WATERMELON HAD BEEN LEFT OUT OVERNIGHT.
By morning, flies gathered around the red edges where someone had already taken a few bites. Every so often they scattered before settling again a moment later. Beside the watermelon sat a couple of soda cans, a digital solitaire game and a chair where Net spent most of the afternoon. At her feet lay Pocket, a white Labrador retriever that lifted her head whenever someone passed. The flies buzzed around the watermelon until, after a while, they became difficult to distinguish from the sound of cars whirring above.
If not for the traffic overhead, it might have been easy to mistake the afternoon for one spent on a front porch of a house rather than in the encampment of an unhoused community.
By next summer, construction is expected to reach this stretch of road under the interstate between Sixth and Webster. The people living here may have to leave. Whether they will be scattered apart, or able to sustain the connections that have helped them survive, is still uncertain.
Net, who said she was not comfortable disclosing her full name, had taken on something of a motherly role in this encampment of about 30 people.
If you stayed near Net’s table long enough, you eventually met nearly everyone. Net would look up at whoever wandered over and ask, almost offhand, if they had eaten yet. Most of the time they hadn’t. She would slide a bag of chips or a fig bar across the table. Some people stayed to talk. Others ate and kept moving. Net seemed to keep account of who had already come through that day and who she had not seen yet.
Behind Net, blue tents stretched beneath the overpass. Shopping carts and bicycles were scattered near orange construction signs where Caltrans began working in March. Construction will continue through 2029 and eventually overtake the encampment.
Construction is getting closer
The intersection is part of a $175.4 million Oakland Alameda Access Project, a yearslong overhaul of the roads connecting Interstates 880 and 980 with the two tunnels that carry drivers between Oakland and the city of Alameda. The project, which broke ground in April, will untangle a road system that will send drivers straight into the Posey and Webster tubes, rather than onto local streets through Oakland’s Chinatown.
For those living in dozens of tents around the off-ramp, the coming construction will mean another move.
“The people living beneath the bridge used to live over there,” a member of the encampment said, pointing to an adjacent lot. “They were told they had only a few days to leave.”
Some campers weren’t around when notices were posted, she said. Others came back to find everything gone, including documents and clothes.
Since the encampment is on state property, Caltrans will be responsible for clearing it away. Caltrans spokesperson Hector Chinchilla said the agency provides a minimum of 48 hours’ notice before clearing an encampment to give people time to collect their belongings.
Oakland spokesperson Jean Walsh said the city and Caltrans are coordinating future encampment closures around the construction schedule and have been in contact with service providers, including community cabin programs and St. Vincent de Paul. But because the closures are still months away, Walsh said it is too early to know exactly what shelter placements will be available. Any options will depend on capacity at the time and could include those programs or others.
Traffic, good and bad
As of publication, the city of Oakland had not provided a specific closure date for the encampment, but Caltrans said demolition of the nearby Broadway off-ramp is expected to begin in spring or summer 2027, bringing a major portion of the construction directly into the encampment area.
Carl Chan, a longtime Chinatown community advocate and former president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said he has been involved in discussions over versions of the access project for roughly three decades. More pedestrian access and the redirection of traffic around Chinatown is one reason the district’s business community supports the project. Chan said the project addresses a problem they have long described as the difference between “good traffic” and “bad traffic.”
“Good traffic,” Chan said, means people who come to eat, shop, visit family or otherwise spend time in Chinatown. “Bad traffic” is drivers who are simply passing through on their way to the freeway or the tubes.
The broader project will also add bike and pedestrian pathways intended to better connect Chinatown, downtown Oakland and the Jack London District with Alameda.
That same stretch of Webster Street is also where Sam Gan has worked for the past few years at a TruConnect cellphone service booth. Gan said he regularly sees families riding bicycles throughout the area and believes the planned bike lanes would make it safer for people traveling through the neighborhood.
Other Chinatown workers said they knew construction was happening but could not say how the streets would change. There was a similar lack of familiarity with the encampment. Several said they generally avoided the area around Sixth and Webster and knew little about the people living there.
The community beneath the freeway
Day-to-day routines in Chinatown may look indistinguishable from those in the encampment, despite the social distance between the two cultures.
What goes unnoticed are days when an encampment resident feels well enough to put on shorts, walk around the block and enjoy the small pleasure of lying in the sun without drawing any more glances than usual, or nights when no one can sleep and people throw dice, bet far more money than they have, pass around dollars nobody can spare and laugh.
For now, the underpass is calm. Craig Parker, known in the community as Nephew, played a digital solitaire game. He had never played before and kept pressing at the buttons, trying to make sense of it.
“I mostly rode bikes,” he said, when asked what he played as a kid.
“It’s getting to be that weather again, the kind where you ride around with your shirt off,” Nephew said. “If you’re not careful, the heat will get you. But the cold … the cold will get you every time. The cold will beat you. Shit, it’s beat me a few times.”
One night, three winters earlier, the cold had set in so deep that he could not think, he said.
“Have you ever been so cold you couldn’t make a decision?” Nephew said. “Usually, you just have to stumble onto some kind of shelter.”
“It’s getting to be that weather again, the kind where you ride around with your shirt off. If you’re not careful, the heat will get you. But the cold … the cold will get you every time. …”
Nephew, encampment resident
That meant find a car, a tent, a blanket or anywhere warm enough to hold you over until morning, he said. That night, he had none of them.
Eventually, he stopped walking and lowered himself onto a street corner. He closed his eyes and shivered against the pavement. Occasionally, he said, his skin scraping against the concrete gave him a brief feeling of warmth, but eventually even that stopped. He said he closed his eyes because, by then, there were no decisions left to make.
A friend from a previous encampment found him lying on the corner. There were wooden pallets in the back of his truck. Together, they broke the pallets apart and started a fire. Nephew said he still doesn’t know how the friend found him, only that someone noticed he was gone from the community.
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