Homelessness & the Encampment Abatement Policy
Sweeps are ineffective. They do not end homelessness, they harm the people they displace, and they cost the city millions. Oakland needs real solutions that give people somewhere safe to sleep and a path toward lasting housing.
Start here
For more than a decade, Oakland's main answer to homelessness has been to clear it from view. The city sweeps camps, tows the vehicles people live in, and moves people along, over and over, to the same blocks and the next ones. This spring the City Council doubled down on that approach, adopting the Encampment Abatement Policy (EAP) on a 5 to 1 vote.
The evidence on this approach is not close. Sweeps do not reduce homelessness. They cause harm to people who are continually displaced, they cost millions, and they fall hardest on Black Oaklanders, who are about a fifth of the city but more than half of its unhoused residents.
There is a practical alternative Oakland can build now: safe parking and temporary housing sites, run on best practices, so the thousands of people sleeping outside and in their cars have somewhere that can actually support them. Black Solutions Lab fought the EAP, and we are still in the fight to move Oakland's money toward what works.
By The Numbers
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By The Numbers •
Sweeps are not just ineffective. They take what people need to get back inside.
A sweep routinely costs people the medication, identification, and case-worker contact they depend on, and replacing lost records alone can take 6 to 8 months. Sweeps do not make anyone safer either: a 2024 University of Colorado study of 300 Denver clearings found they did not reduce crime and can leave the people displaced at greater risk of theft and assault.
For the people who live in them, a tow is the sweep, and it takes the home.
Vehicle residents are about 45% of Oakland's unsheltered population, and the EAP now makes it easier for the city to tow their vehicles. UCSF found vehicle residents, who most often do not end up living in a vehicle by choice, are under constant threat of losing their vehicles: on a median income near $9,000 a year, the parking tickets pile up until, in the study's words, "after multiple tickets, their vehicle was towed."
After the Supreme Court loosened the rules in 2024, Oakland's sweeps exploded.
In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities may punish people for sleeping outside even when no shelter is available. Oakland's camp closures rose from 14.4 a month before the ruling to 32.2 a month after. The city ran 1,212 closures in 2025, up from 140 to 240 in earlier years.
As the sweeps accelerated, Oakland cut the places people could actually go.
In 2025 and 2026 the city closed the Wood Street cabins and RV park, the 3rd and Peralta cabins, and the 71st Avenue safe RV parking site, which had operated since 2019, and recently Mandela House. It has opened nothing to replace them. Oakland now has fewer than 1,300 shelter beds for an estimated 5,500 homeless residents, down from roughly 1,826 in 2024.
Oakland has no plan.
Two recent City Auditor reports found Oakland spent at least $12.6 million clearing camps and nearly $70 million on homelessness programs while tracking almost nothing about whether any of it worked. The 2021 audit found the city "lacked an effective strategy" and never even budgeted for the sweeps it kept running, with no goals and no way to measure success.