Some residents of a tiny home shelter for homeless people in West Oakland are refusing to leave, a day after city officials closed the site.
Among them is Sandra Martin, who said Wednesday morning she had no plans to move.
“We’re out here trying to figure out what the f— we’re going to do,” Martin, 37, said. “I feel like we were cheated out of our opportunities that were supposed to be given to us. We’re really and truly living on a prayer.”
The shelter is one of two city officials closed Tuesday due to a budget shortfall. Between 10 and 15 people remain at the tiny home village at 3rd and Peralta streets, sandwiched between Interstate 880 and a postal service lot, Martin said. It had housed as many as 40 people.
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, staring down a persistent funding challenge, has planned to take a different approach to homelessness than other Bay Area mayors. She’s proposed curbing sweeps and focusing more on neighborhood blight while respecting the humanity of encampment residents. That intention may be tested at the Peralta cabins if residents refuse to move.
Freelance homeless advocate Amy, left, who preferred to not give her last name, talks with residents Sandra Martin and her boyfriend Drew Dyer, near the Peralta cabins tiny homes where they live at Peralta and Third Streets in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. The city-contracted tiny home village in West Oakland is slated for closure on March 31. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Martin and several others told this news organization the site’s staff had offered new shelters at a different tiny home village on Mandela Parkway. But they said conditions there were poor and even dangerous.
“After today or tomorrow, if I get kicked out, I’m right back out on the street again,” said Frankie Ernst, a 40-year-old auto mechanic who moved from an encampment into the Peralta cabins in 2024. “It sucks. I feel really, really left out in the dark.”
Jean Walsh, a spokesperson for the city of Oakland, said in a text the tiny home village will officially close “when all clients are moved off the site.” It was unclear Wednesday morning how officials planned to clear the village if residents didn’t move willingly. Walsh said the city “has not engaged with law enforcement.”
The nonprofit Housing Consortium of the East Bay runs the site. Darrin Lounds, its executive director, referred questions to city officials. He said he had heard that only four people were living at the site as of Wednesday morning. In February, he said staff planned to offer residents shelter or housing elsewhere if it was available. The tiny home village is located on land owned by the state transportation agency Caltrans, Walsh said. A spokesperson there didn’t comment by press deadline.
Resident Frank Ernst plays with his dog Bud near the Peralta cabins tiny homes at Peralta and Third Streets in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. The city-contracted tiny home village in West Oakland is slated for closure on March 31. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The second site slated for closure Tuesday is a 30-person RV safe-parking area on 71st Avenue near the Coliseum.
The closures are part of a plan to deal with cuts to the city’s community housing services division, a 41% reduction in funding for this fiscal year.
Still, more people continue to fall into homelessness than find housing each year. About 2,500 people become homeless annually in Oakland, officials have said, while city and county programming help 1,500 people find housing.
Tiny home sites are typically intended as temporary when cities and nonprofits set them up. In practice, they can become homes to people for years.
Martin said she moved into the Peralta cabins in September. She lived for eight years in a nearby encampment until the city decided to clear it. After workers towed her RV, she said, she slept on the spot for three days and cried. Eventually, a city official offered her a spot at 3rd and Peralta — a rare opportunity, Martin said.
Oakland opened the tiny home village in 2022, according to press reports. At that point, city officials had added hundreds of new shelter slots and transitional homes, including tiny home sites scattered throughout the city.
A drone view of the Peralta cabins tiny homes at Peralta and Third Streets adjacent to the Oakland main post office in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. The city-contracted tiny home village in West Oakland is slated for closure on March 31. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Ernst, the mechanic, said site staff had offered him a new tiny home at a site on Mandela Parkway. The nonprofit Operation Dignity operates two villages on that thoroughfare. Ernst said he would have had to share the new tiny home with a stranger – a prospect he didn’t think was safe.
“You’re gonna be in there with somebody you don’t know,” he said. “And this is the kind of place where you’ve got the crazies that stab you while you’re asleep or something, you know? I wouldn’t want to be risking that.”
Even so, Ernst said that at the Peralta cabin site, the bathrooms were filthy, and other residents would spread feces on the single shower available. A neighbor’s dog once viciously attacked his, Ernst said, and the neighbor faced no repercussions.
In February, a city spokesperson said the two shelters slated for closure were “valuable,” but they had “weaker program performance when compared to others.” At the time, Lounds, the nonprofit’s executive director, said residents of the Peralta cabins “tend to be younger and healthier than our other program residents and not eligible for housing opportunities for targeted populations such as seniors and people with disabilities.”
“These and other factors contributed to lower performance and outcomes,” Lounds wrote in an email then.
A security guard closes the gate of the Peralta cabins tiny homes at Peralta and Third Streets in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. The city-contracted tiny home village in West Oakland is slated for closure on March 31. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)