Oakland officials say they plan to close two homeless shelters at the end of June. But the sites’ nonprofit operator claims it may need to shutter them as soon as next week, raising fears that dozens of unhoused people could soon be forced back onto the streets.
The shelters, a cluster of about 80 tiny home cabins and an RV safe parking lot, are on private property in an industrial neighborhood in West Oakland. The city says its lease with the property owner expires at the end of the year and that it will take six months to clean up the area, meaning the sites must be closed by June 30.
However, the operator, Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS), has warned it could be forced to pull out of the adjacent sites on March 31 due to missed payments from the city to manage the shelters. The Berkeley nonprofit did not respond to questions from this news organization about how much Oakland is behind in payments, but told the San Francisco Chronicle last week it was owed $1 million.
In a statement, Oakland officials confirmed the missed payments but would not verify the amount. They said the city is working with the nonprofit to keep the shelters open a few more months to relocate the residents.
“Solutions are in swift development to bring the city’s outstanding payments to BOSS up to current, as well as identifying solutions to support the programs’ operations to the end of June,” officials said.
City officials declined to answer whether the city had always planned to close the shelters this year, and did not directly respond to questions about whether concerns raised by some city officials over conditions at the sites played any part in the decision to shutter them.
The city would also not specify where shelter residents could be placed next. And it declined to answer how many people are currently staying at the sites, which were designed to accommodate 100 residents in the cabins and 40 RVs at the safe parking lot.
Like most big cities in the Bay Area, Oakland lacks anywhere near enough shelter beds for everyone who needs them. The city has an estimated 5,490 homeless residents, more than two-thirds of whom live on the street or in vehicles, while the rest stay in shelters.
John Janosko, an advocate for homeless people who previously stayed in the cabins, said shelter residents have been in a state of anxiety since learning last week that BOSS may cease to operate the sites.
“We weren’t sure if that meant that the cabins were closing down altogether and the residents would be put out onto the street … or if they are going to be left in there to their own devices with no support from the city of Oakland,” Janosko said Monday at a news conference held by advocates.
Oakland opened the shelters in 2023 using an $8.3 million state grant. The city set up the sites after officials cleared a massive nearby encampment along Wood Street in West Oakland, which at its peak had more than 300 people in tents, vehicles and makeshift dwellings sprawled across multiple city blocks. Some were moved to the shelters and promised job placement support, case management and help finding permanent housing.
But facing a severe affordable housing shortage, BOSS struggled to place people in lasting homes. Residents soon complained the cabins were falling into disrepair and that life at the shelters was often chaotic.
“We don’t even have shower heads anymore,” said cabin resident Jared DeFigh at Monday’s news conference. “There’s at least eight or so cabins that have been left abandoned … and this is before they ran out of money.”
In March 2024, a city employee wrote to Assistant City Administrator LaTonda Simmons and other city officials to outline concerns about the cabin site, according to an internal email obtained by the Bay Area News Group through a public records request.
The employee, who worked in the Oakland Human Services Department, described high staff turnover, frequent drug use among residents and challenges keeping the cabins clean “due to the abundance of items” residents brought with them, often through holes cut through the chain-link fence around the property.
The employee wrote that the city gave BOSS “informal notice” that conditions at the site needed to improve or the nonprofit would lose the contract. City officials declined to say whether those concerns affected the decision to close the sites or the missed payments to the nonprofit. BOSS did respond to requests to discuss the city’s concerns about the cabin shelter site.
The planned closures come as Oakland is staring down an $87 million budget deficit despite recent layoffs, fire station closures and other deep funding cuts. It was unclear what impact the budget woes might have had on the shelters.