The photograph on the August 2024 cover was taken on June 5, 2024, during an encampment closure near Children’s Fairyland in Oakland. The resident wasn’t home when city workers arrived, but she had zipped the tent closed and secured it with a padlock, like the front door of any home.
The city’s team lead declared the tent abandoned. If a resident isn’t home during a sweep, the city can take everything they own. According to Oakland’s policy, workers are supposed to “bag and tag” whatever property they don’t deem garbage and then they must leave the resident a note about how to retrieve what is stored. But I just saw workers “bag and tag” a tent only a few minutes before this one, and no note was left for the resident. And I wasn’t alone in seeing this.
Homeless advocates protested the red tent’s removal. They had contact with the resident and said she would be back to move her home elsewhere. But the city wants it gone, the team lead said. The tent was on the list of places they needed to clear. A worker from Fairyland wanted it gone, too. And the cops stood around ready to back up whatever the city intended to do.
Throughout the closure that day, city workers expressed sympathy for encampment residents. But the conversation kept ending up at the same place: “It’s Fairyland.” The children’s park gave them an exception to any sympathy they felt for encampment residents. Because, as they say, “It’s Fairyland.” How could unhoused people ever have a place in their storybook world?
I’ve heard this kind of logic everywhere, both in places where I have lived inside and where I had been unhoused. And now we have the Grants Pass ruling, any public space can be deemed another Fairyland for the unhoused.
Which Bay Area cities will use a Fairyland excuse? Will yours? We’ll have to keep watching to find out.
Laura A. Zink is a writer from Oakland, California. She is a former Steinbeck Fellow, an English teacher, and an organizer of the Oakland literary festival, Beast Crawl. For the summer, she will be the Editor-in-Chief at Street Spirit.