‘Nowhere to Go’: Unhoused Residents Displaced as Oakland Seals Off Encampment

Gilberto Gonzales was one of the last holdouts on Tuesday, watching as a small army of workers cleared the encampment in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, where he’s lived for more than a decade.

Clad in a yellow safety vest and a brown fisherman’s cap, Gonzales said that after multiple warnings, the city had given him the final order to move his makeshift compound an hour before the clearing began.

“I don’t see nowhere to go,” he said, noting that the city had already confiscated his car. “Now I have to move to the other side of the street.”

Gonzales, 64, said he would gladly accept housing, but nothing the city has offered so far has been suitable.

“I’m a senior already, you know,” he said. “I see a lot of apartments for seniors, and I don’t know why I don’t get one of those apartments.”

The city of Oakland last week began sweeping the large encampment that, for years, has occupied a privately owned vacant lot on Alameda Avenue, next to a Home Depot, under the shadow of Interstate 880.

But after multiple failed attempts in recent years to remove inhabitants and fence off the area, the city is now partnering with the property owner and a local container business to install a barrier of double-stacked shipping containers.

Oakland City Councilmember Noel Gallo, who represents the neighborhood, told KQED the property owner has “re-fenced it five times, but the day or two after we put up the fence, somebody tears it down, breaks in and moves in.”

Gallo said nearby business owners and residents have long complained about the encampment, citing frequent drug activity, abandoned cars and other nuisances. The city, he said, sued the Los Angeles-based property owner multiple times to address the blight, even placing a lien on his property in 2023 for failing to reimburse the city (PDF) for $6,000 in abatement actions.

“The condition and the environmental surrounding of it was out of control,” Gallo said, adding that people in the encampment were given several months’ notice and offered services and housing options. “And certainly we don’t wanna [see] Home Depot leaving Oakland.”

The vacant land, which was previously used as a waste oil recycling facility and is listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund site directory, can’t be used for housing because of contamination issues, he added.

The move to use shipping containers comes as Oakland struggles to address its ongoing homelessness crisis. As of last year, the city counted 5,485 unhoused people, a nearly 9% increase since 2022, according to Alameda County’s latest point-in-time count (PDF). Gallo said the city’s ongoing financial challenges and its lack of available land for RV parking sites have only compounded the problem, as evidenced by the dramatic proliferation of encampments in recent years.

By Tuesday afternoon, a semi-completed wall of containers had already sprung up along Alameda Avenue as workers scrambled to remove the remaining debris, including a plastic baby swing still hanging from the lone tree on the property. A caseworker with a local homeless support group spoke with the few lingering former residents.

Jeff Alberto, who owns Oakland Container Services, the business supplying the shipping containers, said he hopes to finish the job on Wednesday. “The plan is to go all the way down [from the freeway entrance] to the end of the street,” said Alberto, who grew up in the neighborhood.

It was a scene reminiscent of People’s Park, which UC Berkeley fortified with shipping containers last January after protesters tore down fencing and destroyed construction equipment.

In exchange for providing the containers, Alberto is leasing the land from the property owner for his expanding container business. He partnered with Caltrans and the city to clear the property.

Alberto said he also helped transport containers to People’s Park last year, in what has become an unexpected niche for his business.

“On my email signatures, it says, ‘We do it all,’” he said. “Like, we don’t say no to anything, especially to make it look better.”

Alberto doesn’t have any misgivings about blocking unhoused people from returning here. Most were offered housing, he said, but didn’t take it. Instead, they relocated a few blocks away.

“They had six years here to get their act together,” he said. “We shouldn’t suffer for all of this. I think it’s time for a change.”