A Tiny Plot: "Moving Camp" EP 2

The standoff between Public Works and the group from Union Point Park ends with a handshake -- a deal to build a new kind of housing community funded by the city where homeless residents make their own rules. But right away, the civility of this agreement seems to break down. And after months of waiting, the group from Union Point Park finally gets a plot of land on E12th street for their radical experiment. But there’s a big problem with the land. It's something that leaves the future of this experiment in limbo. This episode contains strong language & graphic imagery. Please take care while listening. A Tiny Plot https://www.kqed.org/pressroom/12582/a-tiny-plot is a new 5-part series from KQED https://www.kqed.org/’s Snap Studios. Host and Reporter Shaina Shealy takes listeners inside an encampment in Oakland for an against-all-odds story about scarcity, community, and the complexity of building something new from the margins of a broken system. What happens when people who’ve been shut out of a system that has failed them decide to take the lead? Disaster, and unexpected beauty. Big thanks to the entire cast from A Tiny Plot for sharing your worlds with us. Hosted and produced by Shaina Shealy. Edited by Anna Sussman, original music by Renzo Gorrio, engineering by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Director of Production: Marisa Dodge. Executive Producers: Glynn Washington and Mark Ristich. Artwork: Teo Ducot. Special thanks: Jen Chien, Catherine Winter, the City of Oakland, Sweetie at the Travel Inn, Ryan Finnegan, Will Craft, JP Dobrin, Thomas Brouns, Sukey Lewis, Alistair Boone, The Street Spirit, KQED legal, and Ott House Audio. Episode 2 of 5. Episodes drop on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Listen on any podcast platform, right here on Snap Judgment! Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:38Speaker 01

  From KQED's Snap Studios, this is A Tiny Plot.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  This episode contains strong language and graphic imagery. Sensitive listeners, please take care.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Welcome back to A Tiny Plot, a story told in five parts. I'm your host, Shaina Shealy, and this is Chapter Two. When we left off...

• 3:04Speaker 02

  The shields was awesome.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  The residents of Union Point Park defended their encampment against the City of Oakland's eviction order with homemade shields and a barricade of broken toilets and refrigerators. And they sent city cleanup crews back where they came from.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Man, we did something. We accomplished something. Now let's see how much further we could go.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  The standoff ended with a handshake between Dariel from the city and President Matt from Union Point Park. A deal to build a new kind of housing community funded by the city, where homeless residents make their own rules. An experimental model called co-governance. But right away, the stability of this agreement seemed to break down.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  From KQED's Snap Studios, I'm Shaina Shealy. This is A Tiny Plot, Chapter Two, Moving Camp.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  With huge relief that their hard work had paid off and anticipation for their new life to come, the group took down the barricade, pulling down the couch and the rocks and the toilet.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  My arms just felt like they was gonna fall off. They was so hot and numb, because I couldn't move no more.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  As the sun went down that night, Mamadi thought she'd finally be able to relax, to move out of Union Point Park on her own time peacefully. She and her neighbors slowly started packing up years' worth of supplies and equipment and things.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Most people weren't ready by the city's move-out deadline. They weren't worried. They had this agreement, a plan to work together. But the morning they were supposed to leave the park, before most residents had even woken up yet.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  It was, the chaos was already in full swing.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  The city had blocked off the streets early that morning.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  And there was like two dozen police cars and a couple of police vans and this armored SWAT team vehicle and like 15 DPW trucks and heavy equipment.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I talked to a lot of people who were here at the park during this eviction. Some said the eviction lasted for days. One person who worked for the city at the time said they never saw an armored vehicle. But the residents all agreed on one thing. They were surprised by the show of force.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  I mean, just had this like, this like sinking feeling in my stomach where it was like, oh no.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  It was, oh god, like the sounds. It was just like a riot going on. It was so many different voices going on and yelling that you couldn't even hear yourself think.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  After that handshake, Dariel left his position with the city of Oakland. The people I spoke with from Union Point said they never saw him again. And this is kind of how it would go.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  The city was this invisible force, an ever-changing cast of characters, but with the power to make big changes. And when the move-out deadline came around, someone from some department in the city had ordered trucks to come and clear the camp. Mama Dee told me that most residents were still asleep in tents or cars.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  They brought in these weird machines that they stand on and like big giant claws and munches and crunches and rips and tears everything in its fat.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  The claws of them little bobcats or whatever they are, put them, put your stuff in them claws and threw it in a dumpster truck.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  They looked like Land O' Lakes.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Looked like what?

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Land O' Lakes. You ever seen the Stephen King movie? They like eat time and they got big old teeth, like Pac-Man or something. And they eat in the sky away.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Papa Eddie woke up to the noise. When he looked outside his tent and saw tractors coming his way.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  I kept telling them to stop. Fucking stop, man. Just quit. Can't do that.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Mr. Edward Hanson, he was screaming, "You better not touch my stuff. I'm gonna kick your, you know, and I'm not playing with you."

• 7:37Speaker 04

  I was pulling my hair out, hoping I wouldn't have a heart attack or a stroke.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Papa Eddie walked as fast as he could to guard his most prized possessions.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  My barrels of sticks.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  His highly finished walking sticks. He spends months on each one.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  It's a root of rosemary. It had gold paint.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Eddie stood in front of the barrel of sticks as the bobcat came closer and closer.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Quit. Stop. Quit. Stop.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  When the truck got hold of the barrel in between its teeth, a volunteer at the park that day, Judy, she bolted after it.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  She was pretty bold. She snatched you right out of the jaw of that thing, man, and yelled at him.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  When Eddie got his sticks back, he surrendered the rest of his treasures to Public Works.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  I was so tired, I had to sit down. I was afraid I was gonna wake myself up into another stroke.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Mama Dee was also shouting.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Y'all need to get the, out of here. Don't come back. Get your little bobcat and go. You don't know what they have in there. You don't know if they have somebody's ashes that's deceased. You don't know none of that. So before you start just going in there bulldozing, taking, trying to take charge of people's stuff, let them at least get the chance. You know we have a negotiation.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Let us clean up.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  When city workers showed up, the people at Union Point Park just weren't ready. A lot of them had been living here for years. They said they needed more time. Papa Eddie's hands don't work. But the city had a deadline, and the Public Works crew continued their sweep. Just weeks after the handshake agreement on top of the barricade, the experiment was in a state of chaos.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  I lost my generator. I lost my recycle container, a whole box of antique bottles that I dug up from the shoreline. And they tore us up.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  A lot of people living at Union Point Park, from all sorts of backgrounds, peeled off during the days of the cleanup. Others, specifically families with children, many of them Black, were offered placements in transitional family housing. At the end, there were around 15 people who held out at Union Point. And as promised, the city sent someone to help them get set up in motel rooms.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Papa Eddie, the founding father of this village, sat on the ground in his socks and watched folks packing up for the motel with their dogs, binders of baseball cards, bags of clothes, whatever they could carry of what hadn't been destroyed.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  He stayed until everyone was gone, until he was alone again, looking up at the moon from an empty parking lot.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  I just wanted to make sure everybody else, you know, got broke off something, you know?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  When he finally got to the motel late that night...

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Laid down and just relaxed.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Had some ice cream, drank some wine.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  And he fell asleep.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  When these 15 or so people checked into their motel rooms at the Travel Inn, about two miles from the park, they were a community, bound together by an exodus and a promise.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  The first few days of the motel was... Nobody seen nobody.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  When they first got to the motel, everyone was resting, recovering.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Everybody went in, just closed their doors. It was the beds, just being in a warm room. It was awesome.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  As comfortable as they were with showers and TVs and beds, the group was at the motel on borrowed time. The city was paying for these rooms, around $100 per night, per person. No one knew how long the city would keep paying for these rooms, or who would be making that decision, or who from the city would help them find a plot of land to live on, or how long that would take. And as they waited, people seriously moved into their rooms at the Travel Inn.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  It's Shaina. Shaina, the journalist.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I'm at the motel. It's weird because it's in this really expensive part of Oakland, and the street outside is lined with people living in tents and RVs. And like a lot of motels in the city, the motel rooms are filled with homeless people. A lot of shelters don't accept families, so if a family loses their house, motel rooms are sometimes the only way for them to stay together.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  I love my room.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Mama Dee and the folks from Union Point have been here for over four months now. Mama Dee's room is on the second floor. Her grandkids spend a lot of time here.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Grandma? No, I don't want it open.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  She has two queen-sized beds.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's my little kitchen over there. I got two microwaves in here. My refrigerator, my son blocked it.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  But I have this, a two-burner.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Two burners, a slow cooker, a microwave balancing on her toilet lid. Her pantry is stacked with bags of dried beans, mac and cheese, rice, sugar.

• 13:36Speaker 05

  Sugar, jelly.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Jelly.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Hamburger helper, mashed potatoes.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  My oatmeal, my flour, barbecue sauce. And then I have canned foods down here.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And you do your dishes in the bathroom?

• 13:52Speaker 05

  Uh huh. I love this bathroom. This is a lovely shower here.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Mama Dee grows two cherry tomato plants she got from grocery outlet on the balcony. Mustache Mike knows the closing times of all the neighborhood cafes.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  There's time to give away whole sandwiches, cream cheese on it, smoked salmon on there.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  I see him bring back sleeves of bagels to share.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  Well, I get every day, I can get bagels, fresh bagels.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  A woman named Tammy has workout equipment in her room.

• 14:21Speaker 05

  So this is for health. It helps with balance, everything. And then, you know, that's a massage table. Brand-new massage table.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  You've got a massage table?

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  The hotel manager, Sweetie, is keenly aware of just how moved in these folks are.

• 14:37Speaker 05

  I just have to call out their names and they'll be there for me.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Mustache Mike helps Sweetie sweep the hallways and Mama Dee regularly straightens her hair behind the check-in counter.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  My hair is really thick and Mama Dee offered to do it one time. Now, every week I tell her, please open me out.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  In these months and months of waiting, the group has pretty much settled in at the Travel Inn.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  And we forgot that we have things we need to work on in order to be able to be successful.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  The first thing we had to figure out was where was our location going to be? How are we going to get this spot? And know that we're not going to be put out of this hotel.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Mamadi and the others had a lot of questions about how the experiment was going to come together. How they'd find land, build their village, make their own rules, all in partnership with the city. Especially because, again, the city was this ever-changing figure. A committee here, a new council member there. The actual person this group got answers from was Adam Garrett Clark.

• 15:50Speaker 07

  Before you leave this meeting, either come up here and write your room number.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Adam wasn't a city employee. He had a nonprofit, and the city delegated him to be the official middleman between the city and the Union Point group.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  He was definitely always showing up to keep us on track.

• 16:10Speaker 07

  Eddie, do you want me to put your jacket and your drinks up at the meeting spot?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Adam is awesome.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Adam's black. He wears clear-remmed glasses and loves a good neck bandana.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  One day, I meet him, out where he's picking up fried chicken for a group meeting.

• 16:33Speaker 07

  Sorry about the mess.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  When I climb into his pickup truck for a ride back to the motel, I see that it's loaded with supplies for the group that he's been collecting from Facebook free groups.

• 16:43Speaker 07

  You'll probably do in your description of this, like, he's got a straw hack, a printer he found on the street doesn't work, extra pair of work boots.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Adam grew up in San Francisco with a single mom who was a social worker. He was around homelessness often, and he has this strong belief that homelessness can be solved with tiny homes.

• 17:08Speaker 08

  The bird's-eye view of this is that there's just not enough spots for housing for low-income people. The tiny home community, those are spaces where there's communities, and it's affordable. And that's what we need.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Dariel from the city introduced Adam to this group early on, days after that handshake on the barricade. During his visit to the park, Adam told the group about his vision, to build low-budget tiny homes quickly in community. And after the group and the city vetted Adam and his organization Tiny Logic, they accepted him to do this job.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  After the break, we'll hear more from Adam. This is A Tiny Plot. I'm your host, Shaina Shealy. Stay tuned.

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• 20:16Speaker 01

  Welcome back to A Tiny Plot, Chapter 2: Moving Camp. When we left off, we had just met Adam, who was telling us about his belief that homelessness can be solved with tiny homes. The city gave him a budget of $350,000. The task ahead of him was to help this group build a village, to help them make choices about all the rules of their community, like who'd be able to live there, how they'd keep it safe, about what the space would actually look like, how they'd get plumbing and showers. And here's a key: Adam had to help them figure out how they'd make all these decisions

• 20:59Speaker 01

  together, as a community, in cooperation with the city. This is what co-governance is. The city gave Adam a deadline of around eight months, and every week, he showed up to the Travelin' Motel to lead this group towards their promised land.

• 21:18Speaker 07

  Let me know when you guys are ready to listen. Go ahead. I am listening. All right, so two things. You guys want to keep yelling, it's all good.

• 21:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, I want to yell.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Since Adam started this job, he's kept a list of things that keep him up at night.

• 21:36Speaker 08

  And it's a document that I've kind of started, but just a list of all the worst-case scenarios. There's drive-by shooting, there's stabbing, you know, there's fire. So that's a very serious thing that I think about.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Adam mostly keeps that document to himself. At these motel meetings, he's all optimism.

• 22:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's part of the game that I got to play is just figure out how I can regulate and be a soothing, downer, de-escalating presence for people.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  I don't care what nobody will say.

• 22:12Speaker 07

  And let's acknowledge too that Mama Dee has had a tough couple of days. So it's not...

• 22:16Speaker 08

  That leap of faith that I was asked to take is still, I'm still mid-leap.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Adam's first task was to help this group find a place to build their community.

• 22:29Speaker 08

  The city produced a list of properties. But when you go through the list, you look at all of them and there's always like, well, this is promised to this program or this has this issue.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Some believed that the burden should land in District 5, where Union Point Park was. And Adam actually found a viable piece of city-owned land there. It was a triangular lot and walking distance of Union Point. District 5 was represented by Noel Gao.

• 23:02Speaker 10

  I know Oakland well and we're trying to change it.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Council Representative Gao knows this group from Union Point well. He and volunteers from the district used to clean Union Point Park on the weekends.

• 23:17Speaker 10

  Picking up rats and all kinds of nonsense. If I didn't pick up like 100 and something needles, that wasn't enough. So it got way out of control.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  He told me someone he went to high school with was actually killed at the park. He said another morning he went to clean the bathroom and found a young woman dead on the ground.

• 23:36Speaker 10

  Laying there, gone.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Gao did not want this mess in his district.

• 23:42Speaker 10

  Well, you know, at that time, we had other goals for that site. It used to be a neighborhood park and we wanted to restore it to that level.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So you did not want this group of union?

• 23:56Speaker 10

  No, because then my kids, growing up, would pay the price.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  It just seems like so complicated to try to find an appropriate piece of land.

• 24:05Speaker 10

  When we say, I mean appropriateness, would you like me to put everyone in front of your house? How is that? Would you like me to do that? No, hell no. You know, the role of government is to take care of the needy. I understand that, but we also have to have some respect for the children and families and provide a safe, clean environment. You just can't come here and trash it and drug yourself out and just because, and you want me to feel sorry for you. I don't. I grew up with that kind of city.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  The city of Oakland was hemorrhaging money every day on motel rooms. And after months of inaction, the city council president, Nikki Fortunato-Boss, put her foot down.

• 24:49Speaker 11

  At the time, the thing I had been pushing for was using public land for homeless interventions.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Boss had activist roots, a history of advocating for the homeless. And she knew about this one place the group could go.

• 25:07Speaker 11

  It's an incredible parcel of land and that the fight over how that land would be used really galvanized this movement, Public Land for Public Good.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  The East 12th parcel, a plot of land owned by the city, right by Oakland's crown jewel, Lake Merritt. Before Boss was a politician, she was part of a protest movement that supported affordable housing in the East 12th parcel and sought to drive out developers from building condos there.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  And now that she was in charge, she finally had a plan to use this public land for public good by turning it into a temporary housing site, an emergency intervention for homeless people who lived around Lake Merritt called Lakeview Village.

• 25:51Speaker 12

  With space for 65 people on the largest parcel of city-owned land near Lake Merritt.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  As Adam became more and more desperate to find this group a home, Ba said she could slice off a piece of land from her project on East 12th for the group from Union Point. Two programs side by side, both devoted to homelessness intervention, but only one would be co-governed.

• 26:17Speaker 11

  You know, it was really city staff who said, "Look, I think we can have these two programs here." And myself and my staff had some concerns about operating two programs side by side that were different. Like, could that really coexist? Oh, yeah, I did. Did the city have the staff and the experience and the leadership needed to help support a successful co-governed encampment? No. No.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  And it's my understanding that despite these reservations, you still advocated for using this land for the Union Point group.

• 26:56Speaker 11

  Yes. In the end, I acquiesced and said, "Okay, let's try it." And that was largely because there was nowhere else for people to go. I wasn't going to be the person to say, "No, you can't live here and continue to have a dignified existence here in our city."

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Finally, an actual plot of land from the city, a slice of the East 12th parcel, land to build a home for their little village. This felt like a huge win for the group, at least for a few moments, because that land had ghosts. I was mad. I was fumed. More after the break. Stay with us.

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• 29:08Speaker 01

  Welcome back to A Tiny Plot. You're listening to Chapter 2: Moving Camp. I'm your host, Shaina Shealy. When we left off, Mama Dee was just learning about the new piece of land for the group's experiment. And she was not happy.

• 29:28Speaker 07

  Hey, Papa Eddie, meeting.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It's meeting time at the Travel Inn. One of the first since this group of homeless people has chosen an official name for themselves: Union Point on the Rise.

• 29:38Speaker 07

  All right, we got pizza, we got a meeting. You got donuts? Uh, I forgot to get donuts, man.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Also one of the first since Council President Nikki Fortunato-Boss has offered a piece of land for their project.

• 29:49Speaker 07

  All right, meeting time.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Adams rallying residents onto the second-floor balcony. Some wheel up chairs from their rooms, others arrange folding chairs into a half-circle around this whiteboard.

• 30:01Speaker 07

  You got your own pizza?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  There are boxes of pizza stacked on the balcony ledge from Adam.

• 30:06Speaker 07

  I think we should get started. I'm gonna get Mama Dee.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Mama Dee is uncharacteristically one of the last people to show up to this meeting. She walks onto the balcony without a word, holding a bright red 7-Eleven slushie.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  All right, welcome, guys. Um, we have, we have a full house here.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  She grabs a seat in the corner and picks up one of the four chihuahuas being passed around. She's pissed, and Adam knows it.

• 30:31Speaker 07

  We jump right in. We had a big question, a big pivotal question from Mama Dee last week that kind of set everybody off, which is, is this a true co-governed space?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  It's been seven months since city officials made a promise to help this group build a co-governed model of housing.

• 30:47Speaker 07

  So I'm curious to go around the circle like we always do and tell me what co-govern means to you. And then the second is...

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Adam goes around the circle, asking each person to define co-governance. Adam once told me that poor people don't often have a seat at the table when it comes to solving problems that impact their own lives. The co-governance model was developed to try and address that root problem.

• 31:10Speaker 07

  Right. Rachel, what does co-govern mean to you?

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Ah, co-govern, okay.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  Co-govern is they should, like, we have some control, like, you know, what we say goes.

• 31:21Speaker 07

  What we say goes.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Control.

• 31:24Speaker 15

  Where we get funding and we get guidance through, you know, the city. But initially, we decided on our own shit.

• 31:35Speaker 16

  Yeah, having a say in what's going on, the vote counts.

• 31:38Speaker 15

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Adam talks about this metaphor he heard from someone at the city when he first was hired to do this job. Co-governance is like a car where the Union Point residents are the drivers. Adam is the co-pilot, and the city is in the backseat.

• 31:55Speaker 07

  The passengers, the city is in the backseat.

• 31:57Speaker 17

  You're the co-pilot.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  Co-pilot. The other part of that conversation is the city is buying the car. Yes, that's a good point. That's a good point. They're picking the make and model, you know?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Still holding on to a dog, face stony, Mama Dee blurts out.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  They got their feet on the, on the, on the brakes, gas and brake. At the same time, brake.

• 32:18Speaker 16

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  For Mama Dee, it's not just a metaphorical car being jerked around. It's her future.

• 32:27Speaker 05

  We are not co-governed because we are not over there designing our own spot.

• 32:32Speaker 17

  I think that if this was truly around co-governance, they would have decided that they wanted to move on East 12.

• 32:38Speaker 09

  They've already decided where we were gonna be.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  There's a housing rights activist at the meeting today. Nita B. Her graying hair is pulled back into two braids.

• 32:47Speaker 09

  Because we had no say so.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  My thing is that, rather than call it a co-government site, like, be honest. You know what I'm saying? Because all that I witnessed happening is that the city's checking off a box, being like, "Oh, we had a meeting." Check off a box. Oh, you know, they've been...

• 33:02Speaker 01

  At this point in the meeting, Mama D is holding in her rage, arms crossed. She's barely sipped her slushy.

• 33:11Speaker 05

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

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Mama D has a big problem with the East 12th Street site.

• 33:19Speaker 07

  When we went through this process a couple of months ago, it was like, where can we go? We had this one site over in District 5.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  You can hear the desperation in Adam's voice. For nearly half a year, he's been calling, emailing, begging city council members and staff for a piece of land to get this experiment going.

• 33:42Speaker 07

  We just didn't have a site for a long time. And the thing is, guys, it's like, 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. And then we got this place.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Mama D breaks.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  I'd rather go back to Union Point.

• 33:56Speaker 09

  I wouldn't.

• 33:58Speaker 05

  I would, 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 fucking day? No. Nobody did. But me. And nobody's giving a fuck about me. I knew that was gonna be a problem. Nobody. I did too. So come again with all that shit with me.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  You guys are right. You're totally right. And I love that this is being recorded. There are a ton of spaces out there. Nita B knows this well, actually.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  But they're just picking us.

• 34:31Speaker 07

  The issue is that, is that you got, who owns it?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Okay, try talking and I'm gonna talk you out.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Can you hear me crunching on a chip?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Perfect. So, I want you to say a little bit more about finding out,

• 34:51Speaker 01

  about getting placed at the 12th Street site. What do you remember from that?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  I was heated. My son had just been deceased a year and a half. You know, I kind of like put it in the back of my mind.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  It's hard. I was like, why would you guys give us a spot where you know my, my son was murdered?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Kendrick was Mama Dee's third son. She had six. As a kid, Kendrick was always getting left behind by his siblings.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  I used to keep Kendrick so close to me.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Kendrick spent a lot of time with his mom. And when he was in his twenties and had a kid of his own, he came to stay with Mama Dee at Union Point Park.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Everybody loved Kendrick. Just being playful or joking and having fun. Everybody at the park loved him.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Every so often, Mama Dee would send her kids to a motel for the night to take actual showers. And one night, Kendrick got his things together from his tent at Union Point and went to America's Best Value on East 12th Street. He hugged his six-year-old son, J.C., on goodnight and tucked him in with Mama Dee.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  I was just falling asleep and it was him. And I thought they were playing with me. My sister, she said, "Diana, no, somebody got hurt, somebody got hurt."

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Mama Dee went to East 12th Street. Kendrick had been shot 13 times in the parking lot.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  When I got there, they wouldn't let me go see my son. That was the most hurtful.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Just knowing my son was on that ground and somebody would kill my son like that. The police, the coroner's office came and picked him up. And I seen them put my son in a bag. I couldn't sleep for like, I didn't get no sleep for four days. It felt like time was stopped.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  The piece of land on East 12th Street that the city gave this group. If you stand anywhere on the plot, you can see straight to the entrance of America's Best Value Inn, where Kendrick was killed. Like, it's feet away, right across the street.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  It's too much for a mother to have to go through being told where she's gonna live. And then it's right there where your son was murdered.

• 37:12Speaker 07

  So how do we move forward on this? Because we have this space, we have some people that want to move in. No, you can't file a...

• 37:20Speaker 01

  But back at that meeting, when Mama Dee erupted in anger, all Adam could do was try to save this experiment.

• 37:27Speaker 07

  Now, as far as Deanna's situation...

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Need to be the activist, she raises her hand again.

• 37:34Speaker 17

  I just wanted to lift up, like, the trauma that Deanna is talking about. I just think about the fact that every day, she literally has to see the place...

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Her and her family.

• 37:46Speaker 17

  Right. And that is just, that is like so... It's deep. I can't even like... And that they need to find another spot, because this community wants to stay as a community, but one of their members, if not all of them, because at some point, they were all touched by Kendrick's life. But that his family has to actually be in proximity of where he was shot down. And that's fricking crazy to me.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  I think the city should offer her another option. So that it's maybe close, so that she could still come to meetings, we could still board day.

• 38:25Speaker 05

  I don't want them to offer me nothing else but where my community that we started is gonna be together.

• 38:33Speaker 17

  You see, that's what I'm trying to say is, we're all together, we're all gonna go to a different site.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  If Mama Dee isn't going to East 12th, none of them go.

• 38:42Speaker 09

  They disbanded a lot of communities. Yeah. Like us, they disbanded them. They moved them here, there, everywhere. They tried that in their city.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Separating us from the economy.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  From 2021 to 2024, the city of Oakland closed more than 537 homeless camps and cleared hundreds more, separating communities. If there's one thing this group believes, it's if they separate, they lose. So just when this group is so close to their dream, when they get an actual piece of land, free, to build their own co-governed home, they decide they are not willing to risk breaking up the group. They say they aren't going to East 12th without Mama Dee.

• 39:30Speaker 07

  Are we collectively rejecting the moving in?

• 39:35Speaker 09

  I say, this is March back to Union Point, and this fucking back fucking down here. You know what I'm saying? We're ball and chain ourselves.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  It's kind of like they're back to square one, threatening to resist the city because they don't want to be separated.

• 39:51Speaker 09

  I say we need to go back to Union Point and motherfucking chain ourselves to the fucking ground. Right?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  I didn't know that they all felt like, if I didn't go, that they wasn't gonna go. And that just made me see the love that they have for me as family, not friendship, but family. And we would let nobody break us apart.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Adam breaks down empty boxes. On the wall behind them is a blueprint mock-up for the East 12th site, a timeline to move out of the motel by the end of this month. But for now, on the travel-in balcony, President Matt disassembles the dry erase board. Others fold up chairs. Mama Dee takes her melted slushy back to her room and locks the door behind her.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  You just heard the second episode of Snap Studios' original series, "A Tiny Plot." There's more. Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing episodes here on the Snap Judgment feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Don't miss it. Next up, on "A Tiny Plot."

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Deanna, you could do this. You can't... I'm not gonna do this. I don't wanna see my... I don't wanna relive this every day.

• 41:32Speaker 08

  It's hard enough to do what we're doing. We're dealing with the layers of people dealing with the trauma of transitioning from survival mode on the streets. And then we got a layer on top of this, this like weird political football. You know, it's like setting a grenade, you know, in a pile of wood.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  "A Tiny Plot" is a production of KQED Snap Studios. Hosted and produced by Shaina Shealy, edited by Anna Sussman. Original music by Renzo Gorrio. Made possible by the entire Snap team and everyone who lived at Union Point Park. Thank you for sharing your stories. Extra special thanks to Jen Chen, Katherine Winter, The City of Oakland, Sweetie at the Travel Inn, Ryan Finnegan, Will Kraft, JP Jobrin, Thomas Browns, Sukey Lewis, Alistair Boone and the Street Spirit, Ot House Audio, the entire cast from Union Point Park, and KQED Legal. Engineering by Pat Macedi-Miller. Director of Production, Marisa Dodge.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Executive producers, Glynn Washington and Mark Ristich. On Team Snap, the union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51. And this is not the news. No way is it the news. Because this is Snap Judgment. Get your ears ready and keep your hearts open, because this is... P-R-X.