A Tiny Plot: "The Barricade" EP 1

Using broken refrigerators, mattresses and dishwashers, residents of Union Point Park barricade their tent-city. And they fight for an extraordinary idea: their own plot of land from the city, where they could live in community and set their own rules, on their own terms. 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. This episode contains strong language & graphic imagery. Please take care while listening. Huge love & 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 1 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.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:04Speaker 01

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

• 2:31Glynn Washington?

  Snap Nation, I cannot wait for you to hear this epic journey Snap producer Shaina Shealy has been on. Shaina has followed a small group of homeless people in Oakland as they fight for an extraordinary new idea and they speak for themselves. It's an epic story we'll be releasing over the next few weeks in a series of five installments. From KQD's Snap Studios, welcome to A Tiny Plot, Chapter One, The Barricade.

• 3:12Glynn Washington?

  Now, this episode contains strong language and graphic imagery. Assistant listeners, please be advised, Shaina Shealy takes us back to where it all started.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Years ago, a man with sharp blue eyes and a sea of long wavy hair came upon a park along an estuary called Union Point.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  A little bit of shaman-y, I guess.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  His name was Eddie. He walked around alone, mostly barefoot, surveying the land.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  It was like a park, a little kids' park with a marina.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  There were two empty parking lots, grassy lawns, benches, and bathrooms, sailboats off in the distance, waves from the bay lapping up onto a little sandy shore.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  It was full of rocks and rusted metal and corroding metal and stuff, and broken glass and just garbage, garbage everywhere.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  This park seemed to him like one of the less bad places to sleep in Oakland. He saw it as a fixer-upper, lots of potential for someone with a vision.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  It smelled like garbage with a hint of sulfur.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  He started sleeping there. At first, just out in the open.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Scared ever to be there alone?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, because of the raccoons. Raccoons are fierce animals, man. They can tear you up if they want to do. That's why I decided to put up a tent.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Once his tent was up, Eddie built out his space. He found an old wood stove and built fires in the empty parking lot at night.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  I liked to watch the moon.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Wherever I was at, whatever I was doing, you know, I could just glance over, keep my eye on it, watch it.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  One day, he found a rusted-over-ship anchor, half-buried in the ground, nearly as tall as him. He cleaned it and painted it, red, white, and blue.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  He'd always been an artist, working with his hands. And when he was in his 60s, he had a stroke in his tent, and he never got back the full use of his hands.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Same problem. I can't hold on to things. They fall out of my hands. It's pretty frustrating.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  But he still made these walking sticks out of tree roots from around the park that he carved and finished. Sometimes he painted them gold. And he really fixed up Union Point Park.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  In the beginning, he was all alone.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Then other people started showing up. I ran into some friends of mine, and I told them about the park, and they came down. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, you know?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  And what kind of people came to Union Point?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Homeless people.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Homeless people. They came to the park with tents and blankets and cars. A lot of them wanted to work with Eddie, to make things better.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Eddie would wake up in the afternoon, and together, they'd walk down to the shoreline, which was full of trash.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Every day, every day. And little bit by little bit, we pulled it all about there. Should make a beach on that, on that stretch of land over there. Pretty nice beach.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Eddie and others were sharing that beach with more and more people. More tents popped up in the parking lot near Eddie's. They spilled into the second lot. And then, out to the side of the park, along the railroad tracks.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  To the parents who dropped their kids off at the school nearby, and the boat owners with sailboats docked just yards away, this was a problem. And it was a sign of a bigger crisis. Of over 100,000 people sleeping in the middle of sidewalks and underpasses and public parks all across the state of California. A humanitarian emergency.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  About one-third of our country's homeless population is here in California. Before I met Eddie, before I even knew about Union Point Park, I'd heard homelessness here in California described as this big ship that's been on course for decades. And anyone who has any sort of power is trying everything they can think of to turn the ship around. But the ship is too big. It's been at sail for too long, picking up speed and runaway polarization of wealth, systemic racism, and policies preventing new housing from being built. There are now close to 6,000 people on the streets each night in Oakland alone.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  An audit in the city of Oakland found that the city is not prepared to deal with the homeless crisis.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Shortly after Eddie's arrival at the park, the city of Oakland would directly and indirectly spend over $120 million per year, trying to, one, make life less awful for homeless people, and, two, get them to stop setting up tents on sidewalks and in parks. The city spent this money on all types of efforts, like putting porta-potties and hand washing stations outdoors, delivering meals and hygiene kits, and also on clearing encampments and moving people to temporary shelters.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  And still, the number of people in their cars, on the streets, and in tent encampments like the one at Union Point would grow. Over this past decade, the number of homeless people in Oakland has more than doubled. What Eddie didn't know back when he arrived at Union Point Park barefoot was that one day, he and his neighbors, people with everything they owned packed into a car or a tent, would come together and come up with a better way to get themselves out of tent encampments, off of sidewalks. Together, they had this idea that if they had their own piece of land where they could set their own rules, they could manage themselves without city workers calling the shots.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  It could save the city money and headaches, and it could give the residents of Union Point Park something that people with homes have: the power to make their own decisions about how they live. It was an experiment, something the city had never tried. And if it worked, the folks at Union Point believed they'd set an example, a model that would help other homeless people across the state.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  When I heard about this small group of homeless people, so adamant on being, you know, captains of their own ship, I wanted to know who they were. So I started to hang around.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Over the course of a year, I'd see them fight for this radical experiment.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  So we was holding these shields like, "Go ahead, try to come through because we're not letting you in."

• 10:32Speaker 05

  They were not prepared for that level of resistance.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I'd see them win.

• 10:37Speaker 06

  And then, all of a sudden, all the public works people started leaving. By the grace of God, we did it.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  There was someone who came to us with a model for something that we were already asking for. I was very much elated.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And I'd see them build.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  One opportunity the city was giving us, and if we make this little community here work, then they're going to expand it. It's an incredible parcel of land, and that fight over how that land would be used.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Really galvanize this movement, public land for public good. What if it was made to fail?

• 11:12Speaker 07

  We're dealing with trauma, 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 throwing a grenade in a pile of wood.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  I cannot speak what's gonna happen. It's not gonna stop here. This is just the beginning.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  From KQED's Snap Studios, I'm Shaina Shealy. This is A Tiny Plot. Chapter one, The Barricade.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Before this fight for something better, before the characters in the story knew each other at all, there was Eddie at the park. And when more and more homeless people joined him there, they gave him the title of founding father and started calling him Papa Eddie. And then, those people brought more people. Friends and girlfriends, husbands and kids.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  People were staying like everywhere.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Mustache Mike is a skinny white guy, wiry. He wears a Star of David necklace. He came to the park with his girlfriend Rachel after their group house got condemned. They set up their tent behind a bush near the bathroom. People had all sorts of tents here at the park.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Full-size tents where you can walk inside, small ones where you can just barely crawl inside. And this sleep tube, we built our own structures, I mean.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Mustache Mike built out his tent from materials he found around the park.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  I mean, I used a tarp, a sail from a boat, and a rubber mat from like a rubber pool liner, and that stayed dry all winter. Because if your sleeping area gets wet, you're through, you know? You gotta have a dry sleeping area, because cold is okay, but cold and wet, no good. You get sick, you know, real quick.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  At night, Mustache Mike would share cans of sauce and vegetables he'd found with other people sleeping at the park.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  It was very cool, you know? It was almost like picnicking or stuff like that, but.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Because everybody knew each other, so that was a big deal, you know, good thing.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  When people described Union Point Park to me, it didn't always sound like they were talking about a tent encampment. Sometimes at night, over when the sun's setting in the summer, you'd forget where you were. You think you're in paradise, almost, you know? The people camping here would hear the clink of sailboats as they bobbed up and down with the tide.

• 13:39Speaker 06

  It's beautiful right by the water. It's like, oh my gosh, so beautiful. It's so beautiful. I liked it. That's one thing I liked, the sunset.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, you're at the spot on the bay where you're across the waterway from Alameda. And if you look down the waterway...

• 13:57Speaker 01

  There were so many people I talked to who lived at the park. I got to know a few of them pretty well, like this guy Matt. He has orange hair and freckles, and he's in his late 30s. Years ago, he was actually a student body president of Berkeley City College. And then he was a DJ. And then the pandemic happened and DJ gigs stopped. And so he couldn't casually crash on friends' couches anymore. And then, all of a sudden, he had nowhere to go.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  After the break, we'll hear how more people landed at Union Point Park and started calling it home. I'm your host, Shaina Shealy. Stay tuned.

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• 17:07Speaker 01

  Welcome back to A Tiny Plot, Chapter One: The Barricade. When we left off, Matt had just arrived at the park. It was during the start of the COVID pandemic, and he found himself with nowhere else to go.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  I sort of showed up there with my tent one day and just kind of poking around. And I just started setting it up. It was a mess. I would say ramshackled dwelling places. And I bought these foam panels, and I built myself a little tiny house out of foam. The other people, my neighbors, would say, "Go ahead." I said, "I had the mansion on the block."

• 17:49Speaker 01

  He always invited neighbors into his styrofoam mansion during storms. And in return, his neighbors helped him stay sober and focused. They tried to keep him away from an ex who they saw as a bad influence.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  And so, real quick, we became kind of like family. And we fight like family, too.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  This was what a lot of people kept telling me about their stays at the park.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  There is a lot of love in the community. There is, really. It's like a unity thing. It's like having a family. You know what I'm saying? And being away from your family for so long, and you miss the family feeling.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Oh, what I love about you.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. It was the...

• 18:40Speaker 02

  It was just seeing all the different types of people. Black, white, Mexican, whatever. And everyone got along.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  What started as one tent became dozens of makeshift homes. There were tarps and trucks and styrofoam huts. Probably over 30 people, some said as many as 50, all living together at Union Point Park.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Two and a half years into the park, that's when the rats started coming.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  With more and more people, trash was piling up.

• 19:20Speaker 06

  One time I was sleeping, I'm like this. On my hand, I felt a paw on me. I'm like, what? That's too little. Oh, God.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  A rat?

• 19:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was a rat in my tent.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  They was not rats. They was like, like little mini chihuahuas.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Enter Deanna Riley. She's 45 years old, a white lady with blonde hair and lots of tattoos. Stars all the way up her arm in memory of her grandma Betty. A heart on her ankle for her stepdad. Tinkerbell on her back, because she likes Tinkerbell. When she first came to the park to see her sister, she thought it would be for a short visit. It was at the height of the rat infestation.

• 20:11Speaker 06

  It was nothing but rats, rats everywhere. Them rats was on top of their fucking roof of the tent. I'm like, they're coming in, guys. They are coming in. I gotta go.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  But Deanna didn't really have anywhere else to go. When her husband died, she and her kids lost their Section 8 voucher. She didn't have the money to pay rent, so she started living in her car. And then she ended up parking at Union Point one night after hanging out with her sisters who already lived there. She cuddled her dogs to sleep in the backseat. And she woke up in the lot, morning after morning, until she started to call the place home.

• 20:52Speaker 06

  I got a tent. Somebody just gave it to me.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Really?

• 20:55Speaker 06

  Burgundy and beige.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  She took me there to show me where she set up her tents at the park.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  I had a tent here. I had a tent right here.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  All six of them.

• 21:06Speaker 06

  Then we had a tent right here. The one tent escalated into many tents. I had to have one for my bathtub.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Your bathtub had its own tent?

• 21:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  And how'd you get hot water in it?

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Uh, boil it.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  You had like a little stove?

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Like propane? I had one of those.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  And I used to just put big pots of water on.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  How often did you take a bath?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Every other day if I wanted, or every day. I just didn't wash my hair every day. Cause it's not good for our hair.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  What were your other tents for? You have six. One for your bathtub, one for your clothes.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  One for just a girl's spot. If we wanted to go ahead and just be girls. Cause I had a lot of nieces out there too. So, I would make sure that they were having fun and instead of being bored or just sitting in a tent looking like man, or too embarrassed to come out. I'd say, hey, everything happens for a reason in life. Don't never be, um, shy about coming out in your situation because nobody knows your situation. Nobody knows what you're going through.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Deanna's son and daughter Hazel and Dupree eventually joined her at the park. And then her son Kendrick, he brought his kid with him. Deanna babysat her own grandkids and took care of others too.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  I have one daughter biologically and hundreds of daughters. Whoever I come in contact with, I'm always mom to them.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  When Deanna learned that rats don't like the smell of mint, she went out and bought strong smelling plants.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Uh, spearmint and peppermint.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  If Eddie was the founding father of Union Point Park, Deanna was the mother. Grown adults at the park actually started to call her mom, or Mama Dee. And Mama Dee was a force.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  I cleaned the bathrooms morning and night. When my sisters would go to work in the morning, they would have a clean bathroom to get up to, brush their tees and go use the bathroom, get dressed and head out to work. When they come home, clean bathrooms so they could go in there, change their clothes, put their jammies on. And we could sit down and have a conversation for a minute and then they go to sleep.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  People who know her told me she cleaned constantly and commanded others to clean up too.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  After Mama Dee surrounded tents with peppermint, she picked up needles and scrubbed the walls of the park's public bathroom stalls.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  The graffiti is what really pissed me off. So I went and spent my own money to buy paint, just touch up the paint with the graffiti off the walls and put some little whale creature, whatever it was, from the dollar store. But it was stickers on the wall to make it look appropriate.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  This core group of people, Mama Dee, Papa Eddie, Matt, they built systems to try to keep themselves healthy and safe.

• 24:10Speaker 06

  We actually had people, our own people, going around and doing security, riding around on bikes at night, just checking everything out. I'm sure everything's cool, you know, no heroes are around.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  One time, in the middle of the night, a woman ran up to Mama Dee's tent.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Hey, there's a girl getting beaten up in the bathroom. We need to help her. I said, oh, you couldn't have told the guy? Come on, Deanna. And the man is literally beating a woman. I said, OK. I said, Cardi, come on, get him.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Mama Dee let her dog Cardi loose.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  That man, I ain't seen somebody just so fast into their car.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  After that, they developed a safety call.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  We had a calling to where if, if somebody's being harmed and whoever sees it, they yell out, Marco.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  And then whoever hears it would have to yell polo.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  And if they hear that polo, they know somebody's coming to help whoever made the call. And our call would say something else and let them know we're coming. So that made a lot of this stuff stop happening.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  But not all the stuff. Some people living in the park were using drugs and drinking, and they were exposed, living in a public park.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Anyone who wanted could walk through their home.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Johns coming in with prostitutes and beating them up in the bathroom because they didn't do the job right or something.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  All of this cleaning and planting mint to get rid of rats and Mama Dee's Marco polo system was useful, but it wasn't enough. The problems were overwhelming. The park was not a safe place.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  In the first three years Mama Dee was at the park, boat owners using the marina and park goers and residents reported over 215 violent incidents at Union Point Park. The first one Mama Dee remembers was when a man was injured in a hatchet attack. A month later, a public bathroom stall was set on fire. Another man was beaten with a baseball bat. There were four separate murders in the parking lot in just one year.

• 26:36Speaker 03

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

• 26:39Speaker 01

  People in Oakland were talking about what a disaster the park was becoming. Even Oakland Parks and Recreation gave their own park a score of F, completely unusable. It was the only park in the city to get that score.

• 26:54Glynn Washington?

  Well, several boat owners are calling an East Bay Marina a lawless harbor 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.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Certain areas of the Bay Area shoreline are protected by a government conservation group. It's called the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. And this agency started to get complaints about all these homeless people living at the park by the water. This conservation agency told the city of Oakland to clear them out.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Garbage trucks moved in on the mattresses, the mounds of garbage at Union Point Park along the Embarcadero in Oakland.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So the city did start cleaning Union Point Park. It was mostly an annoyance for Mama Dee and Papa Eddie and everyone else, but it was not a serious threat to their community. The yellow tag meant you move your stuff and then come back to your spot after they cleaned. Red tag, had to get out of there.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  A green means they just looked at your stuff and it's OK. And then they start coming around more often. Could this be the beginning of a turning point? Many people certainly hope so.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Some people did leave, but they often came back. This went on for two years. It appears to be a problem that has neither any solution, resolution, or endgame. I don't think we have, either in this town or any other town, any real idea of how to handle it at this point. Yeah, ongoing issue. All right, Tom, back on in the newsroom. And then, all of a sudden, this back and forth between the city and the people of Union Point Park came to an end. The conservation agency in charge of the Bay Shoreline gave the city a dire ultimatum, a cease and desist order. We got a copy of it. It ordered the city to close the encampment for good in order to protect the shoreline, to make it more usable for the rest of the public.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Or the city would have to pay a fine of $6,000 per day, each day that people stayed there indefinitely.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Well, just put it this way, $6,000 a day.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  That's a lot of money.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  That was October of 2020. The already squeezed-for-money city of Oakland, whose budget deficit was already in the hundreds of millions, had just a few months and a very expensive problem. A problem that would involve the fates of lots of people.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  More after the break. Keep listening for a very unexpected turn of events.

• 29:53Speaker 06

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• 30:59Speaker 01

  Welcome back to A Tiny Plot. You're listening to Chapter One, The Barricade. I'm your host, Shaina Shealy. When we left off, the city of Oakland had a very expensive problem and a very short time to resolve it.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  So, we had them by the balls, kinda.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Matt, the former DJ, the guy who had been student body president in college, he surveyed the situation.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  $6,000 a night for each night they stayed at Union Point. That's over $2 million a year. And Matt realized that he and his community had leverage. With so much money at stake, the city would need them to leave the park and might just be desperate enough to offer them some kind of compensation, some kind of deal.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  So when Matt saw final cleanup notices posted all over the park, he didn't see threats to disperse and disband. Instead, he saw a reason to rally. Matt gathered everyone under a pop-up tent, and they made a plan together.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  To stay, fight, and negotiate.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  To negotiate for some kind of offer from the city on their own terms. This idea would plant the seed for the experiment. Again, an experiment with potential to change the future for these homeless people and others in the city, too.

• 32:34Speaker 04

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

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Days before the eviction deadline, Mama Dee collected cardboard to make signs. Matt strung these multicolored string lights in his pop-up tent and turned it into a center of operations. Activists swarmed the park to help organize residents to resist. Some came with steaming boxes of pizzas. Others brought bottled water.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  And some days, we would have like three different people show up, and there would be like way too much food. So that was great.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  The group began building their own system of governance. First, they held elections.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  We had put Matt to be our president.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  Matt, he knows how to talk to the police and all that, you know? And the legal things to say and whatnot. He used to do a lot of underground parties, like rave parties and stuff.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Student body President Matt was now Union Point President Matt. And when the homelessness administrator of Oakland showed up at the park the week of the eviction, Matt decided to try and talk to him. Dariel Dunston. He had been working on homelessness for the city of Oakland for a few years. When Dariel first got there, he saw what everyone sees on the surface.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  Piles of trash, human feces, inoperable vehicles, makeshift structures.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  But Dariel quickly realized what was going on beyond the trash piles.

• 34:07Speaker 06

  They seem to already have identified who the leaders in the groups were. They seem to have a certain level of respect for one another. So, big picture. I am thinking of so-

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Solutions that could help, understanding that I can't wave a magic wand and just fix it, but wanting to just help. The city has this policy that they must offer some sort of shelter to people when they clear them from an encampment. So Dariel made the standard offer to President Matt and the folks at Union Point Park. He said the city could move them into their "community cabins." It's the city's flagship temporary homelessness site. They wouldn't live in tents anymore. Instead, they'd live in nine-by-12-foot sheds, two people per

• 35:00Speaker 01

  shed. But it seemed like a lot of people were wary of this offer, including activists who were there at the park.

• 35:09Speaker 06

  I'm an organizer with the United Front Against Displacement. Right now, we are at Union Point Park, right outside of the encampment. But one thing about the tough sheds is that a lot of folks don't like it. Like, it is not dignified housing.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  There was no running water at the sites, no real place to cook. They might have to bunk up with strangers, two to a shed. Plus, according to a performance audit on the city's homelessness services, nearly half of the people who move there end up back on the street, not in permanent housing. The heart of the issue, though...

• 35:50Speaker 05

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

• 36:01Speaker 01

  There can be strict policies around visitors, and when you can come and when you can go. President Matt told Dariel, "No." His styrofoam hut was better than losing his autonomy to live in a shed. The residents at Union Point Park refused the community cabins offer. They refused the city's standard treatment of homeless people.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  This move, rejecting their offer, that wasn't what set the Union Point group apart from the 500 or so homeless encampments that the city of Oakland had dispersed over these past two years. Other groups rejected similar offers because most wanted something better. There were two things that set the situation apart from other tent encampments being swept up. One, the city was under the pressure of a $6,000 daily fine if the group didn't leave the park. And two, in this moment, the group at Union Point was organized.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  They had dozens of activists and volunteers backing them up.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  And in the evenings, the group would gather at the illuminated pop-up tent and talk about the kind of housing they actually wanted to live in.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Running water.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Showers and a bathroom.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  A parcel for three to five years.

• 37:21Speaker 05

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

• 37:26Speaker 04

  And we don't want to go without each other.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Most importantly...

• 37:29Speaker 05

  A certain level of autonomy.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  The group wanted to write their own rules, decide who could visit their community, what amenities they'd have, how security would work. And they were ready to fight for it.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Everybody came together as one community. You want to think twice before coming to Union Point and messing with somebody because you're not going to only mess with that one person, you're going to mess with everybody here.

• 38:00Speaker 05

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

• 38:05Speaker 01

  The city's final cleanup notice? It said they'd start evicting people from Union Point on February 9, 2021.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  And they were like, okay, now we have four days. Now's the push time.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  A big group of volunteers arrived to the point.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  They was teaching us how to defend ourselves with the armor gear and to hold our positions. Armor gear? Like how they have their shields and stuff. Did you actually have shields? Yeah, we had shields, huh?

• 38:37Speaker 04

  No, we know how to make them though now, huh? You get some thick, thick wood that you can't bust. Because if you hit a thin piece of wood, you're just gonna go straight through it. But you get some thick wood, you get some leather straps like, or whatever kind of straps.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  The idea was to shield what was left of the encampment from the city cleanup crews.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  So that way, we can be able to stop them from coming in.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  They trained with two people per shield.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  So we was holding these shields like, "Go ahead, try to come through because we're not letting you in." And just having that power with that shield kind of made us a little bit more stronger to be able to do what we have to do. To, because they see we're not gonna back down. The shields was awesome. I don't, it was just a bunch of people.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  The day before the scheduled cleanup, President Matt took out his laptop and looked up California's OSHA standards. He told me he found a guideline warning employees at the Department of Public Works about lifting items more than 50 pounds. And he came up with an idea.

• 39:43Speaker 05

  It was definitely my idea.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  A barricade around the encampment, built with items heavier than 50 pounds.

• 39:50Speaker 05

  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 heap. Garbage bags full of garbage. Dishwasher that someone had thrown out. Piles of dirt. A refrigerator, a mattress. Seats, anything to slow down their progress. Bed frames, lions, tigers, and bears.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  The residents stayed up through the night building the barricade. By the next morning, outsiders had arrived. Activists, volunteers, journalists.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  So can you tell me who you are and where we are?

• 40:26Speaker 04

  I'm Deanna Riley. We're at Union Point Park. They're trying to put us out with nowhere else to go, no reprieve zone.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  The first public works truck rolled in early in the morning. There were cop cars, too. Some residents left the park because they were worried about a confrontation. Others left for housing offered by the city and never came back. But a bunch of them stayed to fight. Good, good, we're ready, we're ready. Guys aren't coming in here today. Volunteers handed out coffee and doughnuts. One guy sat at a broken down piano that had become part of the barricade and played. Others stood with the residents around the barricade shouting.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  Hell, no, we won't go. When I say we had people there supporting us, we had people honking, we had people with signs. We need adequate housing.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Mama Dee told me that the city of Oakland was now faced with a heavy wall of junk, and they were running out of time. Soon, they'd have to start paying a lot of money every day. Given the action that the other state agency was taking against the city, our hands were tied and we had to do something. Days into the standoff, the city homelessness administrator, Dariel, showed up with a couple city employees and a single garbage truck.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Dariel was in a black sweatshirt with a hoodie, you know, covered up.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  The mound of things piled up was over five feet tall.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  And I walked over and sat on the barricade.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Matt sat down on a mattress balanced on top of the barricade. Dariel had been quietly observing Matt and the others for a few days, and he had an idea. There was this homelessness intervention model called cogovernance that had been floating around. Some students at UC Berkeley had written a paper about it, and Dariel had been talking about it with other city employees for months. He'd even studied how it was implemented in other cities, Seattle and Eugene. The key features of cogovernance are these resident-led agreements, agreements about how homeless people will live together in community, like how they'll pick their leaders and make their own rules.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  And Dariel thought that this group might be the perfect one to pilot this cogovernance idea in Oakland because they were already organized. They already had leaders.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Matt had all of the makings of being an effective leader. He could build things from wood and piping. You need a person like that if you're trying to create a village.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  And then, Dariel made a move that surprised everyone. He walked from the truck towards the barricade, looked up at President Matt, and climbed the pile of junk to the top. He sat down next to Matt, and the two chatted.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  When it came to a head with me and Dariel on the barricade is when, like, he basically made the concession. He cited this, the co-governed model, which sort of addressed the concerns that we had had.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Dariel told Matt that under co-governance, city officials would work with the Union Point Group to create a kind of village where residents wouldn't be told what their rules and rights were, but they would decide on them together with the city. Dariel presented the model as an experiment, one that could potentially help homeless people across Oakland. President Matt liked the sound of that.

• 44:14Speaker 05

  I was very much, 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 seemed very positive, like there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  And right there, on a busted mattress on top of a barricade, President Matt accepted the idea under certain terms. He wanted a parcel of land for three to five years, toilets, regular trash pickup, water hookups, electrical hookups, and autonomy for the group to make their own choices.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  When Matt and Dariel shook hands, you could tell it was like, yes.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Something is about to happen for us.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  No one really knew what was going on until Matt announced to the protesters that the city was ready to negotiate.

• 45:13Speaker 05

  There was so much energy and emotion swept up into it. It was a charged moment, but basically, we liked what he had to offer.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Dariel told Matt that if this group agreed to leave Union Point Park, he'd advocate for the city to work with them, to build this community he was asking for. He'd pause the eviction until the group had time to pack their things into storage containers. And while they worked out the details of this new communal home, the city would pay for residents to stay in motel rooms.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  That handshake was, "The city is going to continue to work with you in this community to identify a parcel of land that you all can remain in community and possibly implement a co-government encampment."

• 46:06Speaker 01

  It was an offer made under duress. The city didn't want to pay $6,000 a night to the Shoreline Protection Agency.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  It wasn't a handshake to say that this deal is done. It was a handshake to say that the city will continue to work with you all in good faith.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Dariel made his way down the barricade and waved off the dump truck.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  And the work crews backed away.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Then, all of a sudden, all the public works people started leaving. By the grace of God, we did it.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Finally, after over two years of struggle between the city and park residents, a deal had been reached that all sides seemed pleased with.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  We could really see ourselves doing this in Oakland, becoming the first, being able to have it done and succeed.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  This was day one. An experiment in co-governance. It was an experiment that would test the commitments of this group and of city staff, trying to figure out how to address the vast homelessness crisis here. This experiment started here, on a barricade made of trash.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  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. It was like, man, we did something. We accomplished something. Now let's see how much further we could go.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  You just heard the very first episode of A Tiny Plot. There's more, five chapters total. Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing episodes on the Snap Judgment feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Chapter two is dropping in just a few days, here in the Snap Judgment feed. You don't want to miss it.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  It was crazy.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  I think it was traumatic for a lot of people.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I had two of them. You know, the little things that munch everything and ratchet the shreds and stuff it in the back of the garbage truck.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  I'm your host, Shaina Shealy. And I really want to thank everyone who worked on this show. First, the entire cast from Union Point Park. Thank you for letting me into your world. And second, the whole team at Snap Studios. Thank you. The series was edited by Anna Sussman and Mark Ristich. Original music by Renzo Gorrio. Extra special thanks to Jen Chen, Catherine Winter, the city of Oakland, Sweetie at the Travel Inn, Ryan Finnegan, Will Kraft, J. P. Dobrin, Thomas Browns, Sukey Lewis, Alistair Boone and the Street Spirit, and KQED Legal.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Engineering by Pat Macidi Miller. Our director of production is Marisa Dodge, and our executive producers are Glynn Washington and Mark Ristich.

• 49:36Glynn Washington?

  Thank you for listening to A Tiny Plot here on Snap Judgment. Big thanks as well to everyone on the program. We appreciate you. No Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. On Team Snap, the union representatives, 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 this the news, because this is A Tiny Plot, a brand-new epic series from KQED Snap Studios. The story has just begun. And of course, this is PRX.