‘The End of the Road’
One of Oakland’s most sprawling homeless camps sits next to a Home Depot parking lot. We spent three months here. Days and nights. In sunshine and rain. We got to know dozens of the 100 or so people who live here.
America has more than half a million homeless people, and nearly 1 in 4 lives in California.
In parts of Oakland we counted more than 100 camps just across the Bay from the glass-sheathed condominiums of San Francisco.
Known for its riches, California now has more and more patches of grinding poverty. The United Nations has compared the state’s growing homeless camps to the slums of Pakistan, Brazil and Mexico.
Many in the camp have fled natural disasters. Kim Hansen lost her home in Northern California to a wildfire in 2014. She later lost her job when the coffee shop where she worked burned down.
She and her boyfriend live in a leaking 50-year-old trailer with electrical wires protruding from the walls. Many of the RVs have been ravaged by rodents and the elements. “This is the end of the road,” Hansen said. “Where else can we go?”
Personal disasters also propelled many to the camp. All of this is made more perilous by the Bay Area’s sky-high cost of living. California lawmakers have spent billions on homelessness, but so far nothing has stopped the problem from growing.
Tents. Tarp rigs. Old mobile homes. Residents cobble together materials found in dumpsters to build their makeshift homes.
Elizabeth Easton was forced out of her home in Texas by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. She barely survived colon cancer. She’s suffered sexual assault. She is wary of nights, when the camp is visited by outsiders who appear only as shadows.
Despite its grimness, the camp has a sense of community. People look out for each other. There are group meals and outdoor haircuts. Bathing is difficult. One resident of the camp has a gym membership and uses the showers there.
Such abject poverty side by side with the Bay Area’s incredible wealth shocked a U.N. representative, Leilani Farha, who visited the Oakland camp last year. Her report puts the California encampments in the same sentence as the slums of Delhi, India. Both places share “no access to toilets or showers and a constant fear of being cleaned off the streets.”
One of the most difficult things about living here is knowing that at any moment you could be forced to leave with nowhere to go.
During an October visit, city officials told camp residents that the conditions were so bad they feared fire and ordered them to clear a lane wide enough for emergency vehicles.
The city sent in a fleet of dump trucks and removed 250 tons of waste from this camp alone.
A Visit to Mexico City
To find a point of comparison to the Oakland camp, we traveled to the Mexico City shantytown that Farha of the United Nations had visited.
We drove to a sprawling neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City. Residents of a shanty encampment there live with a similar feeling of impermanence, yet many have lived here for a decade or more. They have built homes from bricks and recycled wood on a narrow strip of land next to railway tracks.
They survive as trash collectors and taxi drivers. Though the settlements have many differences — the Mexico camp has three times as many people — they both represent communities of last resort.
Mexican authorities have turned a blind eye to illegal installations of electricity and water. Residents also put in septic tanks and functioning kitchens.
Unlike in Oakland, where there are only a few portable toilets and where many use the bathroom at a McDonald’s next door, the residents in Mexico City have working toilets in each shack.
‘Where Is the Compassion?’
A week later, rain had turned unpaved areas of the Oakland camp into mud. A fire had destroyed one of the RVs, and wafts of the smoldering ashes drifted through the camp.
Under steady rain, we ran into Markaya Spikes, who was taking her 8-year-old daughter to school. They have lived in a wooden shed at the camp for the past five years. Spikes now says she is planning to leave.
“Homeless people are treated worse than stray animals,” Spikes said. “When someone finds a stray animal, they take it home and feed it. When someone sees a homeless person, they call the police.
“Where is the compassion?”
The city has vowed to close the camp, and many residents are resigned to finding somewhere else to live. Move along, move along. The only question is where.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .