“If you can build a 47-story building why can’t you build a two-story building for 1,200 homeless? Low-income housing, we can pay something!” says Marcus Emery, who receives a hug from Nate Moon.

Barbara Lewis sits on her cot in one of the twenty Tuff Shed temporary housing units the city recently installed near the Northgate homeless encampment. Each shed can house two people.

Optometrist Michelle Sweeney, left, checks out neighbor Robert Lynch’s vision. Sweeney and her family live near an encampment where Lynch lives. She often helps the homeless there.

Northgate homeless encampment near 27th Street had dozens of people living in tents last May like Tekiiya Turner and her son Lamar Tate Jr. The family found themselves homeless when their apartment had mold issues and they couldn’t find an affordable place to go.

“I go from a block where there are tents lining the sidewalk, to a block where there are Teslas and Mercedes lining the sidewalk,” said Osha Neumann, a staff attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center. “It’s almost like we’re dividing into two species. And it’s increasingly difficult for people to move from the streets, from the bottom, anywhere up away from there.”

Zane Burton, who moved to Oakland after getting priced out of San Francisco about seven years ago, now worries rent increases will push him out of Oakland, too. As prices go up, Burton, who is African-American, says everyone who looks like him is leaving his Lake Merritt neighborhood.

It’s not just Lake Merritt — Oakland’s black population is shrinking. In 2007, African-American residents made up nearly 33 percent of Oakland’s population, according to census data. By 2016, that had dropped to less than 24 percent.

Burton is determined to stay.

“Lake Merritt is the last frontier,” Burton said. “After Lake Merritt, people of color will have to go out to East Oakland, where there’s fighting, shooting, you can’t let your kid be on the porch. And then it’s just a matter of time before the rent in East Oakland gets high.”

Burton, who gets paid twice a month as a mental health worker, says an entire paycheck goes toward rent every month. Even so, he’s feeling pressure to move out from a landlord he suspects wants to charge more. Burton says his wife recently found an eviction notice taped to their front door, falsely accusing the family of failing to pay the rent. He got the matter cleared up, but it was scary, he said. Now Burton is fighting a $65 rent increase — a relatively small amount that nevertheless would eat into the family’s budget, he said. And if this hike goes through, Burton worries larger increases might not be far behind.

The fast-paced changes also are troubling for some of Oakland’s small business owners.