This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials in Oakland, California, began making attempts to cooperate with the city’s unhoused communities, experimenting with co-governed sanctioned encampments and placing new limits on encampment sweeps.

Then came the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which held that cities could cite or arrest people for sleeping outside even if there is no available shelter. Since then, organizers say, Oakland’s officials have gone in the opposite direction: Homeless sweeps have been more forceful, and an executive order and new bill seek to further empower city agencies to dismantle encampments and disempower encampment residents.

The June 2024 Supreme Court decision — which overturned Martin v. Boise, a ruling that only applied to the states in the Ninth Circuit, covering the West Coast — has led to a string of anti-camping laws and more forceful crackdowns on homeless encampments across the country, even in jurisdictions that did not follow any local restrictions on homeless sweeps.

LaMonte Ford is a formerly homeless organizer who lived at a multi-block resident-run encampment called Wood Street for over a decade until last year. Ford says the city of Oakland used Grants Pass as an excuse to crack down even harder on homelessness.

“It was more violent, less notice, more of ‘they have the right to do this’ type of situation,” Ford says of homeless sweeps after the decision. He says that the city significantly increased the number of police that it uses for sweeps from a handful to several dozen for each sweep. That’s not counting staff from Oakland’s Department of Public Works and from Caltrans, the state transportation agency, who come out to each sweep.

According to Sathya, an organizer who says he has attended several homeless sweeps a week for the past year and who did not want to give his last name for security reasons, sweeps of larger encampments have become more routine in the year since Grants Pass. He says the city has offered shelter and services to residents less often, despite this being a legal requirement under Oakland law. He says that in the year since Grants Pass, the city has targeted the largest encampments in the city, including one at 23rd and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and one at East 12th Street.

“They are often not even really doing a semblance of outreach, particularly to people in RVs and vehicles,” Sathya says. “They’ve kind of stopped offering services to people living in vehicles entirely, and in general, they have been a lot more bold about not following their policy on paper.”

Read more: The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass Decision Has Lit a Fire Under Homeless Advocacy Groups

An Oakland public information officer responding to other queries for this article did not provide a response to the allegation that the city is no longer making offers of shelter.

Oakland City Council is set to vote on a change to the bill that would claw back city requirements to offer services before a sweep in some cases, requirements that Sathya says the city already does not follow.

All this happens as the city’s homeless population is spiking. The latest Point-in-Time Count showed 5,485 people homeless in Oakland, an 8.5% increase from 2022, in line with many cities that saw spikes of homelessness after pandemic stimulus funds lapsed.

The collapse of the Wood Street experiment

The Wood Street encampment — particularly Wood Street Commons, a resident-built meeting space with couches and a community garden — once signaled a possible different path forward for Oakland and other cities addressing homelessness.

The Wood Street encampment began in the early 2010s. Police mostly left people alone in the nearly mile-long strip of land underneath a freeway. In 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, it had become an unsanctioned experiment in autonomous homeless-run mutual aid. Residents teamed up with local nonprofits to build cabins and install on-site showers and solar panels.

There were still problems at the site: The California Department of Transportation said there were over 200 fires, and in 2022, a fire at the encampment killed a man trapped in an RV.

When the city eventually decided to take over, “they realized that it wasn’t going to be that easy, because we were actually a community,” Ford says.

After a public standoff, in 2022 the city and Caltrans began evicting residents from a portion of the site that Caltrans owned, while allowing people to remain in a city-owned section of the encampment.

In 2023, the city formally took over the portion of the site it owned. It installed 100 Tuff Sheds — metal cabins made by a private company for sanctioned encampments across the country — and 40 RV parking spots, according to KQED.

The city contracted with a nonprofit called Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency, or BOSS, to provide services, including running water and showers. But after the city missed months of payments, BOSS stopped providing those services and conditions deteriorated, with former residents saying there were overflowing toilets.

Oakland officials shut down the spot entirely in June of this year, removing the residents who had been there with its blessing since 2023.

Ford says very few people who stayed in the sanctioned version of Wood Street were housed. “All the other ones are just displaced throughout the city, in campers or in tents or in things like that,” Ford says.

When Next City/Shelterforce spoke with Ford in late August, he said that Wood Street had just been swept by the city again the prior week, after residents had returned to the location following the city’s June eviction.

“Managers just moved off site and left the camp to their own devices. So most of the residents there just kind of stayed there, and the police came and swept in,” Ford says.

After 10 years living in the encampment, Ford was eventually housed through a nonprofit called Homeless Action Center. But he says that constantly getting caught up in sweeps and having his belongings taken or destroyed prolonged his homelessness for years.

“I misplaced phones, I lost contact with my liaison to the voucher program, I had to start all over each time,” he says.

Ford keeps in touch with others from his time at Wood Street. The day he spoke to Next City/Shelterforce, he said that the city had recently swept three of his friends again. He now organizes with some of them as Wood Street Commons, which remains alive as an advocacy group providing mutual aid to encampments, calling attention to sweeps and pushing back against criminalization.

While he remains frustrated with Oakland’s continued policies, Ford is hopeful. “We’re now sitting at the tables … where before, we weren’t even looked upon.”

Ford says he and others with Wood Street asked the city to take over the sanctioned version of the encampment in an experiment in co-governance. Most of the connections to food donations, clothing donations and local nonprofits had been the result of networks built out by the core Wood Street Commons group, not the city. But the city rebuffed their requests.

“What we were going to try to do is try to take over it and show them how to do it the right way,” Ford says. “But they wouldn’t allow us to do that because they said that we were not ready for that yet.”

Ford argues that the community-run version of Wood Street was more efficient than the city’s sanctioned takeover of Wood Street and its contract for services with BOSS, describing the community-run encampment as a place where residents were empowered and connected with unhoused peers.

“We never closed our doors to anybody. We let anyone come in. I saw people actually reduce their usage of drugs being there,” he says. “You come there and learn how to build your house and get somebody to help you do that. You needed someone to talk to at three o’clock in the morning, you can find someone to talk to.”

As Ford tells it, the city-sanctioned version of Wood Street was more troubled and had more dilapidated infrastructure, especially after the city stopped paying for services and it needed to be closed.

“There was feces backed up in the toilets. The showers were broken. They didn’t have places to cook there. It was filthy inside,” Ford says. At press time, an Oakland public information officer did not respond to a request for comment regarding the encampment’s conditions.

At an April 4 press conference co-hosted by Wood Street Commons, Poor Magazine and Oakland Homeless Union, organizer “Tiny” Gray-Garcia railed against the new Tuff Sheds at the former Wood Street site.

“We are not safe in those shelters, and those spaces that are like jails that they decide to put us in. We know what happened with the cabins in West Oakland that they sent us folks to,” Gray-Garcia said, referring to the city’s Tuff Sheds at Wood Street. “We know that there was raw sewage, that there was malfeasance, and that nobody cared, and now they’re closing it. What kind of a solution is that?”

Hollowing out the Miralle deal

In theory, Oakland is bound by laws and court agreements that mean the Grants Pass ruling should not have changed its approach to homelessness. The Supreme Court decision means cities do not have to offer shelter before arresting or citing homeless people, but it did not mandate cities carry out sweeps or prevent local laws that require offers of shelter before sweeps.

In 2020, Oakland passed a broad camping ban that also established shelter offers as mandatory before a sweep. The sprawling ordinance also included $600,000 in funding for six experimental “co-governed” sanctioned encampments where residents would have some say, including at Wood Street.

Per a 2022 legal settlement reached by the City of Oakland with former residents of a separate encampment, the city must also post notice seven days before a sweep. In the agreement, referred to as the Miralle settlement after a plaintiff in the case, the city agreed to bag and tag each item it removes, create a detailed inventory of tagged items and provide an address where the items are being stored to residents. It also establishes that the city has to “provide garbage run, porta-potties, hygiene stations, deep cleanings, outreach” to encampments, with exceptions for financial constraints or “policy considerations.” The agreement is in effect until 2026.

But the city has not been following all of these requirements, according to local reporting from Oakland’s Street Spirit newspaper as well as video viewed by Next City/Shelterforce.

“They haven’t been offering people shelter for the most part, because they don’t have it,” Sathya says. “What we’ve been seeing is that there might be one or two people at any given sweep who are told ‘we might have something for you.’”

Street Spirit reported in November of last year that city officials were tossing items into the trash without bagging and tagging them, in apparent violation of the settlement agreement. According to the publication, there were only two recorded instances of property being bagged between 2021 and 2023 and 10 in 2024 (as of October).

Video taken in 2024 and 2025 and viewed by Next City/Shelterforce also show Oakland officials destroying various belongings, including planters for a garden and wooden structures.

Reached for comment, an Oakland public information officer said that the city’s encampment clearing team and Oakland Public Works decide what to store based on the 2020 encampment management policy and the city’s “standard operating procedure.”

“The City maintains the logs including the location, description and quantities of material, collection date, retrieval date, the retriever’s signature, and disposal date, if applicable,” takes pictures of belongings and has two storage locations,” the public information officer said, adding that its process is “consistent with the Miralle settlement.” The public information officer did not respond to any specific allegations about video footage or first person accounts in which these guidelines are apparently not followed.

Last November, the Oakland Homeless Union attempted to bring a lawsuit against the city claiming that it was violating the Miralle settlement, but the case was thrown out because a judge said none of the plaintiffs were party to the settlement.

Workers carrying out sweeps on at least one occasion appeared to endanger someone living in a makeshift structure: In two videos of a May 12 sweep of an encampment on East 12th Street, taken by activist Kelsey Hubbard and viewed by Next City/Shelterforce, a bulldozer begins destroying the structure before a woman emerges from it.

In the first video, a bulldozer begins ramming the side of the structure, a home constructed of tarps and wooden boards, ripping off part of a wall. An organizer off-screen yells, “Did they even fucking check to see if someone’s in there?”

In the second video, two Oakland Department of Public Works workers are talking to someone inside the structure, one worker with his hand against the wall. Moments later, a woman comes outside of the structure with a bag and holding a milk crate full of belongings. As she exits, the organizer yells at another Oakland Department of Public Works employee in a safety vest, “There’s someone inside of there. You destroyed half of the structure while they were inside.”

The man in the safety vest appears to deny it as the organizer says, “That is dangerous. That is unacceptable. Why don’t you make sure no one else is in there before you do that shit?”

Sathya, who was there, says the workers only paused the demolition and checked if anyone was inside because organizers had yelled at them.

In response to Next City/Shelterforce’s requests for comment on the incident, Oakland’s public information officer said that the woman in the structure “re-entered the tent after Oakland police department officers had conducted an inspection to make sure no one was in any of the structures.” The public information officer said the city “is now increasing inspections to avoid a repeat occurrence.”

Read more: Why Are So Many Cities’ Homeless Policies Punitive?

In September 2024, three months after Grants Pass, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao enacted an executive order that called on agencies to review 311 calls to find “emergencies” that could allow for exceptions to the terms of the Miralle settlement and the city’s legal requirement of shelter offers. It asks agencies to prioritize closing encampments that have active fires or are attached to buildings that are ”imminent fire hazards.” It tasked agencies with finding and immediately closing encampments that were an “imminent or active destruction” to city infrastructure including bridges, power poles, train tracks, sewer pipes and traffic equipment.

And a new bill set to go before the city council would further roll back the city’s requirement to offer shelter. The 2025 Encampment Abatement Policy would repeal provisions from the 2020 Encampment Management Policy, including a provision that had allowed residents of some smaller encampments to operate in collaboration between the city and grassroots groups. It would also repeal a clause saying that the city “will not cite or arrest any individual solely for camping” or being homeless.

It would also add a provision saying that the city is “not required to make offers of shelter and/or alternative housing” and can cite or arrest people who camp in a recently closed encampment with signage. The bill incorporates wording from Mayor Thao’s September 2024 executive order, allowing for same-day closures of encampments during broadly defined emergencies.

In a recorded announcement of the executive order, Thao boasted about clearing Wood Street Commons, which she called the largest encampment in Northern California. She said that the city was able to act “more expeditiously” because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass.

While Democratic mayors have attempted to strike a tone of defiance against the Trump administration’s recent high-profile actions, including the deployment of the local police in D.C. to sweep encampments, the leaders of most large Democrat-led cities have simultaneously been pulling from the same playbook.

“We see a lot of this really draconian stuff coming down from the Trump administration, [but] the targeting and scapegoating of unhoused communities is really coming from a bipartisan effort,” Sathya says.

This post was originally published on Next City.