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Ending a two-year battle over privately owned land in West Oakland, homeless residents squatting on the property agreed to leave this month — in exchange for $2,500 each in cash.

It’s an unusual resolution they and the activists who backed them are calling a victory for the rights of unhoused people everywhere. But others say it’s a troubling sign of the decline of property rights in Oakland and beyond.

“I felt like it was definitely a win,” said 39-year-old Chad “Bulldog” Elliott, one of the people who was living on the property. “Because they didn’t want to give us nothing. And we made them.”

As the homelessness crisis continues to spiral out of control in Oakland and other Bay Area cities, tensions are growing between the region’s housed and unhoused residents. Oakland leaders are struggling to manage massive encampments, and recently passed a controversial new policy that declares certain areas off-limits to camping. At the same time, groups of activists increasingly are joining forces with unhoused residents and low-income tenants, fighting back against displacement.

“What we’re really trying to demonstrate is the power of the people when they’re united in struggle,” said 27-year-old activist Cassidy Taylor, who moved to Oakland from Massachusetts this year to get involved in Wood Street and other local struggles. “What we’re really trying to demonstrate is we can’t just depend on different ways of working within the system in order to make real change for people. We have to actually put pressure on the people in power.”

The Wood Street outcome calls to mind the Moms 4 Housing victory earlier this year, where a group of homeless and insecurely housed mothers and activists squatted in an empty, investor-owned property for two months. The group and its supporters ultimately pressured the owner into selling the home to a community land trust for use as homeless housing.

“I think what you’re experiencing is the slow creep of a potential attack on property rights in light of the existing poverty that we see throughout the Bay Area,” said Daniel Bornstein, a landlord attorney who called the trend “absolutely concerning.”

Another point that’s concerning to some involved in the Wood Street dispute: The property owner intends to convert the space into a temporary, city-sanctioned safe parking site, and the protracted fight over the land has delayed those efforts by a year.

The saga started in 2016, when the lot was purchased from BNSF Railway by local venture capitalist Fred Craves, through Game Changer LLC. The following year, he bought the lot next door.

Craves originally wanted to turn the property into a music venue and brew pub, said Game Changer’s lawyer, Patricia Smith.

As the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis intensified in the years after Game Changer’s purchase, an encampment grew on the lot. And when Game Changer tried to remove them, the people living there refused to leave. An activist group called the United Front Against Displacement, which describes itself as “anti-gentrification” and is distrustful of government-sanctioned solutions to homelessness, rallied around the unhoused residents, fighting for their right to stay put, and physically blocking efforts to remove them.

By the fall of 2019, about 100 people were camped on the Game Changer land. Craves reversed course and leased the property to the city for a safe parking site, where people living in their vehicles would have a stable place to stay, and access to showers and other services.

“Game Changer can’t cure homelessness in Northern California,” Smith said. “But I think providing that large a property to the city for an extended period of time is going to be good for the people who are there.”

This time, when the Game Changer team told the campers to leave, most did — moving to an adjacent empty lot owned by Caltrans, or to the edge of Wood Street. Game Changer said many could likely come back and get a spot in the safe parking site.

But a handful of holdouts remained, wary of the promised parking site. Among them was a group of five friends living in old city buses and growing marijuana. Over the course of nearly five years, they’d made the compound home, erecting a large fence around the perimeter and installing solar power.

“We wanted to stay there,” Elliott said. “We had so much work in there, and we’d built it from the ground up.”

Law enforcement declined to get involved until Game Changer took the matter to court, Smith said. Delayed by the pandemic, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Patrick McKinney issued an order evicting the campers at the end of August.

Even so, the remaining campers refused to leave without compensation. Elliott and his friends initially demanded $10,000 each. On Nov. 16, they settled for $2,500 each and moved to the Caltrans lot.

“The alternative,” Smith said, “is continuing to pay over $13,000 a month in security and having more people move back and starting the whole process over again. It’s pretty wild out there right now.”

Now, the city is moving forward with its promised safe parking site. Oakland has an agreement to lease the property for at least two years, and won’t pay rent, but will reimburse Game Changer for property taxes up to $100,000.

Supporters of the program hope it will help the dozens of people in RVs, cars and make-shift shacks on Wood Street, just outside the Game Changer land.

Tyu Walker, who has been living in a dilapidated RV on Wood Street since the summer, would love to move into a safe parking site.
“It would be a whole lot cleaner,” he said, looking helplessly at the piles of trash surrounding him. “We would have all the amenities and everything.”

Walker, 44, understands why the holdouts fought to remain on the Game Changer lot. But he wishes they’d spoken up at City Council meetings instead. What they did, he said, delaying progress on the safe parking site, “helps nobody.”