The City of Oakland has cleared a large homeless encampment on East 12th Street, relocating about 70 people to the Mandela House — a former hotel turned shelter, now funded through a state grant.
The move marks one of the city’s most visible steps toward addressing homelessness, a crisis that has more than doubled in Oakland over the past decade.
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Driven by rising rents, stagnant wages and a chronic shortage of affordable housing, more than 4,000 people in the city are currently unhoused.
Oakland officials say the clearance is part of a broader push to connect unhoused residents with long-term housing support. It follows Governor Gavin Newsom’s rollout of a model ordinance aimed at helping cities respond to what he calls the “dangerous” and “unhealthy” conditions of encampments.
“There’s nothing compassionate about letting people die on the streets,” Newsom said in a press release. “Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history.”
As Oakland aligns with statewide efforts to address homelessness, the impact of encampment closures — and whether they help — remains at the center of the conversation.
Homelessness in Oakland
California’s homelessness crisis has reached a breaking point. According to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than 187,000 people were homeless in the state last year — nearly 24% of the entire nation’s unhoused population. The pressure is mounting on state and local leaders to act fast.
In response, Newsom announced $3.3 billion in new funding to help cities expand access to housing and treatment for the state’s most vulnerable.
Cities like Oakland and San Francisco are rolling out targeted interventions. San Francisco’s newly elected mayor, Daniel Lurie, has pledged to tackle homelessness head-on. Oakland is already home to the Community Cabins program — a shelter initiative offering small, two-person cabins built on public land.
These temporary shelters focus on stabilization and connecting residents to long-term support. The program has seen high participation rates, largely because cabins are built near existing encampments, allowing people to stay close to familiar spaces.
“Oakland’s Cabin Community model is one of the most promising and cost-effective homeless shelter innovations I’ve seen,” said Trent Rhorer, executive director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency.
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Is this the only solution?
City officials say closing the East 12th Street encampment is a step forward, but community reactions suggest a more complicated reality.
Some residents and business owners say they’re relieved to see the area cleared, calling it a long-standing source of frustration.
"I was driving by, and I was shocked to see the whole encampment was clean," said Veleda, an Oakland resident, in an interview with Fox KTVU. "It was an eyesore, and it was very hard for them to tackle it."
But homeless advocates say that while shelters like Mandela House or Community Cabins represent a step in the right direction, the process of clearing encampments often unfolds with little warning and limited resources.
"People lost medication, people lost their IDs, people lost their phones, people lost their clothing, their food," Needa Bee, director of the homeless advocacy group, The Village, told Fox KTVU. According to Bee, she was able to reconnect with 54 individuals from the East 12th encampment — none of whom were offered housing options before the site was cleared.
The city maintains that shelter space was made available at Mandela House. But advocates argue the outreach efforts fell short, and question how effective these emergency responses really are in the long term.
With growing pressure to “clean up” encampments, cities risk swapping long-term solutions for short-term optics — and sidelining the very people these efforts claim to support.
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