Oakland residents deserve safe, clean, and accessible public spaces.
The current encampment policy has clearly failed our city, allowing unsafe and unhealthy conditions to persist.
I support the Encampment Abatement Policy because it provides a more practical and balanced approach—one that includes outreach and shelter offers, while also addressing urgent health and safety concerns.
Other cities like San Jose and San Francisco are receiving significant state funding ($90+ million) and making progress by taking action. Oakland must do the same.
Please pass this policy and move our city forward with solutions that combine compassion and accountability.

Please support the EAP. Encampments need to be regulated in order to balance the needs of unhoused with Oakland residents. We currently do not have that balance and residents have to sacrifice their safety in order to walk to school, buy groceries or just walk outside their door. Please support this legislation, which has undergone several thoughtful amendments and has polling support from the majority of Oaklanders.

Hello, my name is Pratik Raghu, and I'm a District 1 resident. I urge you to oppose the deadly “Encampment Abatement Policy”. This policy is being rushed to a vote after key council-members repeated violated transparency laws.

This ordinance cuts into municipal services to criminalize unhoused Oaklanders and enable costly tows. It will worsen the budget crisis, funneling money to a corrupt tow yard, while failing to invest in real solutions. Oakland has only 1,300 shelter spots for 5,500 unhoused residents. Unless Oakland requires available accessible shelter prior to sweeps and helps move residents themselves, this will only worsen the crisis. Sweeps destroy homes, support networks, and livelihoods, making it harder for people to find permanent housing.

The EAP will only displace vulnerable Oakland residents who are overwhelmingly disabled people of color and victims of abuse. Instead, we urge you to address the shelter shortfall and use the 1.4 billion from Measure W to create co-governed shelter, housing, and safe parking sites, such as the Mandela Parkway Proposal.

When the city fails to provide adequate shelter and services, nearby neighborhoods and businesses are impacted. I urge you to listen to community-led solutions and vote NO on this dangerous, harmful, and wasteful policy. Oakland needs solutions not sweeps.

Strong opposition to 6.1 as it does not offer real solutions to our unhoused populations, it punishes them.

I and my organization -- Homeless Advocacy Working Group -- strongly OPPOSSES Item 6.1

I beg you to vote YES on Ken Houston’s Encampment Abatement Policy (EAP) proposal. Oakland has become a dumping ground for the state's homeless population, and the resulting needles, garbage, and feces on our sidewalks have made conditions impossible for residents. It is time to prioritize the health and safety of our citizens by supporting this resolution and giving the city the tools it needs to reclaim our public spaces.

Cruel policy change, everyone supporting it should be recalled

I strongly support the proposed policy. Enough is enough. As a constituent, taxpayer and homeowner family, we deserve a better environment, free of blight and lawlessness.

i vehemently oppose this policy as an oakland resident and someone who has seen the violence of “sweeps” on our communities from Wood Street to E12 this policy does not recognize homeless people as human beings! sweep language betrays its true nature: ethnic cleansing of people determined worthless by our society. please do not vote to accept this EAP and instead focus either on harm reduction, free and affordable housing , and disabled services.

I am urging the city council to pass the new EAP. The quality of life for the majority of the citizens in West Oakland is much lower due to the various encampments with their accumulated trash on our streets and sidewalks.

I strongly oppose the EAP. As the City continues to close down shelters (two sites in March 2026!) it is absolutely bonkers to pass a policy that criminalizes people for living outside while simultaneously offering them no where to go. It is ludicrous to pass a policy that contradicts and undermines the Mayor’s 5-Point Plan and HCD’s Homeless Strategic Plan.

There are roughly 1,000 beds for over 5,500 homeless people in Oakland. How cowardly, to criminalize people rather than implement data-driven and well thought-out equity based solutions, policies, and plans. The EAP legislation explicitly states that in the past several years, shelter spaces have become more limited, and there are not enough shelter beds to accommodate every unhoused person moved from encampments” and in the very next line says “the proposed EAP would remove the requirement to make shelter offers prior to closing encampments”. Please vote no

Adding my voice to the many who oppose this. This does nothing to discourage encampments, and probably makes them more common and likely because it adds hardship to the lives of our most vulnerable neighbors. If people cannot stabilize, they cannot find permanent housing. This does not help anyone, even the house people who support this.

Please pass the 2025 EAP. As a resident of District 3, I’ve watched unsafe encampments move around the neighborhood for years. Currently, the encampments are rapidly growing on both sides of Mandala Parkway. Further, the street lights along the Parkway have not worked for over 6 months, rendering this parkway unsafe and unusable. There are few places to walk in West Oakland, and Mandala Parkway is an important connector to transit, restaurants, and retail for the community. It is noticeably less traversed, and increasingly unsafe for everyone, including the encampments! This would not stand in other districts in Oakland.

It’s obvious the impact that the recent closing of two small home lots has had on District 3. Concurrent with approving the EAP, I request that further funding and resources are designated to find homes for our unhoused community members. The solution is not one-sided.

Dear Council President Jenkins and Members of the Oakland City Council,

I respectfully urge you to oppose the proposed Encampment Abatement Policy. Oakland has a responsibility to address genuine health and safety hazards, but this policy goes too far by allowing displacement of unhoused residents without ensuring a realistic path to safety, shelter, protection of personal property, and continuity of care.

In practice, repeated displacement does not solve homelessness. It destabilizes people who are already extremely vulnerable. I accompany unhoused residents in Oakland, including people with serious disabilities. I know of a resident who is a leg amputee from the knee down and lives in her vehicle. For her, that vehicle is not simply transportation. It is her shelter and a major source of stability. Towing or forced displacement in such a case can mean the loss of safety, medication, documents, essential belongings, and medical continuity.

Oakland should address true emergencies, but poverty itself should not be treated as an emergency. A policy that allows broad enforcement without strong protections for disabled and medically fragile residents risks causing preventable harm while merely moving suffering from one place to another.

I ask you to vote no on the EAP and instead pursue a more humane, narrowly tailored approach that includes disability protections, meaningful notice, safe relocation options, and real pathways to stability.

Respectfully,
Rev. Dominic DeMaio

Do you just want the homeless to die? The EAP provides no reasonable alternatives, and will be directly responsible for avoidable deaths .

If you support this, you will be personally responsible for our homeless neighbors dying.

If you are so heartless that you don't mind being a murderer: it's also an expensive waste of money.

The proposed EAP — even the current, revised version — is dehumanizing of my neighbors, would make any issues within encampments worse, does not outline sufficient support for folks whose homes would be disturbed and destroyed under the policy, and is generally a significant downgrade from the already insufficient current policy. I vehemently oppose adopting the EAP.

I strongly urge the council to vote NO on the EAP.

Supporters of this policy routinely cite the poor living conditions in encampments and the city's ineffectiveness at moving people into interim or permanent housing. The fact is that the EAP would do nothing to improve either of these issues and will probably make them worse. It would remove the city's obligation to make an offer of shelter before clearing an encampment (something it already does a poor and inconsistent job of). This means even fewer people will receive any kind of meaningful services and the city will be paying more to shuffle people around.

Displacing people over and over makes it even harder for them to achieve stability and also, IT IS NOT FREE. The city currently spends millions on encampment closures and no one, not even EAP supporters, seems impressed with the results. A sweeps-forward homelessness policy has failed spectacularly over the past 5 years. Why would we double down on that approach now?

We need a new status quo, not a reinvestment in approaches that don't work. Spend that money on housing, safe parking sites, trash pickup, and other services. Build trust with people living outside so we can actually accomplish something, together.

I'm registering in strong opposition to the EAP. Not only is it a harmful and ineffective policy, but it pits people against each other who ultimately want the same thing. On both sides of the issue we all want safe, clean neighborhoods for all, housed and unhoused. We don't want these things to be luxurious of the wealthy. But the EAP won't bring the safety and cleanliness people desire because it doesn't address the core issue. Instead of adopting policies that treat people with dignity and respect, the EAP displaces people from their homes and communities and ultimately shuffles people to another neighborhood. Listen to community solutions that address the root cause, vote no on the EAP.

Hello,

My name is Juliette Allen, I am an Oakland resident and I am reaching out in strong opposition to the proposed encampment abatement policy.

The city's current policy of violent displacement doesn't work, and this would make things even worse. We know that encampment sweeps do not help people find permanent housing. Sweeps destroy people's homes, property, pets, and their community.

This is a really harmful policy that will make life worse for Oakland residents, even those of us who are housed. Sweeps cost local communities extremely high amounts for bulldozers, city personnel, fencing, storage of seized property, etc. And none of those tax dollars go towards anything that makes our lives better or help our unhoused neighbors.

In fact it puts them exponentially more under attack. People who were living in vehicles would now need to rough it on the street and be all the more vulnerable. Who benefits from this? Communities are safer when people are stable. To choose to increase instability would be to further violence.

Thank you,

Juliette Allen

I strongly oppose this EAP - this is a cruel policy which effectively criminalizes poverty and homelessness, offering no material solutions to the underlying problems. These sweeps destabilize and harm an already extremely vulnerable population of people, making it exponentially harder to escape homelessness.

It's also EXPENSIVE to undergo these sweeps and tows, which will ultimately take money away from other critical needs in the city. Rather than spending money on sweeps, we should be investing in real solutions to the housing crisis, like developing affordable & supportive housing, and providing stabilizing resources to unhoused people.

Thanks for your time and attention in reading this message and considering my opinion.