Dear friends,
I wanted to offer my personal analysis of our efforts to protect 4 tiny homes and the belongings of our residents in the Wood Street community, from Caltrans' attempt to demolish their homes and confiscate/steal/discard their belongings from beneath the Frontage road overpass. I will do this from both a near-term strategic perspective, and from a bigger picture perspective.
First, I want to commend the outstanding efforts of residents and volunteers to assemble and submit the paperwork for the temporary restraining orders on such short notice, and the just-in-time coordination of the plaintiff/residents to appear at the hearing with the U.S. District Court via zoom. I think that there were historic and pivotal developments at this hearing that build on our successes of last year, and point to great future possibilities.
I think it is quite amazing that Judge Chesney went out of her way to fast-track our hearing to accommodate the vicious five day time frame that Caltrans was imposing on residents, to move their homes and belongings or have them destroyed. And the judge showed glimmers of humanity and fairness, where she could very easily have rubber-stamped all of Caltrans' plans. Instead, she slapped the wrists of their two high priced attorneys more than once, such as when they tried to submit their photographic evidence of RV fires and she waived it off for possible later review; or when they made statements like, "there is no evidence of arson", and the judge asked for evidence to this effect and they couldn't provide it.
The judge made a recommendation to the residents to get a lawyer; I think this was done mostly to plug her brethren in the legal trades, and not to chastise any lack of preparation or ability on our part. In fact, I think the side without lawyers fared better in this round than the side with the lawyers. Although, in the second phase of the hearing, Andrea Hensen showed up to help represent us as legal counsel, and apparently did well on our behalf, although I missed this portion of the hearing in order to deal with electrical issues on the northside of our Wood Street community.
I think the lawyers for Caltrans, Steve Silver and Mark Guenzi, made some errors that the judge would not let slide. First, they made the outrageous assertion that there is no evidence of arson. Their position is blown away with one counter-example - David Kelley and the eyewitnesses and photographic evidence of him burning down the Pavilion and music stage at the Wood Street Commons on September 28th of last year. When the judge asked the attorneys for evidence to support their position that residents are solely to blame for all the fires, and base this on the results of investigations done by the Oakland Fire Department, they hemmed and hawed, saying that there wasn't enough time for the OFD to provide the information, etc.
This was a pivotal development, because it was a major blow to the standard narrative that "all the fires are the fault of homeless people." The judge also pointed out that counsel was conflating RV fires with tiny home fires. I don't know of a single tiny home that has gone up in blazes, whereas RV's are the most fire prone dwelling, and a favorite target of arsonists. This was a major blow to Caltrans' insistence that the inhumanly hasty schedule of tiny home demolition is based on some extreme emergency or threat posed by the tiny homes. Then their attorneys whined about the financial costs to Caltrans of interrupting their "contract" to bulldoze people's lives; that didn't come off so well, since it was their choice to make this horrible plan in the first place. In any case, to have them reschedule their contract puts a tiny scratch in their $17 billion annual budget.
And to hear Lydia's strong voice say what is rarely spoken of publicly - "Our residents live in terror of these fires, many of which are cases of arson committed by outsiders." gave me chills. And I could sense the lawyers going apoplectic, but having to bite their tongues.
When our residents suffered an onslaught of suspicious fires last year, no motion was made by City representatives, Caltrans or the fire department to do anything but blame the residents, and withhold vital fire abatement support, like fire hydrants inside the lands of Wood Street, or investigations of the fires supported by our observations and testimony.
Which for me begs the questions, why is Caltrans in such a god-awful hurry to get people out from under the freeways and smash their tiny homes, and why did they suddenly revert to their old playbook of "demolish", "displace", "discard", "defame"? Are they placing all their bets on the fire argument to cover for some other liability that they would prefer to avoid talking about, such as the possibility that their structures could fall down in an earthquake? Or that their structures might have a design deficiency that is their fault? After all, it was their poorly executed Cypress freeway structure that had a catastrophic collapse that killed 42 people.
Last year we were able to help Caltrans try alternate approaches to their inhumane policies toward the people living on "their" land. We applied pressure on multiple fronts: we applied pressure on their workers in the field, employing tactics of eviction defense, and on their executives, through stakeholder meetings and cordiality, and on their corporate doorstep, through a theatrical protest at their downtown Oakland headquarters, and through expanding our message in the press, social media, petitions, email and phone campaigns, etc. And we saw them change their behavior. Although they moved aggressively to build cement barriers and fencing throughout zone II and a part of zone III, they did not forcibly evict anyone. And we were able to ask for and receive their help to use their equipment to help a few residents relocate vehicles and belongings to where residents wanted them to go. And our successful efforts to clean large amounts of trash, flammable items, and some abandoned vehicles shamed them into doing what they had neglected to do for too long, and so they cleared over a hundred abandoned vehicles out of our community. But why then did they return to their heavy handed tactics in the latest go around?
Caltrans not only returned to their heavy handed tactics in their most recent attempt to displace residents of Wood Street, but they changed their justification from visual blight, health and safety and trash, to fire as their sole pretext. Blaming residents for fire cuts to the heart of another pressing matter - the withholding of vital water services to support the basic human needs of hundreds of residents in the Wood Street community. The utility monopoly EBMUD, the City government of Oakland, and Caltrans are all colluding to deprive the members of our community of their right to "life", of the life-giving water needed for drinking, cleaning and fire abatement. The board of directors of EBMUD has an open invitation to the public to make comments at their regular meetings, and this could be a way to open the channel of communication, and begin to broach the subject of getting fire hydrants and other fire abatement infrastructure into the Wood Street lands with enough reach to handle any fires, even before the fire department arrives.
The successes thus far of our residents at Wood Street, and at other encampments throughout California, to challenge and reduce some of the abuses perpetrated by city and state agencies against them, open new possibilities to mount a comprehensive strategy to push back at all of the state-caused mechanisms that contribute to the so-called "homelessness crisis". I say so-called because it could be argued that the real crisis is not a lack of housing, but a lack of land. Land has long been recognized as the primary basis for humans to possess the means of survival, security and stability. For example, the "Charter of the Forest" established in England 800 years ago, was a social contract that reserved the right of "commoners" to own land collectively in a commons, and to pass it down to their descdendants in perpetuity, without fear of eviction or gentrification.
Framing the problem and its victims under the "homeless" title is a way of concealing a centuries-old war waged by monarchies, corporations and the "elites" to dispossess "commoners", or ordinary citizens, of their land within the commons, by forcibly transferring areas of land once held in common by the people into the hands of monarchies and private interests.
This process has been in play up to the present day, and a partial list of the enforcing mechanisms for this process include: eminent domain, legislation that restricts the leasing of Caltrans land to city, county and state governments, but not to individuals or groups for residential use, the hoarding of publicly owned or "surplus" land by municipal redevelopment agencies, the municipal injunctions against overnight camping, inflation, over-incarceration, real estate speculation, gentrification, personal debt, top-soil loss, excessive property tax, reduction in the number of farmers and family farms, toxification of soils, car-centric urban planning, restricted opportunities for ex-felons, too much pavement, reduction of the commons and common space, curfews in urban parks, self-interested consumerism over cooperative community, and the strategic falsification of our country's foundational phrase "life, liberty and property (or estate)" into the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
In the face of all this orchestrated disenfranchisement of we the people, our successes at pushing back against the eviction of encampments by Caltrans and the City of Oakland have the potential to grow into a complete reversal of the process of landlessness amongst the people, and eventually to become an end to all "homelessness" everywhere, through humane means.
To achieve those great ends, what should our next steps be? And what should our strategy be to most effectively restore the commons, as well as our inherent right to possess land sufficient to have life and liberty for all?
Here is a proposed list of steps I think we should take in order to reverse, transform and replace the old system, and all of its enforcing mechanisms:
1. Establish a commons land trust, of by and for the people, in every city in our country, and the world. These trusts would be based in common law, and on the recognized sovereignty of each human being, and on a social contract amongst humans, or "peers".
2. Abolish all slave labor in the prisons, and amend the 13th amendment of the constitution to that effect.
3. Abolish all injunctions against overnight camping in every city.
4. Overturn all laws requiring ex-felons to divulge their criminal record to landlords and employers.
5. Pass legislation allowing urban commons, and other groups and individuals to lease Caltrans land for residential use.
6. Provide the "big four" of water, electrticity, sanitation and waste disposal to all encampments.
7. Set aside public lands, including at least 30 percent of all "surplus land" owned by cities, for the use of commons land trusts, or other groups and individuals in need of land for residential or community use.
8. Support mutual aid and coordination between encampments, the commons land trusts, local assemblies and the global cooperative forum.
9. Create the infrastructure within each commons that is most conducive to cooperative community, self-governance, and self-sustainability, such as tiny home ecovillages with shared infrastructure and amenities.
10. Expedite the transition from internal combustion vehicles to light electric vehicles, such as the electric cargo trike.
11. Break up the monopolies of public utilities for water, energy, waste disposal, transportation, sanitation and wireless/digital communications.
12. Support individuals in the restoration of their legal sovereignty.
13. Restore the phrase "life, liberty and estate" to the Declaration of Independence.
14. Support the re-matriation of ancestral lands and human remains to all native people and tribes.
15. Restore basic humane infrastructure to West Oakland, and to other "sacrifice zones" in America.
16. Make West Oakland its own city, and secede from Oakland.
17. Phase out car-centric urban planning, and restore standards of beauty and tradition to the design of urban architecture and the built environment.
18. Expand investments in local arts, culture and music. Encourage tolerance and respect for urban graffiti.
19. Promote economic activity and development that supports the restoration of living systems and living soil.
20. Disseminate the teachings and activities of divinely enlightened individuals.
21. Establish humane crypto currencies for the residents of encampments and the commons.
22. Establish full financial transparency and accountability within the Port of Oakland, the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
23. Establish the processes of restorative justice within the encampments and the commons.
24. Get a public apology from the Oakland city government and the Oakland police for the suppression and destruction of the Black Panthers.
25. Take back 30 percent of the land used by the Port of Oakland in order to restore the Oakland shoreline, and its availability for ecological and recreational uses.
26. Make Oakland and West Oakland and the Wood Street community into the greatest urban recreational, ecological and cultural zone in the world.
Theo Cedar Jones
March 26, 2022
Wood Street community
West Oakland
I wanted to offer my personal analysis of our efforts to protect 4 tiny homes and the belongings of our residents in the Wood Street community, from Caltrans' attempt to demolish their homes and confiscate/steal/discard their belongings from beneath the Frontage road overpass. I will do this from both a near-term strategic perspective, and from a bigger picture perspective.
First, I want to commend the outstanding efforts of residents and volunteers to assemble and submit the paperwork for the temporary restraining orders on such short notice, and the just-in-time coordination of the plaintiff/residents to appear at the hearing with the U.S. District Court via zoom. I think that there were historic and pivotal developments at this hearing that build on our successes of last year, and point to great future possibilities.
I think it is quite amazing that Judge Chesney went out of her way to fast-track our hearing to accommodate the vicious five day time frame that Caltrans was imposing on residents, to move their homes and belongings or have them destroyed. And the judge showed glimmers of humanity and fairness, where she could very easily have rubber-stamped all of Caltrans' plans. Instead, she slapped the wrists of their two high priced attorneys more than once, such as when they tried to submit their photographic evidence of RV fires and she waived it off for possible later review; or when they made statements like, "there is no evidence of arson", and the judge asked for evidence to this effect and they couldn't provide it.
The judge made a recommendation to the residents to get a lawyer; I think this was done mostly to plug her brethren in the legal trades, and not to chastise any lack of preparation or ability on our part. In fact, I think the side without lawyers fared better in this round than the side with the lawyers. Although, in the second phase of the hearing, Andrea Hensen showed up to help represent us as legal counsel, and apparently did well on our behalf, although I missed this portion of the hearing in order to deal with electrical issues on the northside of our Wood Street community.
I think the lawyers for Caltrans, Steve Silver and Mark Guenzi, made some errors that the judge would not let slide. First, they made the outrageous assertion that there is no evidence of arson. Their position is blown away with one counter-example - David Kelley and the eyewitnesses and photographic evidence of him burning down the Pavilion and music stage at the Wood Street Commons on September 28th of last year. When the judge asked the attorneys for evidence to support their position that residents are solely to blame for all the fires, and base this on the results of investigations done by the Oakland Fire Department, they hemmed and hawed, saying that there wasn't enough time for the OFD to provide the information, etc.
This was a pivotal development, because it was a major blow to the standard narrative that "all the fires are the fault of homeless people." The judge also pointed out that counsel was conflating RV fires with tiny home fires. I don't know of a single tiny home that has gone up in blazes, whereas RV's are the most fire prone dwelling, and a favorite target of arsonists. This was a major blow to Caltrans' insistence that the inhumanly hasty schedule of tiny home demolition is based on some extreme emergency or threat posed by the tiny homes. Then their attorneys whined about the financial costs to Caltrans of interrupting their "contract" to bulldoze people's lives; that didn't come off so well, since it was their choice to make this horrible plan in the first place. In any case, to have them reschedule their contract puts a tiny scratch in their $17 billion annual budget.
And to hear Lydia's strong voice say what is rarely spoken of publicly - "Our residents live in terror of these fires, many of which are cases of arson committed by outsiders." gave me chills. And I could sense the lawyers going apoplectic, but having to bite their tongues.
When our residents suffered an onslaught of suspicious fires last year, no motion was made by City representatives, Caltrans or the fire department to do anything but blame the residents, and withhold vital fire abatement support, like fire hydrants inside the lands of Wood Street, or investigations of the fires supported by our observations and testimony.
Which for me begs the questions, why is Caltrans in such a god-awful hurry to get people out from under the freeways and smash their tiny homes, and why did they suddenly revert to their old playbook of "demolish", "displace", "discard", "defame"? Are they placing all their bets on the fire argument to cover for some other liability that they would prefer to avoid talking about, such as the possibility that their structures could fall down in an earthquake? Or that their structures might have a design deficiency that is their fault? After all, it was their poorly executed Cypress freeway structure that had a catastrophic collapse that killed 42 people.
Last year we were able to help Caltrans try alternate approaches to their inhumane policies toward the people living on "their" land. We applied pressure on multiple fronts: we applied pressure on their workers in the field, employing tactics of eviction defense, and on their executives, through stakeholder meetings and cordiality, and on their corporate doorstep, through a theatrical protest at their downtown Oakland headquarters, and through expanding our message in the press, social media, petitions, email and phone campaigns, etc. And we saw them change their behavior. Although they moved aggressively to build cement barriers and fencing throughout zone II and a part of zone III, they did not forcibly evict anyone. And we were able to ask for and receive their help to use their equipment to help a few residents relocate vehicles and belongings to where residents wanted them to go. And our successful efforts to clean large amounts of trash, flammable items, and some abandoned vehicles shamed them into doing what they had neglected to do for too long, and so they cleared over a hundred abandoned vehicles out of our community. But why then did they return to their heavy handed tactics in the latest go around?
Caltrans not only returned to their heavy handed tactics in their most recent attempt to displace residents of Wood Street, but they changed their justification from visual blight, health and safety and trash, to fire as their sole pretext. Blaming residents for fire cuts to the heart of another pressing matter - the withholding of vital water services to support the basic human needs of hundreds of residents in the Wood Street community. The utility monopoly EBMUD, the City government of Oakland, and Caltrans are all colluding to deprive the members of our community of their right to "life", of the life-giving water needed for drinking, cleaning and fire abatement. The board of directors of EBMUD has an open invitation to the public to make comments at their regular meetings, and this could be a way to open the channel of communication, and begin to broach the subject of getting fire hydrants and other fire abatement infrastructure into the Wood Street lands with enough reach to handle any fires, even before the fire department arrives.
The successes thus far of our residents at Wood Street, and at other encampments throughout California, to challenge and reduce some of the abuses perpetrated by city and state agencies against them, open new possibilities to mount a comprehensive strategy to push back at all of the state-caused mechanisms that contribute to the so-called "homelessness crisis". I say so-called because it could be argued that the real crisis is not a lack of housing, but a lack of land. Land has long been recognized as the primary basis for humans to possess the means of survival, security and stability. For example, the "Charter of the Forest" established in England 800 years ago, was a social contract that reserved the right of "commoners" to own land collectively in a commons, and to pass it down to their descdendants in perpetuity, without fear of eviction or gentrification.
Framing the problem and its victims under the "homeless" title is a way of concealing a centuries-old war waged by monarchies, corporations and the "elites" to dispossess "commoners", or ordinary citizens, of their land within the commons, by forcibly transferring areas of land once held in common by the people into the hands of monarchies and private interests.
This process has been in play up to the present day, and a partial list of the enforcing mechanisms for this process include: eminent domain, legislation that restricts the leasing of Caltrans land to city, county and state governments, but not to individuals or groups for residential use, the hoarding of publicly owned or "surplus" land by municipal redevelopment agencies, the municipal injunctions against overnight camping, inflation, over-incarceration, real estate speculation, gentrification, personal debt, top-soil loss, excessive property tax, reduction in the number of farmers and family farms, toxification of soils, car-centric urban planning, restricted opportunities for ex-felons, too much pavement, reduction of the commons and common space, curfews in urban parks, self-interested consumerism over cooperative community, and the strategic falsification of our country's foundational phrase "life, liberty and property (or estate)" into the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
In the face of all this orchestrated disenfranchisement of we the people, our successes at pushing back against the eviction of encampments by Caltrans and the City of Oakland have the potential to grow into a complete reversal of the process of landlessness amongst the people, and eventually to become an end to all "homelessness" everywhere, through humane means.
To achieve those great ends, what should our next steps be? And what should our strategy be to most effectively restore the commons, as well as our inherent right to possess land sufficient to have life and liberty for all?
Here is a proposed list of steps I think we should take in order to reverse, transform and replace the old system, and all of its enforcing mechanisms:
1. Establish a commons land trust, of by and for the people, in every city in our country, and the world. These trusts would be based in common law, and on the recognized sovereignty of each human being, and on a social contract amongst humans, or "peers".
2. Abolish all slave labor in the prisons, and amend the 13th amendment of the constitution to that effect.
3. Abolish all injunctions against overnight camping in every city.
4. Overturn all laws requiring ex-felons to divulge their criminal record to landlords and employers.
5. Pass legislation allowing urban commons, and other groups and individuals to lease Caltrans land for residential use.
6. Provide the "big four" of water, electrticity, sanitation and waste disposal to all encampments.
7. Set aside public lands, including at least 30 percent of all "surplus land" owned by cities, for the use of commons land trusts, or other groups and individuals in need of land for residential or community use.
8. Support mutual aid and coordination between encampments, the commons land trusts, local assemblies and the global cooperative forum.
9. Create the infrastructure within each commons that is most conducive to cooperative community, self-governance, and self-sustainability, such as tiny home ecovillages with shared infrastructure and amenities.
10. Expedite the transition from internal combustion vehicles to light electric vehicles, such as the electric cargo trike.
11. Break up the monopolies of public utilities for water, energy, waste disposal, transportation, sanitation and wireless/digital communications.
12. Support individuals in the restoration of their legal sovereignty.
13. Restore the phrase "life, liberty and estate" to the Declaration of Independence.
14. Support the re-matriation of ancestral lands and human remains to all native people and tribes.
15. Restore basic humane infrastructure to West Oakland, and to other "sacrifice zones" in America.
16. Make West Oakland its own city, and secede from Oakland.
17. Phase out car-centric urban planning, and restore standards of beauty and tradition to the design of urban architecture and the built environment.
18. Expand investments in local arts, culture and music. Encourage tolerance and respect for urban graffiti.
19. Promote economic activity and development that supports the restoration of living systems and living soil.
20. Disseminate the teachings and activities of divinely enlightened individuals.
21. Establish humane crypto currencies for the residents of encampments and the commons.
22. Establish full financial transparency and accountability within the Port of Oakland, the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
23. Establish the processes of restorative justice within the encampments and the commons.
24. Get a public apology from the Oakland city government and the Oakland police for the suppression and destruction of the Black Panthers.
25. Take back 30 percent of the land used by the Port of Oakland in order to restore the Oakland shoreline, and its availability for ecological and recreational uses.
26. Make Oakland and West Oakland and the Wood Street community into the greatest urban recreational, ecological and cultural zone in the world.
Theo Cedar Jones
March 26, 2022
Wood Street community
West Oakland