Sharraxaadda
This encampment doubles in size each week. This morning there was a belligerent homeless person "batting" garbage with a stick at people and traffic. It's dangerous. If we do not address this it will grow into a whole homeless village like so many other places throughout Oakland. This is next to a park where children play!
sidoo kale waydiiyey...
S. Is this illegal dumping related to a homeless encampment?
J. YES
J. YES
S. Are there mattresses?
J. NO
J. NO
S. Are there appliances?
J. YES
J. YES
S. Are there tires?
J. Don't Know / No Answer
J. Don't Know / No Answer
S. Are there additional materials?
J. household items, tarps, bicycles, tents, bedding, clothes, garbage
J. household items, tarps, bicycles, tents, bedding, clothes, garbage
S. Are the dumped materials in the middle of the roadway BLOCKING through traffic in a traffic lane?
J. NO
J. NO
S. Are the dumped materials located on public or private property?
J. Public
J. Public
54 Faalladas
La qiray City of Oakland (La Caddeeyey Rasmi ah)
Steve (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Lisa (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
5300 soup (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Julia Clements (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Ted (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Dakin Ferris (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
HD (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Corinna Sullivan (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Ayala ave (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Martin Thomas (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
PK (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Steve (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Francesco Indrio (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
PK (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Bindrio (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
IheartOakland (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Lynn Delaney (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
City of Oakland (La Caddeeyey Rasmi ah)
Isticmaale bilaa aqoonsi ah SeeClickFix (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
City of Oakland Call Center -- I appreciate the effort to combine requests, but you combined this with a request that was combined with another request about an illegal camper. You are effectively shutting down all the requests without actually doing anything!
You still have not actually responded to this request -- a growing homeless encampment next to a playground that the City continues to ignore even though taxpayers and concerned citizens keep asking you to address it. The combinations and re-combinations are only ways to avoid the City addressing the issue!
oaksmoke (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Bmudd (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
mcmgee (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Jonathan & Heidi (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Cynthia (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Greg p (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
David Coleman (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
MML (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
MJ1984 (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Theresa (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
It's not only completely irresponsible, but it is egregious, for the city to be "solving" the homeless problem on the backs of neighborhoods, by tolerating tent camps and vehicle camping in residential neighborhoods. There is NO reason why these camps need be tolerated for even one night. There are enough vacant lots and vacant commercial buildings in the city, and/or in nearby cities, which could be repurposed by the city to set up sufficient sanctioned camps, for all homeless in the city. If the city HAD to take care of the homeless, they would. They are miserably failing at this, because residents, under pressure by the "compassion police" to "be compassionate" (eg, to continue to enable and turn a blind eye to serious nuisance) are too tolerant of illegal camps, even when the camps are in residential areas, like this one, where they are most inappropriate.
Residents impacted by homeless camps/campers should be screaming to the city and using every available means to demand that they remove the camps. If the city fails to take action, perhaps neighbors should consider banding together and removing the camps themselves. This would be easier to do when the camps are small.
Monica (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Monica, you're right....and more, it is just common sense that homeless camps are totally incompatible with parks built for recreation and fun. No one has fun when people with serious mental illness engage in bizarre behavior near children, or substance abusers haunt playgrounds, or where vagrants "hang out" and yell obscenities at park goers, where people are appropriating park space as their private bedroom. The continual, oppressive presece of direlects, vagrants and bums in parks makes them impossible for ordinary residents to use.
That these phenomena not only exist but are continual problems, demonstrates how extremely poorly the city has responded to the homeless issue. The city's overtolerance of continual nuisance behavior expresses contempt for neighborhoods and ordinary citizens.
Ben Stiegler (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
I think its important to recognize that not all homeless people are the extreme behavior folks described above, and that probably the majority of homeless people do not want to be homeless. I am sometimes afraid for myself when i'm near people (homeless or otherwise) behaving erratically, and I'm certainly concerned about the public health hazards of homeless encampments. However, there's sometimes a demonization of homeless people applied with a wide brush, and that's neither accurate nor helpful. Many of us are quite fortunate to have traveled unscathed thru the banking scandals of 2008 in which many innocent people lost their homes due to bank and mortgage firm malfeasance.
The offshoring of jobs (which continues under the new Trump tax policies. Harley Davidson is one of the latest to take a Wisconsin tax subsidy (which required new job creation/maintenance), then close the plant and ship the jobs offseas this quarter. The dismembering of ObamaCare (flawed tho it may be, it was better than anything that had come before) and the pressure on local economies which Amazon et. al create all contribute to a downward spiral for many, many Americans. They see oligarchs slurping up every last crumb while their access to what Americans have taken as a given - good schools and parks, impartial law enforcement, civil rights for all, a safety net with steps to help climb back into economically productive society, etc. are systematically dismantled.
I agree that health risks and people behaving badly should not share space with playgrounds. Yet, when we think of the millions of refugees (many of us count them among our ancestors) who came or ended up with nothing at some point in their lives, had it not been for the compassion of others, many of us would not be here today.
I have been taking spare clothing to the encampment near Northgate. I feel more connected to helping someone directly than when I donated it to those yellow-bag curb pickup charities. Although it can be scary to face what could be your or my situation 1 family medical crisis away, the homeless among us are people ... like us, even if its easier to think of them as invaders or pests.
Steve (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Dear City of Oakland/PWD,
DO NOT "combine" this service request with others....this is how you continue to bury the problem. I reported the homeless encampment off of the Claremont Avenue exit and their associated garbage pile on Claremont Avenue on July 14, 2017 with service request #744127. You quickly took the strategy of "combining" this service request with others on this same issue (that had been reported months earlier) knowing that this strategy makes all the request magically disappear. I tried to follow the different "combined" service request, tried to talk to Dan Kalb, tried to get an appointment with Libby Schaff, went to the police beat meetings for Rockridge and all to no avail....NOTHING EVER gets done about this. So if you aren't going to do anything, just BE HONEST with the citizens and tell us that nothing is going to happen! Tell us, that for reasons that don't make sense, the City of Oakland will not help their tax paying citizens but instead side with the vagrants that feel entitled to camp anywhere they want, use our streets as a public restroom and dispose of IV needles in our public parks. We will then quit using this website will spend our time on more productive solutions like self-assembling as a citizen force that will take care of this ourselves!
Francesco Indrio (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Ben, you're right, but at the same time, regardless how "normal" some homeless folks are, NO ONE should be camping in residential neighborhoods, or near children's parks. In fact there should be no camping on sidewalks anywhere. The city CAN stop this, by moving all these folks into sanctioned spots on city property or in lots in industrial areas, but refuses to do so.
Francesco, you're right, which is why city governments are extremely irresponsible when they let these problems fester. By allowing serious nuisance to continue unabated in neighborhoods, they push everyone into conflict, force residents to try to solve the illegal camping problems themselves. Preventing escalating conflict is WHY we have laws and WHY we have police. What we are seeing now is what happens when cities refuse to enforce laws and refuse to allow police or public works employees to abate nuisance.
Steve, you're exceptionally patient, though I think TOO patient. Eradicating new camps should be the city's very first priority on 311 calls, more so than illegal dumping, and they should take not more than 2 weeks to respond. If you reported this in July 2017 and nothing has been done since then, that says loud and clear that the city never intends to do anything about this.
Which means the area residents should solve the problem themselves. Here's one idea: create a group of neighbors, go over to the camp area, tell campers they have 15 minutes to pack up everything and leave, and that if they want help setting up elsewhere, they will be given a free ride downtown and help setting up camp on the lawn at Oakland City Hall, which is a much more appropriate place for them to be. Not only will they be given help setting up camp there, they'll each be given a bag of groceries/sandwiches and $50-100 for their inconvenience.
Anyone who does not pack up and leave after 15 minutes will have their tents/structures dismantled and put in a truck and taken to the dump, pronto. Anyone who returns, risks having their tent dismantled immediately and removed, without warning.
In addition, some of the sidewalks on Claremont (as well as elsewhere in the city) are too wide, which simply invites people to camp there. Neighbors should band together and (if the city refuses to help) erect "anti-vagrant/anti-camping" walls/barriers in all such areas, to narrow the sidewalks to 4 ft wide, so that no one can camp there without completely blocking the sidewalk to pedestrians. Cities now apparently need "anti-camping" architecture employed in parks and sidewalk design, and this means narrow sidewalks everywhere.
All homeless in the city should be camped on city property, or as close to it as possible, so that their impact is primarily on the city government, on city council, and NOT on city residents.
Meaning, City Hall lawn should be chock full of homeless tents. THis problem needs to be smack in the face of City Council members. In their face, not ours, since they are the ones responsible for working on this problem, but instead they are foisting it on neighborhoods.
In turn, because the homeless crisis is a state and federal crisis, not just a city crisis (California has 25% of all the homeless people in the ENTIRE NATION), City of Oakland leaders should be bussing homeless people to Sacramento, to camp on the lawn there and protest for funds for more shelters/refugee camps for them, as well as to Washington DC to camp on the National Mall to protest for federal assistance with this problem. This problem needs to be delivered smack into the faces of leaders of federal government, and those homeless who help in this effort should be supported, fed and assisted through the effort, and should be viewed as heroes in a very necessary protest movement.
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Ben, you're right, but regardless how "normal" homeless people are, still, no one should be camping on the sidewalk in any city. Cities can and should stop this by moving these people to appropriate places like vacant lots or city owned property.
Steve, you are too patient. If the city didn't take action on this issue in the first 2 weeks, or at least w/in 4 weks, to me that indicates they will never act on the issue.
Really the best place for the homeless to be camping in Oakland, is on the lawn at City Hall. The city should also bus homeless (as "protesters") to Sacramento, to camp on the lawn at the state capitol. And to Washington DC, to camp on the lawn at the nation's capitol. Instead of allowing these people to create serious nuisance for neighborhoods, they should be moved to a place where they can be involved in the kinds of protests needed to make the point that homelessness is a state and national issue, not a city by city issue. So it needs to be solved at a state and federal level. Some sort of refugee camp structure needs to be set up....leaving the problem to fester in residential neighborhoods and under freeway overpasses is not acceptable.
PS I would like to know who is censoring our posts here.
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
"I think that we are reaching the limits where problems turn into chaos and where real hostility sets in.
If you take a class of citizens, no matter who they are, and you allow them to be exempt from the laws that govern ...others citizens.... you create a real conflict possibility,"
Yes
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Steve (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
I just spoke with someone at the Public Works Department (Oakland 311) and was told that the the issue on this service request (ID# 80915) has been "acknowledged" by the city and is still "open". As I described the frustration that citizens are having over the lack of any real response to these "service request", I was told to contact Joe Devries, Assistant to the City Adminstrator, as he is one of the leaders working on the homeless issue in Oakland. I've left a voicemail on his office phone and sent him an email regarding the situation in Frog Park/Temescal Creek path and the Claremont Avenue trash pit. Maybe some of you want to do the same? He's contact information is:
Joe DeVries
510-238-3083
jdevries@Oaklandnet.com or jdevries@oaklandca.gov
Isticmaale bilaa aqoonsi ah SeeClickFix (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Thank you for passing this information on, Steve. I just left a voicemail for Joe DeVries and hope others do too:
Joe DeVries
510-238-3083
jdevries@Oaklandnet.com or jdevries@oaklandca.gov
lkapbash (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Sightline (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
EMD (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
NoPlayun (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Robert (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
User (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
JMP (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
NoPlayun (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
ling (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
Dan Kalb couldn't care less. his political ambition comes first.
Tara (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)
AL (Isticmaale Diiwaangashan)