Governor Gavin Newsom Thursday visited a city lot just walking distance from the Oakland Coliseum which will be the site of a state-approved trailer park for the homeless with medical tents and services to help them find work and permanent housing.
“None of us are naïve that 15 former FEMA trailers now in state control is going to ‘solve the crisis,’” said Newsom.
He, along with Mayor Libby Schaaf, and other city and county leaders toured the RVs that will soon keep 50 to 70 homeless people dry on rainy days.
“They were deployed for some of the California wildfires and they were re-purposed for this,” said CEO of Roots Clinic, Noha Aboelata.
Each family who gets a trailer must have one adult willing to hold down a job. It’s all part of the governor’s latest executive order that allows cities to open emergency shelters for the homeless on vacant state land.
Newsom said the state is fanning out 100 former FEMA trailers to house the homeless across the state.
“This is a deeply temporary solution to the crisis at hand. No one is in denial about the scale and scope of the crisis,” he said.
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The governor said he’s been following the Moms4Housing saga out of West Oakland. On Tuesday, deputies forced out a group of homeless mothers who broke into a vacant home.
“It takes a tremendous amount of courage to do what they’ve done, and they deserve an enormous amount of credit,” Newsom said, adding that his office is reaching out to the moms and hopes something productive comes out of those talks.
“I can assure you, without breaking any confidence, that there will be a lot of wonderful things that will be said and done over the course of the next hours and weeks, that they will be a part of,” he said.
Newsom also announced that Alameda County will get $38 million in state funds to help the homeless.
More than half of that money will go to Oakland, where there’s a little more than 4,00 people living on the streets, in cars and in shelters.
