Dear Cheryl,
On March 21st, you began your attempt to remove our people from this land — the only existence we have been permitted to scrape together throughout the long and documented fight California has waged against folks who sleep outdoors in the city.
I am writing you today to give you more details about conditions at Wood Street. My aim is to provide you with additional information, since the decision you have made — for the mass eviction of our Wood Street Community — is such an impactful and lasting one.
Conditions on the ground have changed rapidly in the last few years regarding the true nature of “homelessness” — a term which I find distasteful and inaccurate, but am using here, for purposes of comprehension. As I told members of Governor Newsom's cabinet when they recently showed up outside of my van, we are not homeless. We are landless..
The encampment phenomena in the State of California has grown so rapidly and so bereft of state-sanctioned support, that multitudes of people have claimed a bond with the land above all else (we were not provided anything else to develop a bond to). And thus, understandably, a land sovereignty movement has emerged. People experiencing this epidemic state of disenfranchisement, amidst rents and inflation that continue to spiral out of control, have precious little faith in the will of city and state officials to act in our interests.
The actions of the state and its agencies to deprive so many of us of our “estate” — or the amount of land required to meet our basic human needs — has brought us to this point. We have claimed land that was unused and unwanted because we had nowhere else to go, and because we, alone, have claimed responsibility for maintaining it.
Caltrans is not directly implicated in this high-speed catastrophe of housing failures — but it can be directly culpable in mismanaging its fallout.
The course of action you have chosen would be just that: a gross mismanagement of a pre-dictated situation which will only worsen the impact of the housing crisis, grow the distance between problem and solution, and cripple the progress that the most vulnerable of California citizens have made towards self-sustainability and self-governance.
In appealing to your humanity, I ask you: Is this an outcome that you can support? Are these strategies of destruction and displacement methods you feel comfortable describing to your family at the end of the day? Are you OK with your legacy being one of banishment and reduced survivability, rather than one of enlightenment and understanding?
If I merely appeal to your corporate instincts, I still have questions.
First and foremost: how much will your operation cost in dollars? Would the hard-earned funds of residents and taxpayers be better spent in finding solutions, rather than brutally pushing people to another location, only to stage this fight again? Can you imagine, from your stated intentions, an actual resolution to the stressors generated by your agency? Or are you passing the problem down the road, albeit at a severe cost to the citizens that are most in need..]
We must now address the issue of fires, which are the stated impetus for Caltrans’ latest moves.
At Wood Street, we acknowledge that there have been many fires in recent months. No one knows this as intimately as we the residents, who are the ones who have felt the main brunt of this threat to our lives and property. A small number of these fires have been the result of our own accidents, neglect or misbehavior. But the majority of the fires have been arson, committed by a small minority, some of whom come from outside our community.
Cheryl, we are more committed than you or anyone at Caltrans could ever be, to the abatement of these fires.
And yet our ability to fight and prevent these fires is greatly hampered by the overwhelming amount of illegal dumping, the lack of fire hydrants, and Caltrans' pattern of allowing dangerous amounts of fuel to accumulate beneath our infrastructure, and close to our residents.
Flammable items allowed by Caltrans to persist next to sensitive infrastructure.
We have asked, over and over, for fire abatement materials and for fire-abatement training. We have pleaded with local authorities to investigate the fires — especially the more suspicious ones, only to encounter a wall of total unresponsivenes.
Despite this lack of help we have been amassing our own body of evidence concerning the true origination of some of.these fires, and we will present this to the judge, and to the court of public opinion, at the appropriate time. In any case, we will no longer play the role of the scapegoat for the benefit of other stakeholders
Arson at Wood Street.
As just one verifiable example of arson at Wood Street, we present the case of David Kelley, from September 28th, 2021. This individual, who had appeared recently at the Wood Street encampment, attracted a lot of media attention because of the way that he was apprehended, after a dramatic stand-off with 50 police officers, a SWAT team, two robots, snipers, negotiators and dogs. Only a short time before, Kelley was witnessed and photographed in the act of setting fires with the use of accelerants, to the Pavilion and music stage that I helped to build and design for the Wood Street Commons. His was a presence that was protested, loudly by community members. The night before the massive blaze began, members of our community contacted the local authorities to express our deep concerns about the actions and statements made by Mr. Kelley, but no help ensued.
This case of arson was a direct attack on our common space, the heart of our community. It was a place where we hosted live music and parties for the public, as well as volunteer service, providing value to the greater community. These structures were essentiaI to the functioning of our community, but they were also very personal for me, since I worked hard to build the stretch fabric architecture for this common space. (Pictures included.) The architecture for this space had become a symbol of our sovereignty and our positive contributions to the city, thereby countering the prejudicisl narratives that we outside residents are always blameworthy, and only cause detriment and harm to society.
Cheryl, I must reiterate to you, that, like any neighborhood, the worst actors among us are a tiny minority, and do not represent us; we cannot be made culpable for the individual who passes through, wanting only to disrupt.or destroy. We should not be FURTHER punished for the David Kelleys of the world, nor can we be chastised amidst the complete negligence of the state in ensuring we have somewhere safer to be.
In the age of zoom and super highways, it is very easy for you to do two things - one is to include representatives from our community in all of the relevant meetings with the City government of Oakland, BNSF, and the Union Pacific Railway, where you are deciding our fate.
And two, you can do like our Governor did, and the director of your agency, Toks Omishakin did, and get on a bus and come down to visit us at our Wood Street community, in order to meet with us, and enjoy our hospitality.
And in the spirit of transparency, I am sharing my communications with you on our social media, on facebook and instagram, and also copying these communications to our contacts at the SF Chronicle, the New York Times, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as well as with the Governor, and the director of Caltrans, who I now have personal relationships with.
We have proven our capacity for hospitality in the past. Because of the unique attributes of space at Wood Street, we were able to build the common areas suitable for parties, open mics, art showings, music concerts and meetings with Oakland assistant city administrator LaTonda Simmons, and Oakland city councilperson, Carroll Fife, as well as members of the press.
I want to share with you positive examples of our use of this unique space, so you will have complete foreknowledge of all of the things you are intending to destroy with your threat of mass eviction of our people.
Because of this unique space, we have been able to develop a model that could fix homelessness in all of Oakland, and could be applied to arrive at the same results in every city of America. Our model is unique within homelessness policy, through its emphasis on land sovereignty and the commons social contract, cooperative community, and the tiny home ecovillage. Our model is the only one for homelessness that has the deliverables of cooperative community, self-governance and land stewardship. I have to give you notice that your stated intentions would severely disrupt and disperse a unique social laboratory that is historic and unprecedented, and would amount to a particularly egregious instance of state caused harm. Are you willing to continue to aid and abet the worsening of the most serious civil rights problem of our time?
Your actions threaten our other enterprises, which are designed to answer all of the complaints, problems and issues associated with homelessness in the urban environment. We stand to lose all of our fire abatement plans and infrastructure. We stand to lose our unique lightweight architecture made out of four-way stretch fabric, and the cob tiny homes, and the music stages, and the monumental urban art (which your workers will completely deface if your invasion is allowed to succeed), and the music all night, and our soil bio-remediation projects, and our soil regeneration projects, our food growing projects, and our future hemp and bamboo farms, and our future aircrete monolithic dome business, and our future electric cargo trike and light electric vehicle businesses, our cleaning and trash removal projects, our high quality access to charitable food distribution and social services, our high press visibility, our high quality access to the waste stream which enables our businesses of hand sorting trash, recovering items that can be restored, refurbished, repurposed and rehabilitated, and thus reducing the burden and cost of excess waste going to landfill, incinerators, and the ocean, and our work as an informal social service agency to help people getting out of prisons and mental hospitals and drug rehab, and our plans to aid the revival of the local native tribes of the Lisjun/Ohlone by cooperating with their efforts to erect new shellmounds where the bones of their ancestors, now locked in UC Berkeley's basement, can be honorably rematriated to the soil and lands of Wood Street.
So again I offer you an invitation to visit us at Wood Street, before you pull the trigger on any more attempts at eviction or unwarranted property confiscation. Take a break in your attack against us long enough to really do your due diligence in these matters, and consider the choices before you, so as to avoid falling on the wrong side of history, and continuing your long train of abuses against we the people.
In love and service,
Theo Cedar Jones
In love and service,
Theo Cedar Jones