Oakland mayor seeks to scale back homeless encampment sweeps as others push crackdown

At a glance, it might look like Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee is following the trends in the Bay Area — and the nation — in handling homelessness. The icon among progressives has cleared homeless camps faster than her predecessor since taking office in May 2025, evoking ongoing sweeps in San Jose and San Francisco.

Behind closed doors, Lee is planning a new course: The mayor and a top official want to remove fewer camps and improve sanitation around them, they said in an interview with this news organization — a recognition that people will continue to live beneath overpasses and on sidewalks in a city with diminishing resources to provide shelter.

Instead of hurrying to break up tents and scatter RVs, Lee and Oakland’s interim homelessness chief Sasha Hauswald want city workers to focus on minimizing trash and human waste around encampments. Lee is exploring paying homeless people to pick up litter, inspired by a program in Portland, Oregon.

That’s because two years of intense sweeps haven’t moved homeless residents indoors, Hauswald said. Budget cuts are forcing the closure of shelter sites this winter. And Lee, a former Democratic member of Congress, said she wants to respect the humanity of people who fell into homelessness.

The strategy she expects to unveil in March appears to be radically different from neighboring leaders — and with the Oakland City Council’s own vision for homelessness. Its members are pushing legislation to accelerate encampment sweeps and eliminate a longstanding local requirement that the city offer shelter to residents when forcing them to move.

The city leaders, led by Councilmember Ken Houston, have proposed striking that requirement and allowing city workers to more quickly tow RVs.

The council majority could pass its plan without input from Lee, who does not hold veto power. In the interview, Lee didn’t specifically say if she supports or opposes the proposal.

“I think we have to approach this in a way that’s practical, but also that values the human dignity of people living on the streets or in RVs,” the mayor said, “and that’s what I think most council members, I know myself, want to see as part of a policy.”

The competing visions for Oakland will come to a head this year, mirroring fierce debates about homelessness throughout the Bay Area and California. If realized, Lee’s new approach seems to break from other big city mayors in the region.

In every city, advocates for homeless people have asked leaders: If there’s not enough shelter or housing for people to go to, what do sweeps accomplish?

Many leaders in the Bay Area cracked down on encampments after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities can ban homeless people from sleeping outdoors, even if no shelter is available. Despite the 2024 ruling, Oakland’s leaders have kept their rule to offer shelter in most cases. Houston’s plan would remove it.

In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie has deployed cops, “street ambassadors” and outreach workers to push homeless people indoors. Fremont leaders made it illegal to camp anywhere in the city and cleared a park of camps last fall. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s administration led about 2,000 sweep operations last year.

Lee, 79, differs from Mahan and Lurie in many ways. The two men in their 40s came to politics after private sector careers. Oakland’s mayor took office last May after representing the East Bay in Congress for three decades, where she carved out a reputation as a maverick.

Not enough shelter

Lee inherited a big challenge on Oakland’s streets. A week before she took office, Alameda County estimated about 3,600 homeless people were living throughout the city.

Oakland was short more than 10,000 housing units for low-income people as of last year. Although the city is making progress building new homes, the pipeline will not meet the full need. The city is also hundreds of shelter units below the need, a city spokesperson said.

On top of that, Oakland is short on cash. The city’s community housing services division saw its budget slashed to $26 million ahead of the current fiscal year, a 41% reduction.

The city is slated to close two interim housing sites in March because of the budget issues: the Peralta tiny home village in West Oakland, which provides 40 beds, and the 71st Avenue RV site near the Oakland Coliseum, a free space with water and electricity for 31 vehicles that opened in 2019.

The shrinking shelter space, a tight city budget and the high cost of housing mean more people become homeless each year in Oakland than those who find housing. With the system overloaded, Hauswald said, it makes sense to dial down the pace of encampment sweeps and focus more on addressing the impacts.

“The city has limited resources to offer, both in terms of interim housing and in terms of staff members who can go into the community and engage with our unsheltered population,” she said in the interview.

Later, she added: “We really need to pivot to focusing on keeping our neighborhoods safe and clean and tidy, and only move people when they do have shelter that is available and with enough time to connect to individuals — to be able to really assess what their needs are, what their wants are.”

That would be a departure from Lee’s track record so far.

Her predecessor, former Mayor Sheng Thao, oversaw 17 camp closures per month on average. Lee oversaw an average of 91 closures each month since starting the job in May, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of the city’s data.

On a cold morning in January, a trash compactor rolled down a stretch of East 12th Avenue, where a dozen people lived in tents and cars. Litter spilled across sidewalks near derelict vehicles. City workers worked fast to clear the block, loading tents, pallets, chairs and refuse into the dump truck.

At Glad Tidings Community Church, Pastor Jeremiah Captain, 70, was relieved to see the city workers. Camps had sprung up right outside the church’s front door. His congregation of 179 people was scared of visiting, he said; just five had showed up that Sunday for services.

“My people deserve much more than having to see this,” Captain said. “Trash, filth, needles and condoms.”

Around the corner, Tai Tran, 55, huddled with others inside a spray-painted Jeep with a bedroll folded across the roof. The Jeep could run, but someone had lost the key, Tran said.

He’d bounced in and out of housing, Tran said, but otherwise lived unsheltered in the area, “scattered” a few blocks at a time by city sweeps.

“Stop the Sweeps” has long been the position of advocates for unhoused people. They argue — backed by academic research — the forced movement of homeless people doesn’t solve underlying issues, but breaks up communities and separates people from their belongings, including documents and medicine, power generators and tools.

Lee’s administration appears to have reached a similar conclusion.

A city divided

After two years of ramped-up sweeps, “we have not seen a significant reduction in the number of encampments in the city of Oakland,” Hauswald said in the interview.

“That’s what we’ve been yelling for the last four, five years,” said John Janosko, an organizer who used to be homeless. “It’s amazing she’s saying this,” he said of Lee.

While Lee and Hauswald prepare to roll out their vision, Houston, the City Council member, has not backed down from his push to expedite clearings of tents and RVs. He is an unabashed critic of the blight posed by illegally parked RVs in particular.

The outspoken representative of the city’s District 7, which spans areas of East Oakland, Houston insists his constituents favor a more severe crackdown to “bring back law and order to our city.”

Activists have panned the plan as an attempt to criminalize homelessness, and in the fall, a state agency expressed concern that it would be out of line with state guidelines to at least attempt to find shelter space for displaced residents.

In an interview this week, Houston said Lee recently asked to schedule a meeting with him to negotiate changes to his policy. Regardless, he is “not willing to budge” in the shelter debate, he said.

“I’m puzzled why this is even taking so long,” Houston said.

Still, Houston has relaxed his earlier threats to target colleagues who oppose his ordinance in elections. And he pulled down social media posts that took hostile aim at unnamed political opponents.

In West Oakland, Masoud Saberi lives in an RV at a bend of road not far from the former Wood Street encampment, once Northern California’s largest homeless camp.

He said the Bay Area’s reputation as a bastion of free speech and human rights drew his family to the East Bay when they fled the 1979 Iranian revolution. He implored city leaders to find lasting solutions that don’t penalize homeless people.

“This is Oakland, California,” he said. “We’re at the forefront of progressive thinking. We have a responsibility and an opportunity to make sure things are done in a respectful and humane way.”