“These people lived here before me,” said 24-year-old Maria Campos on a cold November night as she walked her dog with her mother, Daisy Campos, along 37th Street near Martin Luther King Way in Oakland. The three of us were standing half a block away from 37MLK, a community of about 20 unhoused people, mostly elder Black women, who used to be housed in the neighborhood but now live in tents on a small plot of land behind a fence on the corner. Maria seemed sad and angry from seeing her neighbors displaced; she told me that her family regularly donates to this community.
“These people got kicked out of their homes because the landlords doubled their rent,” Maria told me. She herself has lived in the neighborhood since she was two years old. “I’ve known a lot of them since I was a little girl, and they’ve all seen me grow up.”
37MLK sits near the border of North and West Oakland, an area that has housed a predominately Black population since the 1950s. It’s a population that has diminished since the 2008 market crash and continues to suffer during the present tech boom. But the Black roots of the area run deep. If you were standing on the corner of 37th and MLK in 1970, you would have seen the headquarters of the East Bay Negro Historical Society, which would later transform into Oakland’s African American Museum and Library. A 15-minute walk could take you to at least four different sites important to the Black Panther Party: the headquarters for its free-breakfast program, the second Black Panther Party office, and the homes of both the party’s chief of staff, David Hilliard, and the party’s founder, Huey P. Newton.
Skinny—a 60-year-old Black woman who’s spent her whole life in Oakland and knew Newton and his brother—was priced and forced out of her apartment on 37th Street about nine years ago, but she refuses to be uprooted from her neighborhood. She lived in a tent with a small community of unhoused people along 42nd Street and MLK Way, then moved into 37MLK when it opened in August. Through all these transitions, she’s maintained her job of giving in-home care to elderly and disabled people; one of her current clients is formerly homeless.
“Forty-Second Street was trashy,” said Skinny, as we sat in her tent eating pizza at 37MLK. “It wasn’t anything like this. And I feel safer here because we’re fenced in.”
37MLK isn’t like most other communities of unhoused people I’ve seen throughout Oakland. It’s clean and calm. I report largely on homelessness in the area for the Oakland Post, and usually, the unhoused communities I encounter have problems dealing with trash, rodents, and human waste. Many unhoused people and advocates I talk to claim that the city doesn’t provide consistent trash pickup, receptacles, or bathroom services, which makes keeping a clean environment impossible. They also claim that housed residents and businesses make the trash problem worse by illegally dumping waste into their communities.
One reason why 37MLK is different from these other communities is that some housed residents in the neighborhood are treating their unhoused neighbors well—and even collaborating and helping the site to flourish.
37MLK has a sit-down toilet, a shower, solar lights, a garden, and chickens. The site houses over 15 tents that are big enough to stand up in and fit a bed inside.
Stefani Esheverrí-Fenn, a woman in her early 30s who has lived in the neighborhood since 2009, handed me a bag of trash as I exited after visiting her at 37MLK. She explained that when housed people visit the site, she asks them to take a bag when they leave if they can. Since housed people have consistent trash service and unhoused residents often don’t, individuals who take the small step of moving trash from one location to another can help make 37MLK much cleaner. Stefani lives in a nearby apartment on 37th Street as well as in a tent at 37MLK. She spends more time on the site than in her apartment, and 37MLK was her idea.
“My biggest reason for staying here is I want it to be in a place that is enjoyable and lovely to be in,” said Stefani as we sat in her tent. “If I can’t live here, then it’s not good enough.”
37MLK has a sit-down toilet, a shower, solar lights, a garden, and chickens. The site houses over 15 tents that are big enough to stand up in and fit a bed inside. Most tents provide shelter for only one woman, but a few tents house male/female couples.
Stefani started 37MLK after being inspired by the Zapatistas, a far-left insurgent political group that’s sought and created indigenous control over land and resources in the Mexican state of Chiapas since 1994. She started 37MLK on August 19 after the Zapatistas announced that they were opening new autonomous zones in a major expansion of their project.
“It was so inspiring to me that at first, I was just like, ‘I can’t live within capitalism any more. I just want to jump into the next plane to Chiapas,’” said Stefani. “But then I remembered what the Zapatistas always say: ‘Don’t come here as an outsider and presume you have shit to teach us about our own struggle. Join the movement by becoming a Zapatista where you are by claiming autonomous space.’”
It’s unclear why exactly the police left, but Stefani suspects they feared a public-relations nightmare from evicting old women off of vacant land.
Stefani’s love and empathy for her unhoused neighbors, whom she claimed the land for, also inspired her. She’d known many of them for years, having moved to the neighborhood in 2010 from New York City, when rents were still accessible for those who weren’t wealthy. She met Skinny around this time, when they both were walking their dogs. A few days before Stefani opened the 37MLK site, Skinny had been evicted from her tent on 42nd Street.
On August 19, Stefani broke into the plot of vacant city-owned land that now hosts 37MLK and posted this video online:
After she posted the video, the number of people occupying the plot of land, most of whom would later live at 37MLK, grew. A nearby landlord immediately called the police and asked them to remove the residents, but although police did show up, they left after the residents refused to leave. It’s unclear why exactly the police left, but Stefani suspects they feared a public-relations nightmare from evicting old women off of vacant land. She also thinks that the recent federal court case ruling on Martin v. Boise could have required the city to find the site’s residents alternative shelter before removing them. The ruling states that “as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”
Whatever the reasons, the police haven’t bothered the site since. In the days that followed, Stefani bought large tents for those moving to 37MLK with money she earned from tutoring wealthy people’s children.
“I want this to be a place that’s also about breaking the isolation that homeless people experience.”
Stefani’s desire to secure space for her unhoused neighbors is rooted in part in her own experiences with homelessness in New York City. As a teenager, her parents kicked her out of their home for being queer. She was homeless the entire time she attended college, residing instead in homeless shelters. Although she did well enough in school to be accepted to UC Berkeley’s PhD program in Classics, the experience was largely a struggle, in no small part due to the way that living in homeless shelters limited her autonomy.
“You lived by extremely draconian rules,” Stefani said of her experiences in shelters. “Here you can do what you want.”
New York City shelters require that all residents be in and out of the sites at certain times, but those times didn’t fit with Stefani’s work and school schedule. So she had to obtain special passes from employers and teachers, which she found embarrassing. She also found the situation isolating, pointing out that she was never able to bring friends or lovers to where she lived.
“I feel like I had no youth,” said Stefani. “I got kicked out because I was queer, but then I never felt like I could be a part of the queer community. I want this to be a place that’s also about breaking the isolation that homeless people experience. The only rule here: just don’t do shit that will bring landlord wrath down on us.”
“Stefani is too good to be true,” said Robbie Smith, a 67-year-old Black woman who was born and raised in Oakland and currently lives at 37MLK. “I’ve never seen anything like her before.”
Robbie says that while growing up, she “never wanted for nothing”; she says that her family “was kind of half-rich.” Her father was a construction worker; her mother was a housewife; and she had two siblings. Although overt individual displays of racism might have been worse for Oakland’s Black population in the late ’50s and ’60s, it’s hard to say if things have gotten much better as a whole for the non-white working class. Secure housing and a comfortable life seem harder to obtain these days.
Maria’s Latinx family has maintained their housing in Oakland for 20 years, but at this point, every member of the family is working, bringing in four sources of income. Robbie’s family needed just one.
In the area surrounding 37MLK, there are four major stakeholders at work: unhoused residents, long-term housed residents, new-arrival residents, and landlords. The distinctions between and interests among the groups aren’t necessarily clear. Maria says that the new-arrival residents who have come in during the last few years don’t help 37MLK and that they wish 37MLK residents move away. However, Robbie and Skinny say that all the housed people in the neighborhood leave them alone or donate and help, but the landlords cause worry.
“It’s not the neighbors,” said Skinny. “It’s the landlords. The people who stay in the houses — they’re cool. I’ve talked to them, and I’ve asked them how they feel about us. It’s not them. It’s the owners of the homes.”
Stefani thinks long-term residents in the area, both housed and unhoused, are in a similar struggle and should support each other. That includes her own situation. Although her housing complex has a new facade on the outside, the inside of her apartment is in need of a lot of work that the landlord refuses to do. The floor is unfinished and has rotted damp wood. The sink and bathtub leak water throughout the whole apartment. The place is infested with cockroaches. She thinks her landlord is trying to get her to leave the rent-controlled unit so that the place can be fixed up, then rented out to a wealthier person.
“There’s often this dichotomy drawn between homeless and housed,” said Stefani, “but so many friends of mine are like myself: precariously housed and barely hanging on. Or your apartment is such a piece of crap precisely due to the same forces that have led other people to become homeless. It’s not better to be staying in my apartment than to be staying in this tent.”
37MLK has allowed Stefani to be more confident toward and be less afraid of her landlord. She’s been pushing her landlord to make the repairs she’s needed for years and has formed a tenants union with some neighbors, knowing that she has a safe community to fall back on if she’s forced out. Although the lack of blood family has made holidays painful for her in the past, now she looks forward to them, putting up holiday decorations in 37MLK. Last Halloween, she organized a party with 20 friends around her age to celebrate with the elder women of the 37MLK community. Skinny and Robbie had a wonderful time.
“It was really beautiful,” said Skinny. “That was the best Halloween I ever had.”
Readers who wish to support 37MLK and other unhoused communities in Oakland to get supplies for winter as well as food can donate to a GoFundMe campaign organized by Love and Justice in the Streets. The organization is run by Katrina Hanson and Talya Husbands-Hankin. Readers can specifically note 37MLK in their donation if they want their contribution to directly support 37MLK instead of going into the general fund.
