Oakland is grappling with one of the nation's highest per-capita rates of unsheltered homelessness.
Despite comprising only a quarter of Alameda County's total population, Oakland is where more than half of its unhoused population lives. According to the 2024 Point in Time Count (PIT), the city had an estimated 5,485 homeless residents, 67% of whom were unsheltered, meaning they slept in a place not fit for human habitation. Of those unsheltered people, the majority lived in vehicles or RVs — approximately 58%. Of those who live in vehicles, 82% have resided in the County for over 10 years.
The crisis has only deepened as the number of people living on the streets far outpaces the city's available shelter beds: The City maintains about 1,300 shelter beds across 24 different program sites including 1,200 emergency shelter and transitional housing beds, 280 Safe RV Parking spaces, and 600 permanent homeless housing units. That’s enough to shelter just under 24% of its homeless population. Oakland’s emergency shelter beds are INFO, while their permanent homeless housing units are consistently full. The unsheltered status of the city’s homeless population was noted in 2018 by former United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Leilani Farha, who declared homelessness in Oakland and San Francisco a humanitarian crisis and a violation of human rights.
Homelessness in Oakland is a crisis of local displacement in which longtime residents, disproportionately from Black communities, are priced out of their own neighborhoods. Alameda County HMIS System Report in 2025 found that 60-70% of unhoused residents in Oakland were last permanently housed in Oakland. Black residents comprise just 20% of Oakland's total population yet account for 50% of those experiencing homelessness and 59% of those newly homeless. The 2024 PIT Count found that 85% of Oakland’s Black unsheltered residents have lived in Alameda County for over a decade. Historically, the majority of Oakland's most established encampments have been concentrated in District 3, which includes neighborhoods where displacement has hit hardest, including West Oakland, Jack London, Downtown, and Adams Point.
As this crisis has become increasingly severe, Oakland has shifted to a coordinated policy response that is built around an emergency management system for encampments. In recent years, Oakland officials have become more serious about closing homeless encampments. On average, there have been 91 encampment sweeps each month since May of 2025, compared to WHAT IN 2024. City leaders may soon codify this increased focus on encampment sweeps into local policy: Councilmember Ken Houston is currently leading a push to accelerate encampment sweeps by eliminating a longstanding requirement that the city offer shelter to residents before closing encampments.
Mayor Barabara Lee is advocating for a different strategy. Her office recently released a draft of her plan to reduce unsheltered homelessness by 50% over the next five years. She intends to do this by focusing the city’s attention away from encampment management toward increased permanent housing, interim housing, and homelessness prevention services. Her plan would cost $3.2 billion beyond what the city and county is already spending.
Funding for homelessness services in Oakland currently comes from the Vacant Property Tax, Measure Q, and Measure U. Total City funding for homelessness programs in FY 24-25 is estimated at $131,200,000. [FOR WHAT?] Of this funding, an estimated $13,700,000 was spent on encampment specific measures.
In practice, this encampment response plays out across three core activities: the maintenance of active encampments through hygiene and health services and deep cleanings; the closure of encampments when the city determines intervention is warranted; and the outreach efforts meant to connect unhoused residents to shelter and services along the way.
For the most part, this work of management rests in the hands of the city’s designated Encampment Management Team.
Who’s in charge?
Oakland’s Encampment Management Team (EMT) was established in 2017 to streamline coordination of the City's response to the growing unsheltered homeless population living in encampments. It is an interdepartmental group that works together to discuss local policy, and clean or close encampments. As of WHEN, the team works under the jurisdiction of the Office of Homelessness Solutions in the City Administrator’s office. Their job is to X, Y, and oversee the EMT. The EMT is made up of representatives from the Public Works Department, the Human Services Department, the Police Department, the Fire Department, and additional departments like the Mayor's Office and the City Attorney's Office as necessary. Each representative helps decide which encampments should be prioritized for closure or maintenance, and participates in executing these actions on a daily basis.
Also within the City Administrator’s Office is the Office of Homelessness Solutions, a department that was created in August 2025 by Mayor Barabra Lee “to coordinate efforts between the various city agencies and set a comprehensive, unified strategy for addressing homelessness in Oakland”. It leads policy decisions, facilitates cross-departmental coordination, and guides program and funding priorities across City, County, and nonprofit partners. The Office directly manages the Encampment Management Team (EMT). There are eight or nine dedicated staff members in this new department.
When it comes to the city’s overall provision of homeless services, Oakland’s Human Services Department has a specific division that is dedicated to homelessness: The Community Homelessness Services Division (CHS). CHS oversees a broad portfolio of homelessness prevention and response services, like EXAMPLE., aAmong these is outreach at encampments.
CHS contracts with external partners to deliver these services. They have contracts with more than 20 nonprofits and community based service providers including Operation Dignity, Bay Area Community Services (BACS), Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS), Housing Consortium of the East Bay (HCEB), and Urban Alchemy TO DO WHAT ENCAMPMENT OUTREACH
Guiding Policy
The Encampment Management Policy
Oakland’s response to unsheltered homelessness is guided largely by the Encampment Management Policy (EMP).
In its current form, the EMP has served as the foundation of the City’s encampment response since 2020. It articulates a system for providing maintenance services like trash pickup and sanitation stations with the stated goal of “minimiz[ing] the impacts of unsheltered homelessness on businesses, infrastructure, and neighbors.” It also describes the city’s priorities for when and how to close encampments.
Here’s how it works: the policy creates a geographic classification system dividing the city into high-sensitivity and low-sensitivity zones. High-sensitivity zones make up over 90% of the city. Here, encampments are immediately targeted for closure. These are locations near critical infrastructure or areas requiring safe access, including traffic lanes, bike lanes, ADA-compliant sidewalks, schools, waterways, residences, businesses, playgrounds, parks, and emergency shelters.
In low-sensitivity zones, encampments are not prioritized for closure as long as they meet certain requirements — many of which unhoused people say they cannot meet. These include , maintaining a 12-by-12-foot personal footprint, limiting hazardous materials, and ensuring that structures are no closer than 6 feet apart. In these areas “public health and public safety findings” like infectious disease cases, excessive vermin or biological hazards, obstructed right-of-way or ADA access, or infrastructure damage are used to justify whether the EMT will close the encampment, or perform another type of intervention.
There are a total of four types of encampment interventions described in the EMP.