Cam McKeel took drags off a joint while strolling through his maze of 35 marijuana plants. Every few feet he stopped, inspected the growth of a few leaves and swatted at flies buzzing around fresh dirt.

The plants McKeel tends with his five friends aren’t stowed away in a pristine greenhouse. Instead, they’re lined in makeshift planter boxes in a once-vacant lot at Wood Street and West Grand Avenue in West Oakland. The group calls home a pair of Muni buses and an RV. Their ad hoc operation is equipped with a security camera and protected by a fence built of wood panels they collected from a nearby trash bin.

City officials say the grow is illegal because McKeel and his friends are trespassing on private property and running a pot farm for profit, but they haven’t done anything to shut it down. The episode highlights the complexities of managing two surging trends in Oakland and other Bay Area cities: homelessness and cannabis regulation.

McKeel claims his operation isn’t commercial, that he and his friends just really like marijuana.

“I smoke a lot of weed,” he said. “As much as I can, as often as I can, as soon as I wake up, before I go to bed.”

Several dozen homeless people are camped or living in RVs in and around the privately owned lot, which sits in an industrial area near a highway overpass. The city is negotiating with the property owner to turn the lot into a city-managed safe RV parking lot. But what to do about the 4-month-old marijuana grow, which has generated a handful of complaints on social media from residents and business owners, is a quandary for officials.

California state law allows for each person to grow up to six plants for personal use. McKeel and his friends say they are following state law; There are fewer than six plants for each of them. But city officials aren’t buying McKeel’s story that the marijuana is just for him and his friends. And they say that growing marijuana on someone else’s property is illegal.

“You’ve trespassed on someone’s property and taken over a huge portion of it to create a large cannabis farm for profit,” said Joe DeVries, assistant to the city administrator’s office. “No one can smoke that much pot. He did it without getting permission from the city, without getting permission from the owner. No, that is not OK.”

Greg Minor, who heads up cannabis policy and enforcement for the city, did not respond to calls for comment.

McKeel, 51, and his fellow farmers are biding their time as their plants approach harvest. They’ve proposed that the city allow them to move to a different spot under a freeway overpass out of sight of concerned residents, and grow their weed in peace.

“This is the holy grail,” McKeel said, pointing to the marijuana plants. “This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life. I’m not a bad guy. The alternative is me on the sidewalk asking somebody for weed, and here I’m not asking anybody for anything.”

Two of the men he lives and grows with, A.C. and Dave C., say sometimes they use marijuana to barter for food, beer and cigarettes.

“You don’t want to sell it because that is against the law,” said 43-year-old A.C., who asked to be identified by his initials for safety concerns.

They started growing their plants in May and are expecting to harvest by October. Residents of a community Facebook page who commented on a photo of the grow in early August said they notified the city and wondered how it could be allowed to stand.

The property is owned by an entity called Game Changer LLC. The city has been negotiating with Game Changer to lease the property for free and convert it into a safe RV parking lot, DeVries said. Oakland would be responsible for maintaining the property.

Calls to numbers associated with Game Changer and its managing member were not answered.

DeVries said he expects that the safe parking lot — which would allow for 50 RVs whose owners have been identified by the city as Oakland residents and currently park in the West Oakland area — will be open in the next two months. But he said he doesn’t know if McKeel’s Muni bus will be eligible to park at the site.

As the city has continued negotiating with the property owners, DeVries said the illegal pot operation hasn’t made it easy.

“It’s just another wrinkle, so when you’re trying to plan a construction project and it involves multiple parties and multiple moving parts, when you add a crazy part like that, it just makes the process more challenging,” DeVries said. “That is why these things take longer than we would like.”

McKeel and A.C. say the city is deploying scare tactics. They claim they’re harmless. And instead the city should consider letting them settle down on the spot by the freeway.

“Under the freeway, there is endless amounts of space,” A.C. said. “In two days of work, we could move all this under there. It’s an area that is not used. Then we are not going to be on the street and we are not going to be an eyesore. They would have nothing to complain about.”

McKeel, A.C. and their other friends met in San Francisco nearly a decade ago. They struck a friendship sleeping in Golden Gate Park and hanging out in the Haight. A.C. said that during that time, he searched “bus” on Craigslist nearly every day for five years before he came across a Muni bus being sold for $1,500.

The men pooled their money together, bought a bus, an RV and eventually, a second bus and moved to Oakland. On a recent day, they opened Lagunitas beers, sat in patio chairs and stared at their pot farm. Occasionally, Dave C., shirtless, trimmed leaves of the plants before returning to the reprieve of the shade.

“That is just a field of beauty,” McKeel said. “And to think people have a problem with it, get the f— out of here.”

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani