Community

Cob Structures House Kitchen, Clinic, Shower, in West Oakland Homeless Community

Published

5 years ago

April 29, 2021

A community kitchen, clinic, toilet and shower made out of cob and wood sit under the 880 Freeway within a homeless community west of Wood Street in West Oakland on April 18.

Members of three organizations – Artists Building Communities, Essential Food and Medicine, and Living Earth Structures – have built a kitchen, clinic, free store, stage, toilet, oven, and shower with and for a homeless community near Wood Street in West Oakland.

Made out of wood covered in brown cob, the structures that house these facilities seem almost as natural extensions of the earth upon which they sit. Empty wine bottles serve as windows, and old discarded clothes serve as insulation. Sculpted images of trees decorate the structures’ surfaces and succulent plants sprout along the perimeters of their roofs.

Winding stone pathways connect the structures and are bordered by little gardens of herbs, greens, and flowers. The kitchen has a stove, sink with running water, shelving full of bread, and a refrigerator full of food. Herbs and emergency medical supplies fill the clinic. The shower’s water runs hot.

The project is called Cob on Wood. It sits on land owned by, west of Wood Street, and under the 880 freeway.

A community of homeless residents lives near Cob on Wood, surrounding the site. Advocates and some residents estimate the population of that community to be about 100 people. The area west of Wood Street in West Oakland that the community lives in does not receive regular sanitation service from the City of Oakland, and much of it is densely packed with abandoned vehicles and garbage.

With regular maintenance by those living inside and outside of the homeless community, the Cob on Wood site looks different from its surroundings, like a rose that grows out of a crack in the concrete.

“This was built through relationships with the community and came out of requests from the community,” said Xochitl Bernadette Moreno, co-founder of Essential Food and Medicine (EFAM).

EFAM started building relationships with Wood Street residents early in the COVID-19 pandemic by giving them juice, soups, and natural medicines made from local produce. Artists Building Community (ABC) also started early in the pandemic, when Annemarie Bustamante and some of her neighbors living in The Vulcan Loft apartments in East Oakland started building small wooden homes for homeless Oakland residents.

ABC has expanded now to include volunteers throughout the area, and they have built several of their homes in the Wood Street community. But the structures at Cob on Wood-look different from ABC’s homes.

ABC and EFAM came together to contract with Miguel Elliot of Living Earth Structures to guide the building of Cob on Wood structures using cob. The group benefited from Elliot’s experience of building cob structures for over 25 years in a variety of settings and locations, including parts of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia.

While the groups have followed Elliot’s construction guidance, they also followed nearby homeless residents’ service requests, whose first request was a kitchen. Elliot’s cob construction made the kitchen safe from catching fire, as the cob is fireproof.

Such precautions were necessary. Oakland’s fire department responded to almost 1,000 fires in homeless communities during fiscal years 2018-19 and 2019-20.

LeaJay Harper, who has lived in the Wood Street community for over seven years, now restocks the kitchen every few days and also cooks for herself and other residents.

“It’s been a challenge trying to keep food in the kitchen because people are definitely using it,” said Harper. “It’s made it so that folks who didn’t have the facilities at their own space to cook can have hot food every single day. A lot of people are gaining weight, which is a good thing.”

Harper works and meets closely with ABC and EFAM to plan food pickups. Other homeless residents have taken on roles in the community as well. A resident named Lydia, who lives in an RV near the community and is knowledgeable about medicinal uses of herbs, is the community clinic liaison. She helps spread information about ways residents can use the clinic’s herbs.

Raquel, a teenager who lives with her family in the Wood Street community, helps with outreach to inform other residents about Cob on Wood services and events. Another teenager, Sequoia, who used to live on Wood Street, is also part of Cob on Wood’s outreach team.

“I think being part of [Cob on Wood] is really amazing,” Sequoia said. “Most of my life I was homeless and being able to give back to the community now that I’m not on the streets means a lot to me.”

The idea for the community started in September of last year, and construction started in December. The project has been growing. These days, Moreno says about 50 people meet online on Wednesdays to formally plan and maintain the project.

On Sundays, the group meets more informally on site for construction, site maintenance, a pizza party, and an open mic. The vast majority of people involved with the project still live outside of the Wood Street community, but the word is spreading.

Cob on Wood volunteers go into the Wood Street community and hand out flyers about the project. On Sunday, April 18, they hosted an Earth Day celebration called “What’s Your Medicine?” with food, DJs, dance, and musical performances.

At least 100 people showed up to the event. One Wood Street resident who lives in a self-made home said he had never heard of Cob on Wood before but followed the sound of the music and found it.

Ashel Seasunz Eldridge, who co-founded EFAM, and performed at the Earth Day celebration with his band, Dogon Lights, said that Cob on Wood seeks to build on work that Wood St residents already are doing. During the Earth Day celebration, when Cob on Wood had a Town Hall to discuss how the project could sustain itself and better serve the community, five Wood Street residents took the lead, speaking to each other and the crowd through a PA system.

Those residents have been meeting weekly in another part of the Wood Street community.

“We were inspired by the meetings people were already having,” said Eldridge. “We thought, why not bring that to the town hall.”

One topic Wood Street residents spoke about was defending themselves and other people experiencing homelessness from displacement. It was something Cob on Wood organizers found pertinent, as they worry that the site, which sits on CalTrans owned land, could face displacement from that state agency.

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle cites CalTrans spokesperson RocQuel Johnson as claiming the agency plans to clear “abandoned vehicles and liter” from CalTrans land near Wood Street in May and June, claiming similar actions were executed on April 12 and April13.

ABC founder Annmarie Bustamante was at the Wood Street homeless community on those days and claims CalTrans forced people to move themselves and their homes from the location they lived to an area more out of sight of a nearby street.

Abandoned vehicles, Bustamante claims, were not removed from the Wood Street homeless community but were moved to a separate area still within that community. She said the operation did not remove trash but displaced people.

Although this reporter asked CalTrans about the April 12 and 13 operations, the agency did not respond. But Johnson told the SF Chronicle that “[Cob on Wood] structures were placed on state right of way without a permit or without safety inspections,” and added that “CalTrans is currently evaluating the best course of action and has no immediate plans to remove the structures.”

Cob on Wood organizers is unclear about whether CalTrans will remove their structures. The state agency cleared homeless people off their land in Oakland on Sept. 21 last year and late January this year. During the January operation, a group of advocates, 10 of whom carried colorful shields, defended the self-made home of two Oakland residents living on the land bordering Mosswood Park and the 580 Freeway.

While nearly 20 of their neighbors cleared themselves from the CalTrans-owned land they were living on, the two residents never left the area, and their home was not dismantled.

Bustamante, who was at the January CalTrans operation supporting eviction defense, is also prepared to defend Cob on Wood if necessary. Defending space through direct action is a topic of steady conversation among those involved with Cob on Wood.

“If CalTrans does try to displace us at Wood Street without allowing for other adequate resources, there’s gonna be a fight,” said Bustamante.

Cob on Wood wants to expand to include a sauna and small huts for homeless residents. They are seeking funds to help their project, to help pay for construction costs, materials and stipends for homeless residents who help with the project.

Readers can donate to their gofundme campaign.

Mia Lane

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OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — “Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.”

Published

3 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology - City Limits

Every indicator in New York City’s housing market is pointing in the wrong direction.

Rents are at historic highs. Foreclosure notices are climbing in Black and brown neighborhoods that never fully recovered from the last crisis. Deed theft, the predatory stripping of generational wealth from families who built their equity over decades, continues to devastate communities from Brownsville to Jamaica.

On top of all these factors, there were more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sitting completely empty as of April last year. That number grew by 8,000 units in a single year, with the sharpest increases hitting Brooklyn and Queens hardest.

Brooklyn and Queens. My neighborhoods. Your neighborhoods.

You would think that news of 57,000 empty affordable apartments in the middle of a housing emergency would produce outrage, emergency hearings, and demands for accountability. Instead, New Yorkers got a collective shrug from opinion leaders.

Read that again: 57,000 families could be housed in those apartments. Households currently paying market rent, doubled up, couch-surfing, or one missed paycheck away from the street could have relief. And silence from the city’s housing leadership, activists, and coalitions.

In my experience as chair of the Subcommittee on Affordable Housing in the Assembly, that is not advocacy. That is surrender.

These are the same voices, the same institutions, the same political class that successfully lobbied to effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City through Local Law 18. At its peak, Airbnb had roughly 20,000 listings in New York City, nearly a third the number of apartments currently sitting vacant and padlocked in the rent-stabilized system. The campaign against those listings was relentless, loud, and wrapped in the language of affordability and housing justice.

Where is that energy now?

Where are the press conferences about landlords warehousing stabilized units while families sleep in shelters? Where is the legislation with teeth? Where is the outrage that was apparently plentiful when a Black homeowner in Bed Stuy wanted to rent out her spare bedroom to make ends meet?

Because that is exactly who Local Law 18 hit hardest. Not the corporate bad actors. Not the hedge funds. The struggling homeowner, disproportionately Black, disproportionately in Brooklyn and Queens, who used their home as a small economic engine to survive in a city that grows more expensive by the month.

Those families were told their activity was destabilizing the housing market. Those families were fined, delisted, and legislated out of a livelihood. And now we learn that 57,000 stabilized units are sitting empty while rents spiral and foreclosures mount, and the response from housing advocates is essentially: that’s just how big numbers work.

This is not sound policy. This is politics. And the communities paying the price know the difference.

I have spoken with homeowners across Central Brooklyn who are barely holding on. They bought their homes, sometimes one generation removed from the Great Migration, and they have watched the equity they built become both their greatest asset and their greatest vulnerability. Predatory lenders, deed theft schemes, and rising property taxes all circle that equity like wolves.

Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.

Everyone in this fight knows what needs to happen but will not say it out loud: Local Law 18 needs reform. Common sense reform. The kind that distinguishes between an investor running a ghost hotel and a homeowner renting a room. The kind that actually targets bad actors instead of penalizing the most economically vulnerable property owners in the city.

I hear it in private conversations with elected officials, with housing attorneys, with planners. The consensus is there. The political will is not, because the same advocacy groups and political donors who pushed the original law are still in the room, and nobody wants to take their call.

What this moment requires is courage, not calculation.

Every month that passes with 57,000 empty stabilized apartments is a month of families in crisis, of shelter costs ballooning, of neighborhoods destabilizing. Every month that Local Law 18 remains unreformed is another month a Black homeowner in Flatbush or Hollis faces impossible choices that wealthier New Yorkers simply never have to make.

You cannot ban the small and ignore the large. You cannot mobilize armies of lobbyists against a homeowner’s spare bedroom while shrugging at tens of thousands of warehoused affordable units. You cannot claim to stand for housing justice and then tell 57,000 families worth of empty apartments that the math just works out this way.

The hypocrisy has to stop. Politics have to give way to people. And the officials and advocates who have the power to fix this, who know what needs to be done, have to decide which side they are actually on.

Because from where I stand, in the communities I have served for decades, it is very clear who is being left out in the cold.

Dr. Annette Robinson is a former member of both the State Assembly and City Council in Brooklyn.

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Black History

Oakland Protesters Rally to Defend Haitian Immigrants and TPS

The Haiti Action Committee traces its roots to the international movement that emerged following Haiti’s 1991 military coup, which overthrew the nation’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Political violence sent thousands of Haitians fleeing the country, while U.S. policies resulted in refugees being intercepted at sea, repatriated, or detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Published

3 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Activists Gerald Smith and Romaine Charite at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland near City Hall protest in support of Haitian immigrant rights. Photo by Carla Thomas

By Carla Thomas

Protesters gathered in downtown Oakland near City Hall at 14th Street and Broadway on Thursday, Aug. 13, calling for protections for Haitian immigrants and an end to deportation policies affecting Haitian communities across the United States.

Organized as a call to action by the Legalization for All Network and supported by the Haiti Action Committee and other community organizations, the demonstration carried a clear message: “Defend TPS! Legalization, Not Deportation!”

Participants focused attention on the termination of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haiti and immigration policies protesters described as continuing attacks on Haitian immigrants under the Trump administration.

Haitian Romaine Charite of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization urged demonstrators to stand with Haitian families and led chants:

“When Haitians are under attack, what do we do? We fight back.”

Injustice to one is an injustice to us all.”

“Dump Trump!”

Charite and other protesters condemned the federal government’s treatment of Haitian immigrants, describing the policies as an attack on a population already facing extraordinary hardship.

Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated effective July 27, 2026, removing temporary deportation protections and work authorization for hundreds of thousands of Haitian beneficiaries who lacked another legal basis to remain in the United States.

Gerald Smith, a protester and former member of the Black Panther Party during the 1970s, said Haitians were being unfairly targeted and warned that ending TPS would have a devastating impact on Haitian families and communities.

“These policies are racially motivated and unfair,” Smith said. “Everyone deserves the right to self-determination and protection from persecution.”

The Haiti Action Committee cited the continuing political, economic and humanitarian crisis in Haiti as evidence that returning large numbers of immigrants to the country could place already vulnerable people at greater risk.

The Oakland gathering, which drew about 20 participants, reflected a decades-long history of Bay Area activism surrounding Haitian democracy, refugee rights and U.S. immigration policy.

Those policies sparked protests involving Haitian communities, Black activists, artists, college students, churches, labor organizations and human rights advocates. Prominent figures, including dancer and activist Katherine Dunham, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and TransAfrica leader Randall Robinson, joined campaigns challenging the treatment of Haitian refugees.

In 1992, Haiti Action Committee joined other Bay Area organizations in a dramatic demonstration on San Francisco Bay. Boats carrying Haitian participants were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard while supporters gathered along the waterfront and reportedly chanted, “Let Them Land!”

More than three decades later, protesters have returned to the streets of Oakland, centering on protecting Haitian immigrants, opposing deportation and pressing for immigration policies that provide families with a pathway toward permanent legal residency.

For more information, visit Haitisolidarity.net.

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Community

First 5 Alameda County Celebrates First Year of Measure C’s Implementation

Measure C, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.

Published

3 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas (left) with Community Advisory Councilmember and childcare provider Nancy Harvey. Photo by Carla Thomas.

By Carla Thomas

First 5 Alameda County marked the first anniversary of the impact of Measure C with a community celebration Friday, Aug. 7, at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, highlighting more than $135 million invested to strengthen early childhood education, families and caregivers across Alameda County.

The celebration brought together families, educators, caregivers, advocates, elected officials and community leaders for an evening of music, cultural performances, and children’s activities.

“Oakland is on the move,” said Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, commending all the advocates who helped win the victory for early childhood education and their providers.

First 5 Alameda County CEO Kristin Spanos said, “In the first 10 months of Measure C being available after the Board of Supervisors adopted the 5-year plan, we’ve had over $135 million put directly into the community supporting children and providers with emergency grants, investments, and stipends.”

First 5 Alameda County, the public agency responsible for administering Measure C, focused on quickly moving voter-approved dollars into local communities while developing partnerships, accountability measures, and infrastructure intended to create long-term impact.

Alameda County District 5 Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas: “We’re celebrating the first year of getting money into families’ pockets and childcare providers’ pockets. This is about deploying very vital resources over the course of five years. It’s a billion-dollar impact.”

Community Advisory Council member Nancy Harvey said, “We are totally excited. It was a 10-year fight, and we fought tooth and nail. We had so much support from County Supervisors Nate Miley and Nikki Fortunato Bas, the unions, and the late Supervisor Wilma Chan. This is a historic event – people are watching Measure C all over the nation.”

Harvey explained that small childcare providers received a $40,000 grant, and larger providers received a $50,000 grant.

Childcare advocate and provider Lisa Zarodney of Livermore said, “When I got my emergency funds, I was about to close. The stipend allowed me to continue through 2026 and get all the babies on my wait list.”

In business for 27 years, Zarodney said she is now caring for the children of past clients.

“I couldn’t continue my legacy, my dream, and my passion without the funding from Measure C.”

Harvey emphasized that he next leg of the fight is to ensure workers have a sustainable wage.

“We are now pushing to raise the wage of workers to $25 to keep doors open and people employed,” she said.

First 5 Alameda County’s vision is to build an integrated and equity-centered early childhood system supporting children, families, and communities regardless of race, income, or neighborhood. As administrator of Measure C, the agency has worked to expand access to early care and education, strengthen family stability, and support the providers and caregivers families rely upon.

Through Measure C and partnerships with initiatives including the Oakland Children’s Initiative, First 5 Alameda County has sought to reduce fragmented services and better coordinate public resources.

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