I will never forget the group hug.<\/p>\n
There must have been 15 or 20 of us. I remember at least one dog. An injured woman inched into the circle with a cane. An elderly, white-bearded man clutched a walking staff, like an urban Gandalf, disseminating wise vibes. One person wore clown makeup. \u201cSomebody\u2019s gonna die in here,\u201d joked someone smushed between bodies in the center of the lovefest. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna take over the world!\u201d someone else shouted. Everyone giggled.<\/p>\n
We were in a homeless camp on Wood Street in West Oakland, one of the largest in California at the time. It has since been bulldozed, but around 300 people lived there at its peak. Amid the piles of trash and burnt-out cars, I found extensive infrastructure, including systems for power and water, a \u201cfree\u201d store, a health clinic with Narcan and herbal tinctures, guest quarters and multiple event venues, with stages, lighting and sound systems.<\/p>\n
These facilities were built in partnership with housed friends of the camp, of which I was one. The group hug happened in the midst of a party I had helped put on with the residents. Kev Choice, a local MC who is one of Oakland\u2019s Cultural Affairs Commissioners, performed a set with his band. Flyaway, an aerial dance company, performed hanging from the back of the overpass at the camp, guerilla-style theatre that thankfully eluded detection by the highway patrol. There was food, drink and merriment of all stripes. The crowd was about 50-50 housed and unhoused \u2014 the invisible veil that normally segregates these two worlds had been lifted.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing that\u2019s apparent is the love that exists there,\u201d said Monte, one of the camp\u2019s leaders. \u201cIt\u2019s infectious.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent the past several years immersed in the Bay Area\u2019s homeless communities. While each one is unique, the common denominator I\u2019ve observed is a special kind of love. It\u2019s the sort of love one finds in a family \u2014 you might have strong differences of opinion, gossip behind each other\u2019s back and even do hurtful things to each other at times, yet you remain bound by a common understanding that you will be there for each other when needed most.<\/p>\n
Part of being in a family is the unspoken feeling of sharing a common plight. In a biological family, that feeling may be rooted in genetics \u2014 maintaining the family line. My observation is that in the family of a homeless camp, it emerges from the shared experience at the life-or-death edge of physical, emotional and spiritual survival. It also emerges in response to shared antagonists: the government actors perpetually trying to sweep you away and the housed neighbors urging them to do so.<\/p>\n
These forced evictions have a devastating effect on our nation\u2019s unhoused tribes, physically dispersing their members, destroying the fragile sense of security they\u2019ve built, literally crushing their hand-crafted infrastructure with heavy machinery, and carting off personal belongings to the landfill. Unsurprisingly, the unhoused don\u2019t see sweeps \u2014 a central, if little discussed, prong of homeless policy \u2014 as doing anything to help them pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It unquestionably pushes them down.<\/p>\n
Allowing camps to exist may sound like a radical proposition, but it is in fact deeply pragmatic. There are certainly ways to mitigate some of their negative attributes without bulldozing them. And there are certainly ways that government-funded homeless services could be rejiggered to keep street families intact, build on their foundation and embrace their informal approach.<\/p>\n
One assumes that homeless folks would want to move indoors if given the chance, but this is not necessarily the case.<\/p>\n
Dave, a man I met in a camp next door to Apple\u2019s $5 billion campus in Silicon Valley, told me, \u201cA lot of us want to be here. We love the compassion of it. We love the fact that we belong. Out here, I can cry and be pathetic or loud and angry, whatever I need to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ethos of the camp, he said, is \u201cthey accept you and they love you,\u201d no matter your flaws. \u201cWhich is a really magical thing. I would never be able to heal anywhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brian Barth, the author of \u201cFront Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the tent cities of Techlandia,\u201d is an award-winning journalist with bylines in the New Yorker, Washington Post and National Geographic, among other publications. This column emerged from his reporting between 2021 and 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I will never forget the group hug. There must have been 15 or 20 of us. I remember…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[964,1493,181,143,145,144,975],"class_list":{"0":"post-195681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-commentary","9":"tag-homelessness","10":"tag-latest-headlines","11":"tag-oakland","12":"tag-oakland-headlines","13":"tag-oakland-news","14":"tag-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}