By Decay
I started the morning uneasy, torn between having to go to work and the unknown timeline of the forced closure of the sheds housing some formerly homeless residents of the “Wood Street Commons”. The sheds (a temporary housing program) started two years ago, an imposition of the City of Oakland and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) after they carried out sweeps of Wood Street Commons, the largest homeless encampment in Northern California – and one where its hundreds of residents had self-organized to resist their removal by the City of Oakland.
During the pre-shed 2023 sweeps, I was a passerby. More recently, I had returned to the site to continue distributing food and aid while working a summer teaching job nearby. Eviction notices from Oakland (dated for 5pm of July 14th, 2025) had littered shed doors during my previous week of food distribution. Yesterday, 5pm had come and gone, and once again, the evictions were delayed. The mutual aid group that showed up with food and water wouldn’t be available today and I was terrified about what might happen when the cops arrived with nobody to film or watch them.
That evening, like the one before, I helped several residents move belongings, tend to their dehydration and nausea, and process the utter helplessness they were experiencing. My fears were mostly quelled; I wasn’t alone as an observer, and members of the Wood Street Commons were there with other community members filming, moving, and supporting their neighbors. I rushed through the abandoned cabins with two of them after the police left, desperately hauling off more personal items nearly ruined by the fire that broke out earlier, tracking down the site coordinator to confirm contact information, and for a moment just… looking. Looking at the walls covered in paint, pictures, bodily fluids, lipstick, messages, dirt — all these signs of life that desperately remained. Trash piled up around makeshift porches, the “Private Property” sticker slapped on one cabin, the square of fake grass as a lawn in front of another. Out of sight and away from the core of Oakland, it would be easy enough for the city to try and bury what happened here.
Over the last decade, police have continually pushed residents from various tent encampments towards the Wood Street Corridor in West Oakland, promising that they wouldn’t be bothered there as Caltrans enacted a brutal series of sweeps across the city. For years, residents petitioned Oakland officials for dumpsters, fire extinguishers, and basic sanitation throughout the settlement — a quarter mile of tents and vehicles tucked under the freeway overpasses of Interstate 880. Fed up with the neglect and constant fires, organizers within the community began gathering to coordinate group meetings, discuss what they needed, and plan events. By 2021, an autonomous collective of volunteers and community members built Cob on Wood: a haven of beautifully decorated (and fire resistant!) cob cabins that hosted a free clinic, hot shower, community store, pizza oven, gardens, and other community resources. As city officials sunk $12.6 million into pushing curbside communities from street to street, something permanent was beginning to solidify.
When Caltrans eventually posted eviction notices throughout the camp in 2022, those same community members quickly secured a temporary restraining order, citing the impossibly short timeline and lack of alternative housing plans. In front of a district judge, the City of Oakland, Alameda County, and Caltrans each avoided responsibility for hundreds of lives, admitting they had nowhere left to push residents and no housing program to fill the gaps. Residents pointed to Cob on Wood, reminding the City that they had already built a self-sustaining civic center that could be expanded and given full legitimacy. Resident efforts and wisdom were ignored again, and a month later, the order was lifted with only 40 emergency shelter beds secured for the 200-300 residents. The moral rot exposed in the hearing was sufficiently concealed with a thin veneer of due diligence, it seemed. Oakland came up with a three-phase plan to tear down the encampment, and within weeks, California Highway Patrol and Caltrans workers descended upon the camp wielding threats of arrest and bulldozers. The scope of the law was “too narrow” for any meaningful change, you see. They had been pushed here for years, and now, they’d be pushed somewhere else.
The first phase targeted the quarter mile where the majority of residents had settled on Caltrans property. By 2023, they turned to the remaining members on a smaller parcel of city land to begin the second phase. The property, 1707 Wood Street, had been left abandoned since its purchase in 2007 and was now the headquarters of the Wood Street Commons, who still provided food, clothing, storage facilities, and harm reduction supplies. During this phase, the City moved some of the residents into hastily built sheds and an RV lot down the street (the rest decided to “self-relocate”), promising housing support and job opportunities. Now that people were corralled into this program, service provider Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS) could swoop in and profit off of pantomiming the work already being done by mutual aid groups. At every step, the city systematically removed people from their support systems, destroyed property, and rejected any alternative to the inhumane sweeps. What I witnessed in July was the third phase — after whittling the encampment down to 50-100 program participants, they could finally shut it down and cover their tracks.
So… about those promises of temporary housing and transitional support. Shuffling people into temporary isolation chambers in hopes that they can be slotted neatly back into the crumbling infrastructure around us after years of trauma doesn’t work. It was never supposed to work. Capitalism relies on the threat of homelessness and instability to keep us compliant, and when that fails, they turn to state-sanctioned terrorism to keep us scattered. The cruelty inflicted on people trying to survive isn’t new or unique; it’s part of an ongoing war against community building through endless cycles of displacement. The war is escalating — troops have been deployed in Washington to “end vagrancy” while Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) opens the floodgates for states to enforce relentless anti-camping laws. They want us to remain hidden. One would imagine this to be the end of something fragile, a final nail in the coffin as America turns the full weight of its power against the people held hostage within it. An ouroboros of destruction and expulsion coming to a bloody end. One would be wrong.
Years into the wreckage and removal of their belongings, pets, and lives, the largest homeless encampment in Northern California produced something separate from the narrative of pain and suffering detailed here. Millions of dollars and hundreds of police officers cannot undo the progress made by members of the Wood Street Commons in building and caring for their community. Each phase of evictions brought more engagement, more work, and more organizing. Through that work, people have been housed, recovered from addiction, accessed life-saving medical care, and fully joined the fight against displacement. These stories matter. We often focus on the trauma of homelessness — and there’s a place for that discussion and documentation. In this article, I discuss it to preserve a piece of history that the City of Oakland wants us to forget. I want the truth to be out there. But if we’re going to survive the onslaught of fascism as organizers and community members, our eyes need to be fixed on the horizon ahead. We need to hold onto the fact that when the state comes to knock down our spaces, we find new ones. Months after the final evictions, Wood Street Commons is still in full operation planning events and campaigns.
While Oakland officials made excuses and fell behind in their payments to BOSS this year, members of the Commons put together the Mandela Parkway Proposal: a detailed permanent supportive housing solution. A few weeks after the July evictions, they co-hosted a Good Neighbors Assembly and brought in long-time housing activist and current Oakland city councilmember (and “Moms for Housing” organizer) Carroll Fife to discuss community needs. We strategized around the $800 million dollars of Measure W funding being dedicated to address homelessness and planned statements for upcoming city council board meetings. As this paper is being assembled, Wood Street Commons will be conducting their 4th annual solidarity bike ride from Oakland to Sacramento: a tradition they’ve used to raise funds for the community, build connections between unhoused groups, and visit state legislators to demand policy changes. Between events, they manage food distribution, medical support, press releases, and more. The constant displacement and violence didn’t destroy the community — it gave people a reason to stick together and learn how to fight back.
We know that the price of successful organizing will always be a target on our backs, the force of the state bearing down on our movements and communities. Other groups, with projects like People’s Park in Berkeley and Camp Resolution in Sacramento, will continue to develop and subsequently be met with bulldozers and arrests. Some reach historic wins; some reach historic losses; several will have both. Even so, months or years after “defeat,” these movements are able to capture and reproduce something dangerous: self-governed safety. The more we can disentangle ourselves from the trappings of capital and root ourselves in what will inevitably outlive it, the more difficult it is to coerce us into compliance. We need to learn from this and understand that the very mechanisms they use to threaten and target us are, ultimately, the same mechanisms that give rise to coordinated opposition.
This isn’t just about housing advocacy and solidarity movements. This is about resistance as a whole. I admit that I have no words of wisdom for what comes next — but I know we’ll face it arm in arm, covered in dust and sweat. They can’t stop us. We have no other choice.
More information about the Wood Street Commons and their ongoing work (including an upcoming documentary!) can be found at www.woodstreetcommons.org
Grassroots organizations involved in this story include: Wood Street Commons, Homefulness, Living Earth Structures, Essential Food and Medicine, Artists Building Communities, Moms 4 Housing, Black Solutions Lab, Community Ready Corps, and Anti-Police Terror Project.