first, Wood Street was where Oakland diverted its infrastructural and social problems.
Figure 7. Panorama of the Cob on Wood community center shortly after completion in 2020 in the shadow of 880 overpasses. It comprised a community free store, health clinic, kitchen, sleeping cabin, and a composting toilet, landscaped with community gardens, walkways, benches, seating areas, and a performance stage. Cob on Wood and its surrounding neighbors were cleared by Caltrans in 2022. Photography by Miguel Elliott, 2021.
Figure 8. Tommygun's two story home at the Wood Street Commons before eviction in April and May 2023. Photograph by David Bacon, 2023.
Figure 9. Wood Street encampment residents settled under a defunct railroad trestle, including one resident with his abode suspended off the ground between the wood posts, with access via a ladder and pulley system. Photograph by David Bacon, 2023.
Figure 10. The Wood Street encampment settled the vast, unused land underneath 880 before its incremental eviction in 2022 and 2023. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, Sept. 2023.
Many of these sites are now slated for infill apartment complexes. The developers of one complex adjacent to the former Wood Street Commons encampment installed a sign assuring passersby that their project will offer “100% Affordable Housing” (Figure 11). The sign is meant to signify that all of the apartments will be rented at below-market rates. But in this context, it reads as a dishonest assurance meant to soften the stark juxtaposition of the new development with the old encampment — and as an unintentional double entendre commemorating the now evicted curbside community, for whose residents “affordable housing” is still out of reach. Whether the justification is to make way for below-market construction or to protect public health, Oakland’s long history of dispossession haunts each encampment eviction. In all cases, the powerful justified demolishing the homes of Oakland’s most vulnerable on environmental grounds, from “blight” back then to fire hazards, soil toxicity, and pests today.
Figure 11. “100% Affordable Housing” promised at the new development in the lot adjacent to the recently evicted Wood Street Commons; Ben Jameson-Ellsmore. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, July 2023.
On August 23, 2023, a longtime member of the Wood Street encampment named Jeff set up a small plywood shanty in the Wood Street Commons lot in an attempt to resettle his former home. He was met with force as private security, a dozen policemen, and the city’s department of Public Works descended on the scene. Jeff was talked out of his structure by the police and was unharmed. But within minutes, a small nudge by a city garbage truck splayed the shanty. The Wood Street Commons lot was vacant once more.
Citation
Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, “Settling in the Scars of the City,” PLATFORM, October 30, 2023.
