Drive-By Videos

Wood Street Homeless Camp, Oakland, June 2019.

Originally done as a hastily-shot riposte to all those Oakland boosters who went on (and smugly on) about the exquisitely-prepared second world coffees and chai lattes and world-beating hipster food and affected clothing stores the city liked (and still likes) to think of as symbolizing itself, this sight is now (2025) such a commonplace that neither the video nor the camp itself usually rates a second look. But back in 2019 it was still a bit of a novelty for a lot of people, and the bigger camps (and this one was big) were typically tucked away out of sight, out of mind.

This was just one of the homeless shanty towns or camps in plain sight in Oakland that I felt might better symbolize the city than all those Stupid Hipster fetishes and lovingly-boutiqued foods and artifacts. Same for California. Hundreds of Oaklanders lived — and still live — like this (not through choice); tens of thousands of Californians do as well, in this self-proclaimed Most Progressive Of All Possible States. Yay Oakland! Yay California! Let’s show the world the future California’s making for us all!

This was a part of Oakland — Wood Street — I’d been pretty familiar with for a couple of decades by then, and the mounting misery and dereliction was impossible to ignore. But it just as hard to ignore the gap between the brutal reality on the street and the self-image Oakland had of itself as some sort of arty progressive political and social beacon (at that point I’d spent most of the last twenty-something years living in Oakland). So I slung my camera on my old Subaru and drove slowly down this familiar old street, dodging potholes and the Mad Max wrecks, two people shooting up in the middle of the street, etc., as best I could, and if I missed maybe half of what I wanted to get on video, oh well — I got enough to sort of make a rather obvious point without getting anyone recognisably in the shot (difficult, for sure).

And yes, there’s no soundtrack. If there were one, it’d probably be mostly just me ranting about things like why is letting people shoot up in plain sight in the middle of Wood Street a progressive value…?

And yes, as of 2025, things haven’t much improved for the homeless in Oakland, even though (or because) the majority of the Wood Street camp appears to have been cleared out several times.