Homeless encampments that have sprung up on the shores and parks of Lake Merritt in Oakland will be cleared in the coming weeks as the city attempts to move the population into sturdier housing units.

City officials and nonprofit contractors Tuesday were putting the finishing touches on Oakland’s third Tuff Shed village installment, located south of the lake, next to the shuttered Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center and across the street from Laney College. Their goal is for the homeless to begin moving in Thursday.

There is room for 40 people at the location — with two beds in each of the 20 tiny homes, and a curtain divider for privacy. A recent census by the nonprofit Operation Dignity, one of the city’s contractors, found there were 65 homeless people living around Lake Merritt. City leaders say some of them will not want to move into the storage sheds, and others may find shelter on their own.

“This is a voluntary project,” said Joe DeVries, an assistant city administrator who heads up homelessness issues. “People are not forced into these, but it’s certainly something that gets people on a path to housing. We don’t consider these houses. We consider this moving from a tent to a bed, and then the next step is to move from a bed to real housing.”

Like at the previous two shed sites farther west in the city — one at Sixth and Castro streets, the other at 27th Street and Northgate Avenue — this one will have portable toilets, wash stations and weekly shower service via a repurposed bus. The area is enclosed with a chain-link fence and has a case worker on site, with storage units nearby for people’s things.

City officials say there are a few minimal ground rules — like no drug dealing on the premises — but that it’s a low-barrier way for the homeless to get help. They say that 55 percent of those who cycled through the first site were placed into housing.

Once participants get housed, others take their spot.

So far, not everyone along the waterfront is eager to move in.

Anthony Thompson Turner, 42, who is living beneath the Lake Merritt Boulevard bridge, said he is homeless by choice and doesn’t want to be in a monitored system or leave his prime spot.

“I know how to monitor myself,” he said. “I don’t need a guideline, a memorandum, a list of rules to exist. They think we are incapable of making proper decisions.”

Turner, who has been homeless for six months, said he might want to get housed again, but not on someone else’s timetable.

His friend and neighbor, Aideen Wells, 30, said he wanted more information before deciding whether to move into the sheds, which he said do not address the root problems of their plight.

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“If you’re not living with anybody, going half with someone, you can’t afford rent anywhere,” said Wells, who works as an independent contractor. “It’s like they’re just giving us fish. You got to teach the people how to fish.”

Mayor Libby Schaaf has championed the shed project as an emergency intervention. She said giving people keys to their own units, to come and go as they please, is empowering.

Sutter Health donated $130,000 to build the sheds, and the city allocated another $500,000 for the site’s operations.

“We are using quick, innovative solutions in Oakland to improve the health and well-being of our most vulnerable — to give people the dignity of going to sleep at night behind a locked door with their partner, their pets and their possessions, to know that there are professionals at hand to help navigate that path back to self-sufficiency,” Schaaf said.

But her critics say the shed project is incommensurate with the scope of the problem in Oakland. Some advocates of the homeless population have decried the sites as overly stringent and denounced the city for clearing encampments.

The mayor said doing so is about balancing needs.

“Our unsheltered residents deserve our support and compassion, but so do children who rely on the Junior Center of Art and Science (and) families who rely on Lake Merritt as the place to find refuge and connection with nature,” she said.

City officials said the homeless camps have caused more than $500,000 in damage to a wetland restoration area that Oakland is required to maintain under an agreement with the regional water board. DeVries said one camper’s fire nearly burned down the Rotary Nature Center on the north shore of the lake.

Schaaf stressed that the city’s homeless services go beyond the three shed sites. The city is pumping new state funds and other dollars into projects such as a rapid rehousing program and a second transitional housing building that’s expected to have at least 70 beds when it opens later this year.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov