Why No Homeless People in Emeryville?

Homeless Clearances Reveal Emeryville's Policies Are Not Compassionate, Not Truthful

Official Claims Don't Stand Up  

Emeryville they say, is a smart, compassionate and nimble city that quickly matches homeless people with emergency shelter and other services.  With the City so committed, the downtrodden are seldom visible, City Hall explains.  Turns out, reality is far from that image.

This sign was recently placed on Emeryville public
property to stop homeless people, according to the 
City Manager.

In fact, local homeless people report they intentionally avoid Emeryville, saying they are rousted without warning by the police, their possessions confiscated and discarded.  Sharply contrasting with the City's official "all are welcome here" reassurances in the wake of recent right wing attacks on the LGBTQ community, City Manager Adam Politzer last week admitted an on-going and punitive city policy against those most disadvantaged.

Mr Politzer confirmed that a "no trespassing" sign recently placed on City owned public property behind City Hall was intended to prevent a homeless encampment there.  The sign was placed amid a field of boulders placed by a landscaping firm paid for with tax dollars whose contract stipulated that the Emeryville PD clear away a homeless encampment that was previously starting to form there.  Boulders spaced 12 inches apart on the City owned property apparently wasn’t enough to chase away homeless people so the City put up a no trespassing sign for them like a maraschino cherry on top of a cupcake made of boulders.  

"All* are welcome in Emeryville".      *except homeless people

Cleared homeless encampment on Wood St
in Oakland, Friday.  
On Emeryville's border, 300 were sent packing.
Where did they go? 
Why haven't any set up camp in Emeryville?
 

To anyone asking, the EPD, City Hall and the City Council has for years explained the reason there are no homeless encampments here is because they do such a great job helping those people find shelter (and other government services).  Emeryville would have us believe Oakland and Berkeley have cruel policies towards poor people that is evident in all the homeless people encamped in their respective cities.  And to skeptics of this official explanation, the City of Emeryville lets the explanation of ‘no homeless visible is proof of a compassionate local government’ speak without any other supporting information.  Concerned citizens are told to just believe City Hall and the police. 
 

If Emeryville is so good to homeless people, last week’s (and continuing) well publicized clearance of a camp of some 300 people on Wood Street in Oakland near Emeryville will make it plain for all to see.  The City of Oakland freely admits there are not enough beds in local shelters or homes for the massive influx of unhoused people left by the unprecedented clearances.  With a compassionate Emeryville right next door, they would migrate here and we would be seeing many tents going up.   Because there are not enough local shelters to accommodate them, tents should now be proliferating here if Emeryville has been truthful to us.  If not, then everyone will know the City has not been entirely truthful about what it does with homeless people found sleeping in our city.  So far there are no new tents in Emeryville, EPD informs us.

A compassionate city that helps homeless people doesn't place boulders and no trespassing signs on the public's property to stop camps from forming.  The Tattler spoke Sunday with five people displaced by the clearances on Wood Street about what Emeryville is like for people without homes.  A woman who wished to remain anonymous told us what all unhoused people in Berkeley and Oakland know: "Emeryville cops arrest you.  They take your stuff and they throw it away and they arrest you.  They don't play." she said.

Several police personnel and City Hall employees were contacted for this story but all refused to comment.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

-Anatole France 

Boulders: Emeryville Hits on New Way to Clear Out Homeless People

Police Rousts Homeless Camp

$13,000 Spent on Boulder Field

City Hall Refuses to Explain

Accountability and Transparency Vacates Emeryville With the Homeless People

Humane Policies Out, Boulders and Secrecy In

News Analysis

Late in April, Emeryville's police quietly rousted a small group of homeless people camped on a City owned piece of land on 40th Street behind City Hall so it could place $13,000 worth of boulders there.  The uprooted homeless people have not returned, probably because the taxpayer funded boulders are so tightly spaced that a human body cannot recline between them.  We say ‘probably’ because all we've been able to get by way of an explanation from officials at City Hall about this lavishly funded public work is a 'no comment'.  Are the boulders just dumped there, waiting to be assembled in some way?  They're not saying.  Is this field of boulders indicative of a new policy about how the City deals with homeless people?  Again, they're not saying.

Even though the City refuses to say anything about it, the barren, seemingly inconsequential triangular shaped plot of public land along 40th Street at Hollis Street has become emblematic and revelatory of Emeryville’s real policy about homeless people.  The City has long downplayed implications about the lack of homeless encampments within its borders, especially when compared with neighboring cities and they've even gone as far as to claim the lack of encampments here proves the efficacy and humaneness of its homeless policy.  However the April homeless clearance on 40th Street and the accompanying $13,000 boulder field raises questions not easily dismissed by a button lipped City Hall.  

Mohamed Alaoui
Emeryville's Public Works Director
"No comment" he says about the boulder field.
The people don't have a right to know.

Through a State of California enforced public records request, the Tattler was able to find that the police department cleared out the homeless camp on the orders of City Hall.  The clearing out of the undesirable people was the City’s part of a contract with Rubicon Landscaping of Richmond, a company the City regularly uses for its landscaping needs.  For this project, Rubicon billed Emeryville $12,976 for the placement of 21 tons of gravel and 14 pallets of ‘double head’ boulders, the public records request revealed.  Anything beyond that, the City of Emeryville has refused to account for.  The lack of a chain of command paper trail hints the City Council was not likely a direct part in this decision.  Rather, it was probably made administratively by the city manager or the director of the Public Works Department. 

Still, the people have a right to know, especially because they paid for this.  Why are these boulders needed?  Who decided this?  How long will the boulders be on the people's property?  Was any consideration made to how the boulders look?  What happened to the homeless people formerly camped there the public paid to roust?  The City of Emeryville refuses to answer these or any questions about this other than the firm 'no comment' from Public Works Director Mohamed Alaoui. 
 

Welcome to Emeryville: All are Welcome Here
*except homeless people

The stark difference between Oakland and Berkeley versus Emeryville has for years been expressed in the large number of homeless camps just outside the city's boundaries compared with the total lack of camps within Emeryville. Council members and staff until now, have been quick to explain the difference is that Emeryville’s homeless policies are good and effective at gently steering homeless people to government recourses including bed facilities.  The police department here has always denied that homeless people are rousted.  To those who have asked about it, the answer up until now has always been that Emeryville is good and humane, leaving that Berkeley and Oakland, with their homeless encampments, must be bad and inhumane.  However, the April call to roust the homeless people at the 40th Street site and the new field of boulders placed there calls this longstanding explanation into question.

The questions persist.  Why won’t the City be forthcoming about this?  Is this reflective of a new anti-homeless policy or is it the City just got caught this time?  Rubicon Landscaping charged Emeryville a lot of money for this.  Were there other bids to supply the boulders?  Did Rubicon get a sweetheart backroom deal?  Is the City hiding something here?  Where did the money to pay for this come from?  Were federal Covid-19 funds or other such inappropriate funds used to purchase these boulders?  How are these boulders placed on our land representative of Emeryville values?  The answers to these questions about the people's business will not be answered by those doing the people’s business at City Hall.  But the Tattler will keep trying to shed light into this and forcing them to account.

This is how you spent your $13,000.
Just keep paying your taxes and stop asking questions.

'No comment' from
Emeryville City
government earns one
smiling Nora Davis

Dog Park Feature: Push Out Homeless People

Do Your Techie Residents Have a Problem With Homeless People?  

Solution: Clear the Homeless Out!

Opinion

These guys are on their way up in Emeryville

Homeless people are a problem that should be dealt with by clearing them away.  So says the Emeryville City Council as they now prepare to use Emeryville taxpayer money to build a dog park entirely in Oakland who's primary function will be to clear out persistent homeless encampments near the Emeryville border under the 40th Street bridge, the site of the future dog park.  These encamped homeless people have been venturing into Emeryville committing crimes and spreading disease plus they smell bad says E'Ville Eye blog editor Rob Arias.  He testified to the Public Safety Committee recently that he's fearful about walking in his own neighborhood and he implored the Emeryville police to clear out the homeless encampments in West Oakland since Oakland cops are not responsive.

Dogs In, Poor People Out

...these guys are on their way down

Mr Arias used his blog to rally his readers to descend on the City Council chambers May 17th  to insist the City clear out the homeless people by putting building the dog park at the top of the list of priorities for the Five Year Capital Improvement program for the City.  This is the same list that provides funds for parks, children, seniors, pedestrian/bike bridges over railroad tracks and the like.  No mention was made by Mr Arias or his followers or the City Council facing the crowd and feeling their pain that another dog park is going in only one block away at the Sherwin Williams site when the developer for that project gets the go ahead (after the election in November).

Two Side by Side Dog Parks Needed

...and these guys are out...all the way out.

Why didn't anyone mention the Sherwin Williams dog park at the capital improvements discussion on the 17th?  Because techies and homeless people don't mix and the dog park under the bridge isn't really meant to serve as a dog park...it's meant to be a buffer between homeless people in West Oakland and the techies populating the Park Avenue neighborhood in Emeryville. As more and more techies move into Emeryville thanks to the City Council building bock after block of drive-in drive-out market rate (men's) dormitories to house them, clearing out homeless people is becoming a pattern and practice of our progressive City Council majority.

In With the New
Meet Emeryville's newest resident.

We remember who's pain the Council felt when calls were made to deny a toehold to these undesirable types at the Center of 'Community' Life bike/pedestrian path and the EBI pedestrian path and the Joseph Emery Park.  The City Council even amended the General Plan to stop bike/ped connectivity in order to deny homeless people places to congregate when they deleted our bike/ped paths and moved to replace an existing park that the E'Ville Eye warned the homeless had "targeted", into a skate park.  The Council noted the skate park would serve a dual function of providing a space for skateboarders and clearing out homeless people...a twofer.
To her credit, Councilwoman Jac Asher told her colleagues that the City bears a responsibility to providing for people living with homelessness and that she expects them (her colleagues) to agree to part with some cash (for unspecified uses) to help with the problem when the budget comes under discussion later in the year.  We'll have to wait to see how that turns out.

Lots of Dogs
Emeryville's City Council really likes dogs.  They just finished building a ersatz public dog park at the Parc on Powell project, a whole city block of rental apartments that go for $3000 per month for a one bedroom unit.  Now they're going to build two dog parks right next to each other in the Park Ave area, a neighborhood that's going to absorb almost 1000 market rate all rental techie units associated with the Sherwin Williams project.  That's a lot of dogs.

At least they can't be accused of not listening to their constituents.

And who's generally not included among their constituents?  Poor people and families.  These are the two groups that are being edged out of our town, all the overheated hyperbolic rhetoric from the City Council notwithstanding.  Over the last ten years, Emeryville has grown exponentially but even with all that growth, families have actually been reduced in numbers.  Emeryville's housing policy (in practice it's more of a lack of a policy) has resulted in a hemorrhaging of children, so much so that we're now the city with the fewest  children in the whole East Bay.  And poor people?  They've been ignored and pushed out as the Council lets developers build residential projects to suit their stockholder's profit needs.  The progressive Council majority so far has only managed to keep affordability from decreasing (they kept the status quo) at one project, in the aggregate, we're keeping on our headlong rush to provide safe haven for residential projects filled with dog loving single techies (girlfriends or wives welcome when applicable).

Two dog parks a block away from each other...nice! 

Woman Beaten to Death on Emeryville's Mean Streets

Emeryville resident Hayok Kay was beaten to death by an unknown assailant where she slept over the last couple of years; on the sidewalk on San Pablo Avenue in front of the CVS Pharmacy police said.  Police are looking for the suspect in the horrific killing, Emeryville's first since 2012.
The beating took place early in the morning on July 6th and by the time Emeryville police arrived at the scene, Ms Kay was unconscious.  She was taken to Highland Hospital in Oakland where she later lapsed into a coma from extensive brain injuries due to the attack and was pronounced dead on August 18th after doctors removed her from life support.

Hayok Kay 1954-2015
Murdered in Emeryville

A native of Seoul South Korea but a longtime Emeryville resident and fixture, Hayok Kay, 61, lived for many years without a home and at the margins in town.  She performed as a drummer the '80's post punk band Polkacide and in several Bay Area all girl punk bands many years ago but more recently made her living by recycling in Emeryville and West Oakland.  Ms Kay's gender and her small stature, unusual for people living with homelessness on the streets, made her well known by the clannish local recycler population, many of whom felt protective of her.  After her partner, the landscape painter Fred Griffing died some years ago, she lost the shelter of the car she shared with him and was flung to the streets.
 
Hayok, known affectionately as 'Miss Kay' by her many friends was the subject of a recent film, Dogtown Redemption, on the lives of people living with homelessness in West Oakland and Emeryville.  Sadly, film director and producer Amir Soltani was prescient in 2013 when, upon the release of his film, he predicted Ms Kay would not last long on the streets, "A diminutive and much diminished Asian-American woman, Miss Kay is easy prey.  Amongst the recyclers, her chances of survival are by far the worst."

The City of Emeryville has no policy or programs or shelter for people experiencing homelessness and they usually get pushed around town by police responding to complaints.  The exposed sidewalks around CVS Pharmacy where Ms Kay was beaten to death is a place where encampments are common for people now after the City fenced off the nearby former bike/pedestrian path known as the Pixar Bike Path, a place people without shelter found attractive because of its relative off the street safety.   Emeryville police refused to comment further on the case still under investigation by the Alameda County District Attorney.

Guest Column: John Bauters

John Bauters is a resident of Emeryville and currently serves on the City’s Housing Committee and the Emery Unified School District’s Measure “K” Parcel Tax Oversight Committee. John is the Policy Director at Housing California, the state’s leading non-profit legislative advocacy organization on policy that impacts housing affordability and homelessness. 

HOMELESSNESS AND HOUSING FIRST

A TINY WINDOW INTO THE AMERICAN HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS
by John Bauters

Homelessness, and its history in the United States, is a largely untold story. To understand 

the origins of homelessness, one need not look much farther than the high school civic 

book. Colonial expansion was wrought with land skirmishes that disenfranchised settlers 

of land and home. The end of the Civil War and the subsequent institutionalization of 

racism in things like the New Deal's lending programs resulted in millions of African-

Americans from being locked out of home ownership opportunities. Broken promises 

with Native American tribes spurned the creation of reservations that offered no housing 

or resources. The economic fallout of the Great Depression, followed by the subsequent 

and insufficient regulation of the market has inequitably punished lower income and 

working families for a century. Perverse regulations in the early administration of Social 
Security and other institutionalized welfare programs – even if unintentionally racist – 

disproportionately and adversely affected women and non-white families, blocking 

millions of families from building wealth and transferring assets between generations 

– a key predictor of housing stability. The obliteration of HUD funding and rescission 

of America’s modest safety net programs in the 1980’s removed some of the last 

protections that kept poor, working families from the streets. Today, the ever-growing 

gap in wage earnings, the lost bargaining power of workers for things like health 

coverage and daycare, and the lack of investment in affordable housing exacerbate 

America’s ever-growing homelessness problem.

CRUNCHING NUMBERS

The point-in-time, or “PIT” count, which takes places annually during the last week 

of January, is an attempt to estimate the number of people who experience 

homelessness on a given night in the United States.  According to HUD's most 

recent report on homelessness, there are nearly 600,000 people in the United States 

who fit the federal definition of homelessness. The federal definition of 

homelessness, encoded in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, is rather 

prescriptive. Advocates have long complained that PIT counts undercount children 

and youth, fail to include people who are marginally housed (i.e. living on a friend’s 

couch or in a relative’s basement because they lack the resources to house 

themselves) and that the process of collecting the data is inconsistently administered 

across jurisdictions. Although admittedly imperfect, PIT counts offer us a general 

sense of what homelessness looks like in the United States and is one of the few 

tools policy experts and advocates have for identifying gaps in existing policy 

and practices that would help reduce the number of people living without access 

to housing.

THE CALIFORNIAN REALITY

California holds several dubious distinctions related to homelessness. Not only 

do more than 20% of the people who experience homelessness in the United States 

reside here (by contrast, California is home to 12% of the general population, which 

means our homelessness rate exceeds our residential rate when compared with 

the national average), but we also have the largest number of unsheltered people 

experiencing homelessness as well.  According to the most recent Annual 

Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) issued by HUD in October 2014, 62.7% 

of those experiencing homelessness in California have no access to shelter of any 

kind. Even worse, on a local level, nearby San Jose and Santa Clara County have 

the highest rates of people living without shelter nationally. California is also home 

to the highest number of veterans who experience homelessness, with 

approximately 24% of all homeless veterans living here in California. And perhaps 

worst, 13,709 unaccompanied homeless children and youth live in California. These 

children are often victims of sex trafficking and other abuses, which helps explain 

why California also has the dubious distinction of being a leader in that category as well.

THE BIG PICTURE: A STEP TOWARD SOLUTIONS

For years, advocates, elected officials and communities have fought over how to address 

the problem of homelessness and the ancillary problems that come from having large 

numbers of unsheltered people in a community. The Bay Area and Emeryville are not 

immune to these challenges. Developing solutions for the complex problem that 

homelessness presents is as much a quest to solve for the social and fiscal problems 

affecting individuals and families in our society as it is a quest to create communities 

that are more livable, affordable, hospitable and humane.

It might surprise some that the solution to homelessness, in its most basic conceptual 

form, is quite simple: house people.

Yes, house them.

For decades, the federal government, local communities, funders and even homeless 

service providers have utilized a carrot and stick approach to solving homelessness: 

“If you get treatment for your mental illness, we will be able to provide you with 

housing assistance.” “In order for us to offer you a bed in our shelter, you must be 

clean and sober for 30 days.” “We can only offer housing subsidies to people who 

have already obtained some form of employment.”

This approach is significantly flawed. The chances that a person with a serious 

mental illness can be compliant with medication or treatment in the absence of 

intensive care or therapy while trying to survive on the street is infinitesimally 

small. People who suffer from addiction and substance use disorders have 

psychological and physiological cravings that are abetted by being left among 

the social environment that enables their addiction to persist, making self-induced 

sobriety on the streets as unlikely as winning the lottery for most. And the ability to 

apply for work, be rested for work, prepare for work and physically get to work is 

minimal when you lack a warm, safe and stable place to sleep each night.

HOUSING FIRST

The proper approach and the only successful solution to homelessness require 

embracing a "housing first” model.  Studies show that people who are offered 

housing assistance find employment faster, have fewer health issues, respond 

better to mental health and substance use treatment and experience fewer 

encounters with law enforcement.  If the thought of government financing 

housing for the homeless bothers you, let’s examine how much it really costs us:

A study on the cost of chronic homelessness by the Massachusetts Home 
and Healthy for Good Program found that the average cost for measured 

services (Medicaid costs, emergency shelter, law enforcement/incarceration) 

per person annually was $33,190. After employing a Housing First approach 

by housing the chronically homeless individual and providing wrap around 

supports, the same cost for those measured services fell to an average of $8,603. 

When you add back in the affirmative cost of providing comprehensive housing 

and supportive services to help make the program work, at a cost of $15,468 per 

tenant, the total return on investment to the state and local governments was an 

average of $9,118 per person.

What is missing from this analysis is something that doesn’t get crunched in 

numbers: social outcomes. Fewer people rely on hospitals and emergency services, 

scarce shelter beds become accessible to others when people in them become 

housed, the number of people living unsheltered drops, and the reduced demand for 

law enforcement and correctional services all make communities more livable.

In fact, if you want any more simple proof about how the lives of people who 

experience chronic homelessness are improved by housing them, look no further 

than Project 25. San Diego decided to house 35 chronically homeless individuals 

who were among the highest consumers of state and local emergency services 

and provide them with supportive services under a Housing First approach. The 

results were dramatic, to say the least.  In the 12 months prior to the project, those 

35 individuals alone spent a whopping total of 1,505 days in hospital care. 

Comparatively, two years into the program, that rate is down to 568, a reduction 

of 64%. Other communities like Charlotte, North Carolina and Salt Lake City, Utah

have already paved the path with success.

HOUSING AS HEALTH

Housing is a social determinant for public health and healthy communities. I had 

the pleasure of being a panelist at a recent convening held by the Alameda County 

Department of Senior Services on how housing improves health outcomes, which 

in turn makes communities not only more healthy, but safer. Aging and senior 

services are looking at ways to invest in solutions for people that allow them to 

age in place as opposed to receive institutionalized or nursing home care, which 

are far more expensive and lower the social health of seniors by removing them 

from their homes. Health officials and senior advocates already see that improving 

the quality, affordability and accessibility of housing improves health outcomes. 

So why stop there?

People who experience chronic homelessness have some of the greatest unmet 

needs and are subject to the most dangerous of health risks. Their lack of shelter 

and services decreases the affordability of general services we all share in as 

residents of the community and the lack of resources designed to meet their 

basic human needs decreases the livability of our community. If you want to learn 

more about how housing is a social determinant for health, read this white paper by 

the Corporation for Supportive Housing, one of the leading advocacy groups for 

supportive housing and a partner of mine in advocating for a “Housing First” approach 

to homelessness.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Funding the development of affordable, permanent, supportive housing is the single-

best long term solution to homelessness. Federal cuts to HUD due to sequestration, 

uninspiring leadership from Governor Brown on this issue at the state level and a 

lack of political will to fund housing solutions by a handful of legislators to address 

this issue leaves some of the problem-solving to local and regional groups. The problem 

cannot be resolved by a single local government alone. However, we can do our part. 

I ascribe to a simple philosophy: “Think globally, act locally.” Promoting affordable 

development and recognizing that solutions for people living in deep poverty or 

experiencing homelessness are not going to be solved by naïve notions of achieving 

affordability through simple “supply and demand” economics are major steps.  We 

must model local solutions for homelessness in such a way that breaks us from our 

untenable trajectory. Good social policy and good fiscal policy are not mutually 

exclusive. Providing a place for the housing first approach in the way we develop 

going forward, investing in permanent supportive housing and meeting the needs of 

everyone who calls Emeryville “home” are all steps toward creating a more livable, 

just community.