Five days a week, a team of police officers, officials, outreach staff, and public works employees traverse the City of Oakland to perform the work of “managing” encampments: Picking up garbage, hauling away tents, breaking down self-built structures, towing vehicles, and at times, making shelter offers. When their work is done, the ground is power-washed and encampment residents are forced to find somewhere else to stay. Residents can be swept again immediately if they return within sixty days of a closure.
Street Spirit analyzed and mapped this process using the city’s public encampment intervention data, which documents the work of the designated Encampment Management Abatement Team (EMAT). This map visualizes for the first time the size and scale of these operations.
Each record in Oakland’s dataset corresponds with one “notice to vacate.” Unhoused people often call these “pink slips” or “red-tags,” owing to their color. These are flyers that announce an upcoming closure. EMAT workers will post them on tents, RVs, and light poles surrounding an encampment between 72 hours and 7 days before they arrive, except in emergency situations.
City workers print out new flyers for every separate block or area. For example, one flyer might say “MLK between 54th St and 55th St” and the next will say “MLK between 55th St and 56th St.” Others will list whole parks, such as “Mosswood Park.” The data corresponds directly to this practice — there is approximately one new record for each posting. You can understand a “posting” as an individual “pink slip” or flyer, and an “operation” as the simultaneous closure of a larger area that encompasses one continuous encampment or several encampments in close proximity.
There are 2,200 records in the dataset. Street Spirit’s analysis has aggregated these postings into 791 continuous operations between January 2021 and November 2025.
This map creates a striking portrayal of the city’s widespread efforts to control its growing homeless population. However, it is significantly lacking. It does not capture the number of people who lived at the site of a closure, or whether they were offered shelter. It does not collect information about the storage of personal property, citation, or arrest. It does not confirm whether or not the intervention actually occurred. At the time of publication, the dataset had not been updated since December 3rd, 2025.
Despite these limitations, this dataset is the most extensive available record of encampment interventions in Oakland. According to Oakland Public Information Officer Jean Walsh, it is an accurate representation of the actions performed by the designated Encampment Management Abatement Team since 2021.
The map has a number of uses. You can:
- Read and contribute oral histories.
- Search for locations to find closures that have happened near a specific address.
- Filter by date to see closures that occurred during a specific time period.
- Filter by era to see closures that occurred before and after the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling, or during different mayoral terms.
- View by district to see closures that occurred in different council districts.
- Filter by sensitivity zones and intervention types.
- Filter by operation length and the number of associated postings.
- Animate the map to watch a time lapse of sweeps.
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Draw custom zones to examine how many sweeps occurred in that area.
- Examine and export the data directly.
Street Spirit created this map to help Oakland residents and others understand the scope and scale of encampment closures in the city, and how Oakland’s response to homelessness has changed over time. The result is a visualization of constant relocation; a fact of life for those Oakland’s unsheltered residents.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES
ANALYSIS
Street Spirit created this map to be a tool for journalists and researchers. In the past six months of cleaning, discussing, and visualizing this data, several key trends have emerged about Oakland’s Encampment Management practices.
That is, the number of notices the city posts before an operation, like a closure. However, the number of operations seems to remain relatively consistent.
There has been a spike in the number of individual postings in the dataset in the last few years, but a relatively consistent number of larger operations. This corresponds to a spike in the number of postings per operation, which means the number of blocks that the City posts notices on at the same time has increased drastically. This demonstrates that Oakland’s operations span more area and occur over longer time frames than in the past.
Similar graphs [to the one on the top] displaying the same data have been cited by various news organizations in order to demonstrate an increase in the city’s aggression following Grants Pass v. Johnson. After Street Spirit grouped the postings into larger operations, we found that there has not been a spike in the number of operations.
The top ten largest operations comprise over 30 percent of the records in the dataset (663 out of 2200)
The same blocks will often be noticed for many weeks in a row.
A clear example of how operations have gotten both larger and longer would be at Lake Merritt. In 2025, the City of Oakland posted notices across all of Lake Merritt for the entire month of April.
As you explore the map, you can visually locate large operations easily, due to the high number of clustered posting dots. We encourage readers to explore the map in order to better understand the City of Oakland’s actions, and conduct further analysis.
Additional trends that we noted:
- Almost all of the locations in the dataset are associated with more than one posting, meaning that the city often returns to the same location many times. Some places have been closed dozens of times. For example, Mosswood Park had been closed 26 times. Many of the closures are centered in areas surrounding historically large encampments, such as MLK & 23rd and Wood St.
- The City’s “Sensitivity Zones” change frequently. Often, the same location will be listed as “High Sensitivity Zone” on one date and “Low Sensitivity Zone” on another.
EXPLORE THE MAP