(Published 12/18/2015)

The past couple of nights, Oakland temperatures have dipped into the low 40s. People are putting sweaters on their dogs. As we go about our holiday shopping, we can't wait to get out of the cold and return to the comfort of our warm homes.

Yet an increasing number of people have no shelter. While there are thankfully fewer homeless families countywide, preliminary data show a 45 percent increase in the number of single people in Oakland with no shelter. Most are men. Many of them are African-American.

Gwen Luckey cleans out her tent in an encampment under the San Pablo Avenue underpass between Castro Street and West Grand Avenue in Oakland on Dec. 16, 2015. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)

The most visible signs of this disturbing trend are the tent encampments that have been cropping up across the city, particularly beneath highway overpasses and in parks.

On San Pablo Avenue near West Grand, the first things you'll see when you exit the freeway are some 20 tents neatly lined up on both sides of the sidewalk. The residents have draped the flimsy structures with blankets, tarps and anything else they can find in a desperate effort to insulate themselves from the cold. The camp started with a few tents about a year ago but has been building over time.

On a recent afternoon, I went to visit the camp. A man was busily sweeping the gutter in front of one row of tents. Raymond Joseph, 50, says he cleans the street twice a day.


He has been living at the camp for a couple of months. When I asked him why, he said, "Choices." Joseph had no interest in applying for a bed in the city's winter shelter a block away, at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Even if he wanted to go there, the shelter has a total of 55 beds -- which is woefully inadequate.

Emergency homeless shelters aren't for everyone. Many people suffer from mental illness and or chemical dependency. You have to be able to navigate the red tape and get a referral from one of a handful of agencies. Walk-ins are available only when someone with a voucher is a no-show. You can't take your dog. And like most pet owners, homeless people are reluctant to part with their canine companions.

In fact, when I visited the San Pablo camp, a large dog guarded its owner's tent.

Homelessness, of course, is not new. What is different is the increasing number of people sleeping in tents.

Joseph seems to think homeless people got the idea from Occupy Oakland and the tent encampment outside City Hall during the protest movement in late 2011.

"It was like a domino effect," Joseph says. "Now there's camps all over Oakland."

Earlier this month, Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol evicted people who had been living in a downtown tent camp beneath Interstate 880. Another one on Martin Luther King Jr. Way was also cleared by authorities.

Some people simply picked up and relocated to the San Pablo Avenue camp. Some residents have been living together there for more than a year.

A doctor visits every week. Homeless outreach teams pass out clean needles to drug users to help prevent the spread of disease.

This is the hardest-to-reach segment of the homeless population. For the most part, we're not talking about people who are out of work or lost their apartment and had no safety net. People in tent camps tend to be chronically homeless. They find community and protection from harm among others in similar circumstances.

"Sometimes it takes a couple of years to engage someone on the street before they are ready to go inside," says Jamie Almanza, executive director of Bay Area Community Services. The nonprofit runs the Rapid Re-Housing program, which provides up to six months of interim housing for homeless people seeking permanent living arrangements.

Raymond Joseph is photographed in a tent encampment under the San Pablo Avenue underpass between Castro Street and West Grand Avenue in Oakland on Dec. 16, 2015. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)

"Most of the people we work with are on general assistance or on SSI (Supplemental Security Income)," Almanza said. "You match that with generational poverty, our housing market and gentrification, and finding housing for people is a real challenge."

A few blocks from the San Pablo camp, a leasing sign beckons "Are you Uptown?" for one-bedroom apartments starting at $2,200 a month.

Meanwhile, at the San Pablo tent camp, it's very, very cold.

Tammerlin Drummond is a columnist for the Bay Area News Group. Her column runs Thursday and Sunday. Contact her at tdrummond@bayareanewsgroup.com or follow her at Twitter.com/Tammerlin.