A Tiny Plot: "Burned" EP 5

The group from Union Point moves into their new homes on the tiny plot of land near Lake Merritt. They run their own security and decide who comes into their space. But then, on a Monday morning in March, we hear devastating news… A fire burns through the plot of land on E12th. Is this the end of the experiment, or will the group keep building? This episode contains strong language & graphic imagery. Please take care while listening. Thank you to the entire cast from A Tiny Plot for sharing your story 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 5 of 5. You can listen to the entire series now! 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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• 2:04Speaker 01

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

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Welcome back to A Tiny Plot, a story told in five parts. This is Chapter Five. When we left off...

• 2:23Speaker 02

  You know how all little girls, they want that white house with the white picket fence? She got it. Now they're taking it a little longer, but she has it now.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  After an entire year of fighting and planning and building, the group from Union Point finally moved into their new co-governed home on East 12th Street.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  It's kind of nice, you know? We feel comfortable and we feel safe.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Until one morning, I heard helicopters above my apartment near Lake Merritt and checked my phone. I saw a text from Adam. One of the tiny homes on East 12th caught fire. I gathered my gear and ran to the site.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  How are you guys? Are you OK?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  From KQED Snap Studios, I'm Shaina Shealy. This is A Tiny Plot, Chapter Five, Burned. You OK?

• 3:22Speaker 01

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

• 3:30Speaker 01

  When I get to East 12th, Mama Dee is on the corner of the block, trying to calm down her dogs that are tied up to a pole.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Her face is smeared with black ash. She checks her phone, sees missed calls from her daughter, ignores them, answers questions from the group, looks back out through the fence. Matt's inside, holding a hose aiming water at a pile of ash. There's still heat coming from it.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  It's a disgrace. Look, they don't even have no brain to the home. It all melted. Within seconds, it was gone like that.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Early this morning, Mama Dee was washing dishes near the water spigot, and then she smelled smoke and heard yelling.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  And then I hear boom, boom, boom. Scared the shit out of me.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Oh my God. The house inflamed and just melted. Within seconds, it was gone.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  I'm thinking, oh, it ain't as bad as it looks. It could be, uh, it could be worse. Shit. You could have been right in that bed and all that shit melt on top of you.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  That's what scares me.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Fire raced through the Lakeview Village tiny home development in Oakland Monday morning. This is citizen video of the thick black smoke shooting into the air.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Security camera footage shows smoke seeping out of one of the Union Point pallet shelters at 8:57 a.m. The guy who lived there had left the site around 7:00 that morning. You can see the smoke actually drifting up from the tiny home for just seconds before the heat pressed against its ceiling and its walls and the front door burst open.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  It was like four or five blowouts or pops.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Flames spilled out of the front door, engulfing the plastic walls of the pallet shelter.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  That flame is red, orange red. That's like chemical.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  By 9:01, four minutes later, the plastic walls melted to the ground. The fire moved east, lashing through another shelter.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  In five minutes, it's like, boom.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  The whole thing, so fast.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Tammy was asleep next door. She slept through the yelling, but woke up from the intense heat radiating through her walls. Still in her PJs, she sprung up and ran outside with two dogs in her arms. Aw, Tammy's running, holding her dogs.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And three of her dogs are on the ground. One of her dogs went running out.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Flames charged up a wall of her tiny home, and she threw the dogs out of her arms towards the fence. The footage shows Tammy then running back into her smoldering house to get her other two dogs, still locked up in crates.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  And then by the time I saw that, there was maybe about a minute and 30 seconds before the whole place was completely engulfed in flames.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Within six minutes, three houses had melted to the ground. They belonged to Tammy, Mustache Mike and Rachel, and a resident named Wado.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Mamadi's husband's house was half burned.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  It happened so fast. I mean, the material that these units are built out of is fiber reinforced plastic with polystyrene core and styrofoam just burns.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  The walls are foam insulated panels made of fiberglass reinforced plastic with aluminum framing. These materials meet a Class C fire rating, which implies a faster flame spread than Class A materials like treated wood and concrete. When I spoke with California architect Naren Kadry Begovic, he told me that building code regulations would likely prohibit him from building a regular house solely with the materials Palat uses. There are just so many regulations around energy and environment and safety. Many of them are lifted for emergency housing. He also told me I can't hold pallet shelter to the same standards as a regular house. Because it's not one. Emergency homes like pallet shelters, he said, are glorified tents.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  They're small spaces with a bed and an egress hatch in the back and a door. And if you start looking at these shelters as anything more than that, then you'll have to build a house. And then, he says, it'll take forever to build, which feels impossible when you're in a housing crisis. But the residents here at East Wealth, they had no say whatsoever in using pallet shelters. The homes came from a contract with the city. And now, people are just sort of hanging around the sidewalk, peering through the fence at their home. Their promised land in rubble. Now I know what traumatized means make you feel funny. One resident, James, is straddling a city bike outside the fence.

• 8:40Speaker 06

  I just want to leave before another explosion. I don't know where to go. I don't know where to leave to. I saw everything. And when I turned around to get the fire signals through the hole, the cabin was engulfed.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Tim walks by to tell people that the new management wants them at the pavilion on the other side of the fence, at Lakeview Village.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  What right now?

• 9:07Speaker 07

  This is when all this is, uh...

• 9:09Speaker 02

  What are they gonna tell us? They got some different housing for us right now?

• 9:13Speaker 07

  No, they're gonna tell everybody that everything has to go.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm thinking straight right now.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  The site manager from the nonprofit has arrived and tries to gather people.

• 9:26Speaker 08

  We need to have a community meeting today.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  Okay, um, I mean, uh, it's...

• 9:32Speaker 05

  People are a little traumatized right now, you realize that?

• 9:34Speaker 08

  We need to have our meeting. Michelle, because this is a very unsafe environment over here. So now the city's coming down and all this shit. So we gotta figure out how we can live in a safe environment.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  It's not unsafe because of our doing.

• 9:49Speaker 08

  Well, it's too much stuff right here, for sure.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  There is a lot of stuff on the ground, inside and outside the pallet shelters. But President Matt points to the plastic and styrofoam pallet shelters that melted in the fire.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, but look, look, none of that would have mattered. It had everything to do with the, with the construction materials of the structure.

• 10:11Speaker 08

  Okay, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm saying this is way too much material and too many supplies and belongings here.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Now, they have an excuse to come down and completely dissolve all of our autonomy and take down the fence and absorb us into the place next door, which we're gonna lose all of the, um, decisions that we've voted on and worked so hard for.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Matt feels this was the city's plan from the beginning, to find any reason to prove that homeless people are incapable of being in charge of their own lives.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  They can't have homeless people standing up for themselves and getting autonomy, because then more people are gonna keep doing that.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And now, their experiment is in literal ashes.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Now they have an excuse.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  No one goes to that meeting led by the nonprofit managers. Instead, Mama Dee piles extra blankets into a sort of bed on the floor of the security shed for Tammy.

• 11:15Speaker 09

  Do you think this is the end of this project? Probably.

• 11:20Speaker 09

  Because if we gotta fight for anything, or stand up for ourselves, it's gonna be against them, and they're not gonna like it. Them is the city. Yeah, and it's gonna hurt us at the same time.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Tammy can barely talk because of the smoke, the fumes, the lack of sleep. The air smells like burnt tires. The official report deemed the East 12th Fire an accident of unknown cause. The day of the fire, the Oakland Fire Department had already responded to three other incidents in homeless encampments, all before they got the call about East 12th.

• 12:03Speaker 09

  We didn't want these pallet shelters, especially when we found out they were made of styrofoam. They melted.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I spoke with Pallet's CEO, Amy King, and she was clear. The fire was not related to the pallet materials. She reminded me that each shelter passes a safety inspection by a local fire marshal before anyone moves in, and that the materials used to build pallet shelters are specifically selected for safety, ease of use, and cost efficiency. In a letter to the city of Oakland, she attributed the fire to, quote, "the lack of management and oversight of this village, a factor that Pallet has no responsibility for," end quote. In response to the fire, Pallet now requires cities to show proof that they've hired trained service providers to manage and oversee safety at pallet shelter sites.

• 12:56Speaker 09

  They're trying to emphasize on the fact that we had too much stuff, or whatever. That stuff didn't even burn. It's still on the ground, and all the fucking outside burned. What do you want now?

• 13:09Speaker 09

  I don't wanna be here.

• 13:12Speaker 09

  I don't wanna be part of this because I didn't, that wasn't what I signed up for. Do you think you're gonna leave?

• 13:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, I just don't have time, I don't know when. Because I'm totally set back by everything.

• 13:28Speaker 09

  Do you have a place to go? Thousands of dollars of stuff I've lost.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. It's awful.

• 13:41Speaker 09

  I wouldn't think I could go through this two times in a lifetime.

• 13:47Speaker 09

  I have to look at that stuff. I had to wake up to that today and feel like shit.

• 13:55Speaker 09

  This just wasn't the thing, what we've been doing for the last year, getting ready for this. I feel like everybody's neglect because they don't give a fuck and it's not fair.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  What's going to happen to the dream of a co-governed home? Stay tuned to find out.

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• 16:53Speaker 01

  You're listening to A Tiny Plot. I'm your host, Shayna Shealy. When we left off, a fire had swept through the plot, leaving homes in ashes. The night after the fire, Tammy slept on the floor of the security shed, and someone else slept on the floor of the kitchen. Others bunked up in pallet shelters that went unscathed in the fire. In the following days, the city designated Union Point on the Rise a fire hazard. They said the houses are too close together, there's too much stuff outside and inside them. The nonprofit managers from next door came onto the site and took over security.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  They instructed the residents to clear the grounds around their pallet shelters. And they made an announcement. The fence separating the two sites, it was a safety hazard and would have to come down.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Shit ain't legal that they doing us.

• 18:00Speaker 10

  What happened?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  But you can't come and tell us we still co-government, but you making all the rules and shit that we gotta go bye-bye here? We are co-government. We ain't supposed to have nobody tell us what to do. We're supposed to be running this.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Mama Dee is exhausted.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  None of this shit is safe for none of us. All they're doing is telling us that this has to go, that has to go. I'm sorry. I'm done.

• 18:22Speaker 10

  What?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  I'm done.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  She walks back to her pallet shelter and starts organizing her shoes into a bin, clearing the rocks by her front door into a dusty pathway. I'm talking to her when a safety inspector walks onto the site with some people from the city. The inspector surveys the shelter.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I don't have no problem moving my stuff, but I was cleaning my shoes.

• 18:45Speaker 11

  I'm sorry. I really don't want media constantly on the site. Do you mind? Like, you really have to talk to HCB if you're gonna be on the site.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Okay. I guess, I thought it was up to them.

• 18:53Speaker 11

  No. It's up to the people that run the site, which is a housing concession of these.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Laura from the city turns to me and tells me, "You need to leave."

• 19:04Speaker 12

  So, we're all on our feet on the site?

• 19:07Speaker 11

  All of our sites, we don't let media to be on the site. Nobody should be here. Security shouldn't be letting anybody in except the locals.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  This is the first time I've been asked to leave Union Point on the Rise. I walk away, and Tammy follows me outside the fence.

• 19:27Speaker 09

  I just have something to report on.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, can you tell me what just happened?

• 19:33Speaker 09

  Just like we assumed, they were taking our co-governship away.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they just kicked me out of the site.

• 19:41Speaker 09

  And I'm...

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And I thought that was up to you guys to decide.

• 19:44Speaker 09

  Well, it's not anymore, 'cause I knew they were gonna take it.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 09

  But you know why they're taking it.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Why are they taking it?

• 19:55Speaker 09

  You know why.

• 19:58Speaker 09

  Because we're homeless. That's the bottom line.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  A few hours after I was asked to leave, I walk back to the site. The sun is glaring.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  They took our fence down. There's a work crew with helmets and neon vests. They're digging up the chain link fence between Union Point on the rise and Lakeview Village.

• 20:23Speaker 07

  They're tearing it down right now.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I'll show you.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  The city's crew dismantles the fence. And the Union Point residents are right behind them, nailing together scraps of building material to build it right back up.

• 20:43Speaker 13

  Putting the fence up.

• 20:47Speaker 13

  So they took our fence out. The city took the fence out, we gotta put a new one.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  They are not letting that fence come down. Everyone has a role. Lucy carries planks of wood to the fence line. Mustache Mike handles the drill. Others steady the pieces. Mama Dee takes a sledgehammer to the scorched pallet wall and knocks it down. James is on the sidewalk, holding a poster in protest.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  What does your sign say?

• 21:20Speaker 06

  See?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  "City of Oakland using dictator enforcement against our rights as Americans in a free nation." What does that mean to you?

• 21:30Speaker 06

  It means that they're running us, you know? They coerced us into a, um, there was a false sense of security. I was coerced into a, um, bad position, you know, um. It's, it's, we want what was agreed upon, you know?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  What do you use James on?

• 21:49Speaker 06

  I don't wanna, I don't wanna live here. I wanna live in a regular home, you know?

• 21:56Speaker 06

  I've been living here all, all my life. They, they jacked the prices, the whole Bay Area, since it's the land of milk and honey, and they're making it unaffordable for anybody to live, especially me on a fixed, fixed income, you know? I just wanna be okay, that's all, you know?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  What's left is a patchwork of plywood and picket fence, held together with nails and screws.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Tied onto the plywood is a beige tarp, stretched along the line that separates Union Point's experiment and co-governance from the land allotted to Lakeview Village.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  This story started on a mountain of trash at Union Point Park, a barricade that Mama Dee and President Matt and the others built to protect their community.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  On that trash pile, this group of people came together to fight for a piece of land they could make their own, where they could stay for three to five years with toilets and running water and electricity, and autonomy to make their own choices about how the place would run. It was a dream.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And when this group of people was placed on the same block Mama Dee's son was shot, when the city told them their new homes would actually be eight-by-eight plastic sheds, when they got stuck with porta-potties and plastic pump sinks, Mama Dee and President Matt and the others still showed up, again and again, to pull together scraps of say-so over what would happen next in their lives. They always returned to their dream.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  It honestly felt like kind of an extraordinary thing to witness.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And now, 12 months after they made a deal with the city on a pile of trash, they are picking up pieces of their lives from another pile. This one, mostly ashes.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Mama Dee digs up a blackened jewelry box that belongs to Tammy. President Matt finds a binder of baseball cards, warped and charred. They throw the items back into this growing mountain of trash and save what they can to carry forward.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  I'm not from the lion, I'm not taking this sugar coat, 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 gonna stay at it, going until the end, and it's not over.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  What happened to the group from Union Point? Stay tuned to find out.

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• 26:55Speaker 01

  Welcome back. This is A Tiny Plot. I'm your host, Shayne Ashili. The city's public works crews eventually dismantled what was left of the fence, and Union Point on the Rise was dissolved into Lakeview Village later that spring. The city called the combined sites "Lake Point." This didn't go over well at first. Some saw it as a loss of their hard-fought-for autonomy, but over time, others accepted it and signed on to Lake Point's program. When the summer came around, those who remained installed AC units to cool their common space. They set it up with chairs and tables, and a chest freezer filled with popsicles and beer.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  It was open to the entire site. They also built five garden beds facing the lake. As for big wins, well, the entire site got access to spigots with running water. A defunct city bus was brought to the site and turned into a functioning bathroom with hot water showers. Since then, other temporary city homelessness sites in Oakland use this model to also get running water, and real toilets that flush. And then, shortly after the merge, Oakland City Council voted to hand the whole East 12th parcel over to a developer with a new plan, to build 100% affordable housing on the plot.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  There will be 185 units, all reserved for low-income people, which means you have to be making between 20% and 60% of Oakland's median income to live there. It's actually pretty interesting if you look at the calculation. Someone making $60,000 a year qualifies. All the folks living at Lake Point eventually relocated. Some went to other transitional housing sites, others chose to go back to the streets. The old city bus with hot water showers and toilets now lives at a transitional city housing site in East Oakland. The 12th Street Development Project is under construction. I recently went back with Mama Dee to check it out.

• 29:02Speaker 09

  So we're driving past East 12th, the East 12th parcel right now.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the reason garbage jumps here.

• 29:10Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  That.

• 29:13Speaker 09

  100% affordable housing coming soon on the sign.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. That's what the sign says.

• 29:23Speaker 09

  But you think it's a good idea.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I think it's the best.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  But the city is still building temporary sites to address the homelessness crisis, though they no longer use pallet shelters. And still, according to an audit on the city of Oakland's homelessness services, there's evidence that these shorter-term programs do not succeed at getting people off the streets permanently. Former council president Nikki Fortunato-Boss is now the Alameda County Supervisor for District 5.

• 29:53Speaker 14

  The real problem that I think I'm personally trying to solve is poverty. And ultimately, I think it's about economic inequality. And so, a lot of times, we are just putting Band-Aids on problems. Like, housing is the solution to homelessness, certainly. But there's also the problem that housing is incredibly expensive. And it's incredibly expensive because of our capitalist system and the inequality it's created. Homelessness is a symptom of the problem.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Nita B., the housing activist, believes that for a moment, there was actually a huge opportunity here, to learn from this experiment and from the people who used to live at Union Point Park.

• 30:36Speaker 15

  Through their organizing power, they were also able to negotiate all their basic needs of food, shelter, water, and sanitation met at the tiny house pallet site. Now, curfews, showers on-site, freedom to move, freedom of speech. They just, they were allowed to be human. They were really allowed to be human. And it's a shame that the city, rather than extend all those things that Union Point fought for, that Union Point got stripped of all of that in the name of being fair and equitable to all the other unhoused folks in city-funded interventions. What the city should have done was extend those basic rights and basic needs to everyone that they were housing in their city interventions.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  As for the other characters in this story, President Matt is back living on the streets in Oakland. Tammy and a few others are living in a different kind of temporary shelter site, where this time, the city has provided trailers.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Adam is selling real estate in Stockton, specializing in affordable ADUs.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Mama Dee entered the lottery for a spot in a deeply affordable housing project, and won. She was the only one in the group to get a spot in permanent housing.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  It's a one-bedroom living room, kitchen. And then, now, I got all my little stickers for the wall and stuff. But yeah, this is my house.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  She lives there, in downtown Oakland, with her son Dupree.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  And if you were in charge, like if you worked, if you were the homelessness administrator for the city of Oakland, what would your plan be?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  I would put the money towards building housing, instead of shelters and temporary nonprofits.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  What about all the temporary programs? Like, even the co-governance program?

• 32:34Speaker 02

  It don't help. It don't help.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  What do people need?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  They need the housing. And I feel that some...

• 32:45Speaker 02

  We have... Oh, I hate bringing this up. Waddo was murdered.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  What happened?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  I don't know. They never placed him nowhere. They just sent him back on the street.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  One member of the Union Point group, who people called Waddo, was found dead in the summer outside of a 7-Eleven in Oakland. Mama Dee also worried that Papa Eddie had died somewhere on the street after the group was kicked out of the East 12th site. She said the last she heard was that his son found him sleeping in a puddle back at Union Point Park, and that he had caught pneumonia. She and I went back to the park to try to find him.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  I thought I heard he went to the hospital. What happened? I don't know where he's at now.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Years after the city cleanup crews mass evicted homeless people from Union Point Park, there are still people living there. When I was there recently with Mama Dee, we saw around 10 tents in the grass, a fort made of found materials, laundry lines tied to poles and elevated foot bridges. The parking lot was nearly full of trucks and sedans and people living out of them.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Mama Dee called for Papa Eddie over and over again, inside tents and underneath bridges.

• 34:15Speaker 09

  We found him! What the heck?

• 34:21Speaker 09

  I've been looking for you forever. Papa Eddie! Forever. I thought I heard somebody calling Papa.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  We found him on a grassy lawn at Union Point Park. He says he comes here most days to enjoy the view and the fresh air.

• 34:37Speaker 09

  I'm just enjoying the fresh air and having lunch.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  He had a hospital sticker on his shirt.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  He asked me to take a picture of him, standing in front of the anchor he painted, back when he first started sleeping here.

• 34:50Speaker 09

  Take a picture of me standing in front of it? Oh, yes. Okay, I love that.

• 34:57Speaker 09

  And it's all the people from the music industry and all the people from the movie industry.

• 35:04Speaker 09

  Be a member of more than one union.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  That's it for A Tiny Plot. I'm your host, Shaina Shili, and I want to thank everyone who worked on this show. First, the entire Union Point cast. Thank you for letting me into your world. And second, the whole team at Snap Studios.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  A Tiny Plot is a production of KQED Snap Studios. Hosted and produced by Shaina Shili. Edited by Anna Sussman. 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, JP Dobrin, Thomas Browns, Sukey Lewis, Alistair Boone and the Street Spirit, and KQED Legal. Engineering by Pat Macidi Miller. Director of Production, Marisa Dodge. Our executive producers are Glynn Washington and Mark Ristich. On Team Snap, the union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers

• 36:32Speaker 01

  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 Snap Judgment. Get your ears ready and keep your hearts open. Because this is P-R-X.