Homelessness
A new city-county collaboration has been put forward by Oakland City Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, along with Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, in an effort to grapple with the East Bay’s increasing homelessness crisis.
The residential building at 2551 San Pablo Avenue caught fire in the early-morning hours of March 27, killing four people and displacing more than 100. That day Strauss started a crowdfunding page to collect donations for displaced residents. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this—as a founding member of the Oakland Warehouse Coalition, Jonah Strauss had collected donations for survivors of the Ghost Ship fire and their next of kin.
Every month, homeless and low-income women and girls in the East Bay have to contend with the high cost of feminine hygiene products. For some women, these products are a luxury they just cannot afford.
A Safe Spaces workshop, organized by the Intersection for the Arts and the San Francisco Bay Area Urban Planning and Research Association, was held in Oakland to discuss Ghost Ship’s aftermath.
Tension between residents and city council grew at Tuesday night’s meeting when councilmembers passed controversial resolutions including paying nearly $300,000 a year to city’s new police chief and establishing cell-site simulator which can be used by police officers. Protestors also gathered and spoke against city’s demolishing a self-organized homeless camp by force last Thursday.
The city and the Federal Small Business Administration (SBA) are offering low-interest loans and technical assistance to business owners, nonprofits, homeowners and tenants in the vicinity of the fire. According to Economic Development Manager Aliza Gallo, anyone can apply but must show proof that the fire negatively impacted them physically or economically.
Oakland’s six-month program to provide fundamental public services and housing resources at its first sanctioned homeless encampment is two-thirds complete. Yet with less than two months to go, the city is still left with lots of work to reach its goal.
For Carmen Garcia, the end of a prison sentence was the beginning of a new set of problems.
“The biggest obstacle for me was continuing to stay in school, because the halfway house wanted me to get a job right away, a full-time job,” she said. “And I remember a case manager said to me, ‘You need to take this job, whatever job they offer you, because now you have a criminal record and you’re not going to be able to get another job. Don’t worry about education, because that’s not going to help you.’”
O’Neil is using the training device that comes with each set of Evizo auto-injectors, which deliver a potentially life-saving dose of naloxone, a drug that counteracts the effects of opioid drugs. This includes both prescription drugs like hydromorphone, hydrocodone, and oxycodone, and street drugs like heroin and fentanyl.