Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the photo gallery on a mobile device.

For many of Oakland’s at least 4,000 homeless people, the promise of housing has been elusive.

But on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, advocates and volunteers took matters into their own hands, constructing an unsanctioned village of 8-by-12-foot wooden homes on a public street median behind a Burger King on East 12th Street at 16th Avenue, their guerilla solution to the city’s epidemic of homelessness.

“This was an unused piece of land with no real value — we gave it value,” said Anita De Asis Miralle, founder of a group known as The Village, which has built two other unsanctioned encampments in Oakland in recent years. “We are saving the city money, it helps businesses, it helps the city of Oakland.”

On Monday, Mayor Libby Schaaf said the city would follow its established procedure on dealing with encampments.

“The city of Oakland has an encampment management policy. We assess each camp based on our criteria of safety, of health, of size and location,” she said.

“We have been brought to court on five occasions to defend that policy, and every time we have prevailed. The courts have found that the city of Oakland’s policy is fair, reasonable and lawful. And we will not treat this encampment any differently than we would treat any other encampment. We will assess it based on that criteria and move forward accordingly,” the mayor continued.

Oakland officials, who have cleared out two other village encampments set up by the group, did not intervene in this weekend’s construction effort, but have in the past have pointed to health and safety problems, like fires and trash accumulation, as the rationale behind clearing encampments.

Miralle said the village is an interim solution for people who are tired of waiting for affordable housing to be built and frustrated with the city’s efforts to add emergency housing. Miralle, who has been homeless for two years and lives in a camper with her daughter, added that they “are going to keep building” because the city’s homelessness problem “is going to get worse.”

The homes are simple, with insulation, a door, window, paneling and trim. The site has no electricity or plumbing, but organizers hope to eventually install solar panels and composting toilets. They also want to add a garden, communal outdoor kitchen and gathering space to the strip of land.

East 12th street is lined with tents and RVs parked along the road, whose occupants often stop by the Burger King for water and to use the bathroom, which are locked except for use by customers. The restaurant’s bathrooms Sunday were out of service.

The area has had a history of encampments, and Oakland has stepped in with “clean and clear” operations citing problems including fires, illegal electrical taps of street lamps and unstable, makeshift “tree houses” that required the city to remove trees, according to a document filed in court by the city.

Miralle’s group filed a court injunction ahead of two cleanup operations last year, arguing the city hasn’t followed its own policies for the encampment sweeps. In a court declaration, city attorney Barbara Parker said the city did not remove personal property as part of the cleanup.

On East 12th Street, volunteers on Sunday were working on the frame of a home for Derek Cain.

Cain, 40, had lived for a decade with his wife and son in an Oakland apartment near the Burger King, but became homeless after their landlord increased rent from $900 to $1,400.

Cain’s wife moved to Sacramento to live with her father, and his son to live with grandparents, leaving Cain alone in Oakland. Now he sleeps, unsheltered, on the ground outside, near where volunteers on Sunday were working on his home.

While a rent increase was what pushed him out of housing, Cain said the stress and distractions of being homeless — constant vigilance over one’s belongings, being unable to sleep at night and the depression — is what has kept him homeless.

“It blocks you from being able to focus on what you need to,” said Cain, who hopes the new home, however modest, will offer him enough stability to get a job and reunite with his wife.

Oakland last year opened the first of three sanctioned “safe parking” sites for RVs on a city lot at 71st Avenue and San Leandro Street. It has also housed dozens of homeless residents in converted garden sheds, and in 2018 launched a $9 million program aimed at preventing homelessness by providing financial and other resources to at-risk residents.

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a project to house homeless families in 15 state-owned trailers on a vacant city-owned lot next to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

Newsom also announced $38 million in new state funds for homelessness for Alameda County.

Oakland has already received $19.7 million in state funding to combat homelessness, such as rapid re-housing programs, converting hotels and motels into housing, and rental assistance for people struggling to find housing.

For the past few years, homeless advocates have mobilized on the weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, said Miralle, inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement led by King before his assassination, which called for initiatives like guaranteed income and more low-income housing.

Weeks after King’s death, organizers with the movement constructed a tent city at the National Mall, a demonstration that Miralle said her group is continuing.

“He was talking about human rights, not just black rights, but poor people,” said Miralle. “What could be a more appropriate day?”

While the city has launched new emergency housing initiatives in the past two years, Miralle says those programs come with too many rules and don’t meet the needs of the people they serve.

She’s also critical of the city’s clearing of encampments citywide, including two unsanctioned encampments built by volunteers affiliated with her group.

One of those encampments, on Edes and Elmhurst avenues, called “Housing and Dignity Village” was a drug-free, women’s encampment of about 13 people. It was established in late October 2018 and weeks later the city issued notices for people to leave the property. The group took the city to court to stop the eviction, but a judge ultimately decided the city could evict the encampment’s residents if the city also provided shelter beds.

The city also allowed the group to camp on a Fruitvale property at east 12th Street and 23rd Avenue for more than a year, with the understanding that the group would eventually have to vacate the property for a retrofitting project for the 23rd Street bridge.

Organizers, despite the city forbidding it, built a fence and some housing structures at the site, one structure which was moved to the site behind the Burger King when the city eventually cleared the encampment.

The east 12th street property currently has three occupied homes, and volunteers hoped to erect five new ones by the end of the holiday weekend.

Ellie Hwa Brumbaum, 25, painted a mural Sunday on the side of one of the new homes. She hopes the mural will help people look more positively at the village, a contrast to images of encampments that often show heaps of trash around tents.

Her father Paul Brumbaum, a carpenter, was among the skilled volunteers building homes behind the Burger King. He also helped build some of the homes that were at the 23rd street site.

“There’s trim, there’s paint, the idea is, if you make something beautiful enough, they can’t tear it down,” Brumbaum said.

As organizers put up the homes Sunday, there was still uncertainty about how long it would be allowed to remain.

Cain said the village is a major improvement to what was in its place before.

“Instead of a shantytown and garbage, this could be a place where someone could get back on their game.” Cain said. “It’s hard out here.”