Oakland nabs $1 million to improve poor outcomes for tiny home residents

Months after an investigation by the Bay Area News Group found Oakland was failing to help most of the city’s tiny home residents get out of homelessness, the city is deploying a $1 million federal grant in an effort to correct the problems.

The $1.03 million fund will assist the city in helping people move from the tiny homes — small, rudimentary cabins designed as temporary shelters — to permanent housing and, hopefully, stay there. To start, the city will use the additional resources at just one of its seven tiny home sites.

The move comes after a four-month Bay-Area-wide investigation by this news organization into the efficacy of tiny homes as a solution to the homelessness crisis. It found that residents at the city’s four “community cabin” sites — where residents live in bare-bones, shed-like dwellings and share portable toilets — move into permanent housing at a rate of just 28%. That’s far short of Alameda County’s goal of 50%. A city audit that reached a similar conclusion also found that 44% of those who move from a cabin into housing end up homeless again.

Those who have been through the cabin programs describe waiting for housing that never became available and then ending up back on the street when their time — sometimes as short as six months — at the site was up.

“I do think it is a resources-based issue,” said LaTonda Simmons, who is temporarily filling in as the city’s homelessness administrator after Daniel Cooper was released from the role after serving less than a year. “But I do know that the city has taken that seriously in terms of trying to identify additional resources that would aid in the delivery of individuals directly into permanent housing.”

She’s hopeful the new federal funding will help. The money will go toward creating a “rapid rehousing” program at one community cabin site, which still needs to be chosen. Rapid rehousing is a strategy used throughout the Bay Area — though it has never been deployed at an Oakland cabin site — to help homeless residents secure long-term housing. The funding helps people pay move-in costs, such as first and last-month’s rent and security deposits, as well as ongoing rental assistance for three to 24 months. It also funds aftercare, or case management services that help the newly housed remain stable and ensure they don’t end up back on the street.

The federal money also will be used to hire staff to run the new program.

While a city spokeswoman said Oakland appreciates the new funding, $1 million in housing support is a “relatively small amount.”

The funding also does nothing to solve another major problem — a lack of affordable housing. Rental subsidies, which generally pay a percentage of the recipient’s rent, don’t do much good if the recipients can’t find an apartment where they can be used.

“There’s a lot of possibility there,” Simmons said. “I think the other part has to be making sure that not just in the city of Oakland but as we work with the county that we’re able to identify permanent units that people are able to get into and that are sustainably affordable for them.”

And though Oakland officials were presented with a ceremonial check last month, it’s unclear when the actual funds will be distributed.

Oakland has four community cabin sites that could be eligible for the funding, the oldest of which has been operating since 2018. The city also recently opened a fifth on Wood Street in West Oakland, using $8.3 million in state funding. When it is at full capacity, that site will provide shelter for up to 100 people. It’s intended primarily to serve people being displaced from a large nearby encampment, which the city is planning to close soon. A federal judge briefly forced the city to delay the closure after a ransomware attack that impacted the entire city delayed the opening of the new cabins.

Unlike the other cabin sites that had portable toilets and lacked permanent showers or running water, the new Wood Street cabins will have bathrooms with plumbing and showers, Simmons said. This news organization’s reporting found that when people have access to such amenities, they are more likely to succeed.

Oakland also operates two additional tiny home sites that use small, rudimentary fiberglass cabins made by a Washington-based company, Pallet.

Oakland’s $1 million grant is part of a larger $15 million federal funding package distributed to Alameda County this year. That funding also will be used to create 100 new housing units for those with chronic medical and mental health conditions, provide advocacy and legal services to homeless seniors, train peer outreach workers to help seniors living in West Oakland encampments and open new access points where unhoused people can sign up for housing services.

This funding will help, but it won’t be nearly enough to serve all of the county’s nearly 10,000 unhoused residents, said Kerry Abbott, director of homeless care and coordination for Alameda County.

“It will make a tremendous difference, just not to enough people,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of expansion needed.”