Transcript of A Tiny Plot to Call Home

I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. It's hard to remember a time when we weren't talking about America's homelessness crisis. It's a vast crisis, and in many US cities, one that is becoming increasingly visible. In West Coast cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, homeless encampments are a part of the urban landscape. They sprawl over city blocks and are a point of tension for local residents, business owners, housing advocates, and elected officials. During the COVID lockdowns of 2020, reporter Shaina Shealey spent a lot of time walking around her neighborhood in Oakland, California. On her walks, she passed people sleeping under underpasses and in makeshift tents on the sidewalks, under piles of blankets in the woods and in parking lots. And she wanted to talk to those people. Then in 2021, She heard about a group of people who had barricaded their tent encampment in the face of a city eviction. They lived at a park along the water called Union Point. Shealy is a producer for the podcast Snap Judgment. At the time, she was searching for stories for the show, so she went to meet people from this tent encampment.

One of the first people she spoke to was a woman named DeAnna Reilly.

We was a family. We was a community that wouldn't let nobody come in and take that from us.

Deanna was around 45 and had been homeless for about a decade. People at the park called her Mama Dee. Even grown adults called her Mom. Mama Dee was a force. When the park had a rat infestation, she planned experiment and pepperment around people's tents to try to keep the rats away. She had six tents at the park, and she tried to make them feel like home.

I had to have one for my bathtub Your bathtub had its own tent?

Yeah. And how did you get hot water in it?

Boiled it.

You had a little stove?

Like propane? I had one of those, and I used to just put big pots of water on.

She really got to know more of the people who made a home in Union Point Park. And before long, she was visiting regularly and documenting the community's struggle against eviction and their fight for a better option. She ended up hosting a five-part podcast series called A Tiny Plot with KQED Snap Studios. The series follows a group of homeless people in Oakland, California, as they fight for their own small plot of land from the city, where they could live in community and set their own rules on their own terms. My conversation with Shaina Shealey about what she discovered after the break.

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We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm here with Shaina Shealey, host of a Tiny Plot. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Ayesha. I'm so glad to be here.

So, Shaina, you learned about this community at Union Point and you ended up following them for about a year as they tried to find a place for themselves in the city. But first, take me back in time a little bit. What was the original encampment at Union Point Park? What was that like?

Sure. Yeah. So first of all, the park itself is pretty special. It's along a working marina with sailboats and grassy lawns and benches and bathrooms. If you're at the park, you can actually hear the clink of sailboats waves lapping up onto this little sandy shore. When people who lived there described it to me, it sometimes didn't sound like they were talking about a tent encampment.

Sometimes at night, over in the sun, sitting in the summer, you'd forget where you were. You think you're in paradise. It's nice, almost.

That was Mike Newman. Everyone called him Mustash Mike. Here's his girlfriend, Rachel Rodriguez.

It's beautiful right by the water. I liked it there. That's one thing I liked, the sunset. It was very cool. It was almost like a picnicking or stuff like that because everybody knew each other. So that was a big deal. Good thing.

There was this group of people who lived at the park together for years. While a lot of them described the park as this little paradise, There were other people who saw the encampment as a problem. There were actually parents who were dropping kids off nearby at school, and there were boat owners with sailboats docked just yards away from the tent encampment. Over time, there were a a lot of complaints. A lot of them actually made the news. Here's a couple of clips from the local Bay Area, Fox and NBC channels.

It's been the source of constant complaints about filth and crime.

Well, several boat owners are calling an East Bay marina a lawless Barber, where homeless people are threatening boaters and breaking into their bathrooms. Now they're calling on the city of Oakland to do something about it.

It really wasn't safe for anyone. Deanna Reilly or Mama Dee, as she refers to be known, In the first three years she was at the park, parkgoers and residents reported over 215 violent incidents at the park, including a hatchet attack. There were four separate murders in the parking lot in just one year.

I mean, that's really scary to hear. Sounds really dangerous. These are real issues for the people who live near these encampments. There's this tension between how to deal with the issues of crime while also respect respecting the dignity of the people around you. This just seems like to be a microcosm of that.

Yes, and nearly a third of our country's homeless population lives in California. It's such a big issue here that nearly all politicians in the bigger cities have some plan for dealing with homelessness as part of their platform.

With all of these complaints coming in, how did the city respond?

Well, the city tried to clear this tent encampment in Union Point Park. The people who lived there, they actually told me that the city made a few attempts at clearing it. But these people always came back. Once the city kicked them out, they'd come back later with their tents. This effort to clear the encampment, it was actually part of a larger trend. Just in a few years, 2018 through 2020, the city of Oakland reported that it had closed or cleared encampments around the city about 500 times. But by the end of 2020, complaints about the encampment were so overwhelming that the city set a very final cleanup deadline for February of 2021.

Tell me, in Oakland, what does it look like when a city clears an encampment? What happens?

Yeah. The city usually sets a deadline for when people need to be out, but a lot of time people don't leave voluntarily. When that deadline comes around, public works employees often show up with law enforcement and garbage trucks and these small claw tractors called dingos. One of the people living at the park, Edward Hansen, he described the scene this way.

They brought in these weird machines that they stand on and big giant claws and munches and crunches and rips and tears, everything and stuff. They look like Lange of the Lears. Lange of the Lears. You remember seeing a Stephen King movie? They eat time and they have big old teeth, like Pac-Man or something. And he's eating the sky away.

That's a description. The langaliers. Oh, my goodness.

I know. Yeah. When he says eating the sky away, it's true. A lot of stuff often gets thrown away. Essential things like tents or medication, but also sometimes sentimental irreplaceable items like a loved one's ashes or photos. This guy, Edward, who we just heard from, a lot of his artwork has been thrown away by the city. Also, people get split up from their communities. These are their support systems.

It sounds very dramatic. This has been happening all over the country. There is a lot of focus on it in DC. Using the premise of crime. It can be really abrupt, right? The tents are gone. But even when that happens, it's just maybe it gets rid of some of the tents, but it doesn't get rid of the people.

Right. When people are uprooted from their communities, it's not like the problems they face just go away.

So where are people supposed to go after the city of Oakland throws away their things and clears their encampments?

So the city of Oakland actually has this policy that they must offer some shelter to people when they clear them from an encampment. When I was reporting this story, the standard shelter they offered, it was a city-run, temporary site called the Community Cabins. But when the city made that offer to the people sleeping at Union Point Park, one of the group's leaders, Matt Long, who people called President Matt, he told the city no. Matt was in his early 30s. He was a DJ, and he struggled with substance use. And he came to the park during the COVID lockdown when he ran out of friends' couches to crash on.

I showed up there with my tent one day and just poking around. I just started setting it up, and I bought these foam panels, and I built myself a little tiny house out of foam. The other people and my neighbors, would say, I had the mansion on the block.

Matt actually told the city he'd rather live in his styrofoam hut than the city's community cabins. And he also told me it's not so uncommon for homeless people to reject these transitional housing offers from the city. These community cabins, they're typically these 9 by 12 foot sheds where you might to bunk up with strangers. There's often no running water or real place to cook. Plus, according to a performance audit on the city's homelessness services, almost half the people who move there just end up back on the street. But the What part of the issue was.

There's all these rules, and that runs counter to a lot of people's strong desire to have a certain degree of freedom in their life.

All people want to have some self-determination, right? It seems like Matt, he leads this charge to reject the city's offer, but they're in a public park. Couldn't the city just clear them by force, right? Couldn't they just come in and just, with the tractors, with the heavy equipment, with the police, get them out? What was the plan?

Yeah. So when public work showed up at the park to clear it out, President Matt and Mama Dee and the whole community at Union Point Park, they had barricaded the encampment to keep the city out. Here's Matt and Mustache Mike talking about building this barricade.

There was just a couple of us who went around and collected stuff, anything we could find in the area, and we just piled it up in a big keep.

Garbage bags full of garbage.

Dishwasher that someone had thrown out. Piles of dirt. The refrigerator, a mattress.

Seats, anything to slow down their progress.

Bed frames and lions, tigers, and bears.

And they stood around their encampment with actual shields.

You get some thick wood that you can't bust because if you hit a thin piece of wood, you're just going to go straight through it. So we were holding these shields like, Go ahead, try to come through because we're not letting you in. They see we're not going to back down.

That was crazy. They were not prepared for that level of resistance.

This is sounding like something from Game of Thrones or something. You're picturing everybody stand, stand with the shields and everything. So this is a face-off, right? What did they think would happen? Okay, you stand, you say we're not leaving. Did they think the city would just say, Okay.

So this was all actually part of a strategy to bring the city to the negotiating table.

When we come back, the negotiation.

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A core part of their strategy was getting organized. As I mentioned before, they had elected a President, Matt Long. They called him President Matt.

Matt, he knows how to talk to the police and all that. And the legal things to say and whatnot.

President Matt held meetings under a pop-up tent to talk about the housing the people in this group actually wanted.

A run of water.

Showers in a bathroom.

A parcel for 3-5 years.

Weekly trash pickup. A tiny house community of our own.

There was this other thing that the group had learned about. The Bay Area shoreline, it's actually monitored by this conservation agency. This agency, they gave the city a cease and desist order to close the tent encampment for good in order to protect the shoreline. Or the city would have to pay a fine of $6,000 per day each day that people stayed there indefinitely. So this group actually had leverage, and they knew it.

So they knew they could run up the bills on the city by staying there and dragging out the process of them being put out. It would be more costly for the city. And so they have some leverage. What did they want from the city long term?

Yeah. So if they were going to leave the park, they wanted a better housing option than what the city was offering. At the time, there was this homeless intervention model called Co-Governance that had been floating around city council meetings. Students at UC Berkeley had written about it, and this guy, Darryl Dunston, who was Oakland's Homelessness Administrator, had been talking about it with other city employees for months. He'd even studied how it went down in other cities like Seattle and Eugene. The key features of Co-Governance are these resident-led agreements about how homeless people can live together in community. Things like how they'll pick leaders and make their own rules, all in cooperation with the city. Dariel thought this group might be the perfect one to pilot this co-governance idea in Oakland because they were already organized. They seemed to already have identified who the leaders in the groups were. They seemed to have a certain level of respect for one another. On one of the last days of the standoff, Dariel made a move that surprised everyone. He climbed up the barricade. He actually climbed this pile of junk, and he sat down on this busted mattress next to President Matt.

Here's Matt talking about that moment.

When it came to a head with me and Dariel on the barricade, he cited the co-govern model, which addressed the concerns that we had had. I was very much elated. There was someone who came to us with a model for something that we were already asking for. So it really just seemed very positive, like there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

What's the main difference between this co-governance model and the traditional one that the city of Oakland deploys?

There are a bunch of differences, but ultimately it boils down to autonomy. In city-run temporary housing, the city sets these strict rules about how residents live. But with co-governance, the idea is that the city gives the residents a budget, and then it's the residents get to set their own rules without the city workers calling the shots.

What you have is the power to be your own security. Make sure your community stays clean. Make sure you're getting the resources that you need to build or whatever it is that you want to accomplish within your co-governancy.

This model hadn't been tried in Oakland before, and this group believe that if they were successful, if If they figured out how to do this right, they could create a model that could be replicated for other homeless communities in Oakland.

We could really see ourselves doing this in Oakland, becoming the first, being able to have it done and succeed. When Matt and Darryl shook hands, we could tell. It was like, Yes, something is about to happen for us. Now, let's see how much further we could go.

It sounds like this David versus Goliath story, these underdogs, and they won. They got what they were negotiating for. But I'm listening and I'm like, it's probably more complicated than that.

Definitely. This is actually just where the story begins. Everything that we just talked about, it happens just in episode one of our series. It was remarkable. Honestly, unbelievable that this group chose to fight the city. It was also like, Okay, you can fight the city, but even if you win, then what? After the barricade and after the negotiation, I actually stuck with this group for over a year. I went to their group meetings and recorded them as they fought for this radical experiment. Each time I was with them, something happened that was not at all what I had expected. There was just one roadblock after the next. There was this one group meeting after months and months of waiting for a plot of land for their experiment when the city finally announced that they had found a spot. This piece of land was actually in a really nice location, and I thought the group would be thrilled. But it was quite the opposite. Here's Mama Dee at this meeting.

The site period is an issue for me, and they know this.

This is Adam Garrett-Clarke. We went through this process a couple of months ago. It was like, Where can we go? He was hired by the city to be the liaison between the city and this group of people. We just didn't have a site for a long time. The thing is, guys, the site If you remember, if you go back and think about it, you listen to our conversations, there was no place. There was no place for us to go. Then we got it. But Mama Dee was not hearing any of what Adam had to say.

I'd rather go back to Union Point. I wouldn't. I wouldn't because Nobody's looking at the big issues here. They're only looking at, Oh, we got these houses. But did anybody see their child put in a fucking body bag? They have to see that shit every day? No.

Why was Mama Dee so upset?

Mama Dee's son was murdered across the street from the plot of land the city had chosen. And I mean, imagine waking up every day to that reminder.

Well, I mean, that is horrific. It also just brings up the difficulties of doing anything with more than one person, trying to get everybody on the same page, meet everybody's needs, everybody's concerns. It sounds like they're in a tough situation.

Yeah. Mamedy. A lot of the other residents were initially super jazzed about this plot of land, but it was amazing. They said they wouldn't go without Mama Dee. They didn't want to be separated from their community. This instance, it was just one of many, many things that made me feel like this experiment was going to completely fall apart. But every time it felt like things could not move forward, this group came back together to fight for their experiment. They persevered, and in that fight, they did actually win some things for themselves and for other homeless people in Oakland. These were things that seemed impossible at the start. I'll leave you with this quote from Mama Dee.

I'm not going to lie, and I'm not taking this sugarcoat, nothing for nobody. Being homeless is the worst. But on the other hand, I feel proud of us as a community, sticking together, and getting through what people didn't think we could do. We're still going to stay at it, going until the end. And it's not over.

I'm eager to listen to the rest of the series and hear more about those twists and turns. Thank you, Shaina, for bringing us this really complex portrait of a community fighting against the odds.

Thank you, Ayesha. It was a real honor.

All five episodes of Shaina Shealey's series, A Tiny Plot, are available wherever you get your podcast. We'll have a link to the series in the show notes. This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yann and edited by Liana Simstrom, mastering by Robert Rodriguez. A Tiny Plot is a production of Snap Studios out of Member Station KQED in Oakland. The series was produced by Shaina Shealey and edited by Anna Sussman. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior editor, Jennie Schmidt. Irene Naguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Rosco. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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