Curbside Castle: Architecture and Aspiration at an Oakland Homeless Encampment
The Fifth Street Natives homeless encampment spills from the sidewalk into the road on the north side of Fifth Street, one block from the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) Station in West Oakland, California. It is a dense, cohesive assemblage of scavenged materials forming a canyon wall in the street (figure 1 and 2). Scrap materials are bound together and leaned against utility poles and chain link fences, forming physical barriers around the encampment. Decorated with colorful hand-painted canvases, its façade shields a cluster of tarp-draped tents. In a neighborhood crisscrossed by transportation infrastructure connecting with large parking lots and warehouses for big rigs, the sounds of passing vehicles permeate the structure’s thin walls (figure 3). Nestled precariously in this liminal zone between industrial and residential districts, between a public street and a private lot, the encampment fights every day for its right to exist (figure 2).
Figure 1. The Fifth Street Natives Encampment (left) framed by Fifth Street, a raised BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) line, the Interstate 880, and an upscale apartment complex in the distance, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Figure 2. An aerial view of the Fifth Street encampment, including Castle and its neighbors arranged in a strip stretching from West Mandela Parkway (upper left) to Kirkham Street (lower right). Screenshot from Google Maps.
Figure 3. The view passing by the encampment on Fifth Street. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) can be seen and heard hurdling by, routinely interrupting conversations and sleep, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Encampments are distinguished from the tents and loose piles of possessions of individual homeless people by their architectural cohesion, accommodation of larger communities, and longer durations in one place, often lasting half a year to three years. They became common sights in West Coast cities like Oakland in the 1990s and proliferated in the years since the 2008 recession. In Oakland, almost 400 tents comprising over 50 encampments were recorded in 2019. The number of encampments increased to approximately 140 in 2021, due in part to the additional economic stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Frequently experienced as preferable alternatives to crowded, underfunded and paternalistic homeless shelters or bare life exposed to the streets, encampments are now enduring features of the Bay Area landscape, where housing is still treated as a commodity, not a human right.
The Fifth Street Natives Encampment began in 2018 as a women’s encampment, when members who experienced abuse at the hands of their partners seceded from another nearby coed encampment. Today, the Fifth Street Natives include some male residents. But a large portion of the encampment is still managed primarily by founding member Nikki Cooper, who is a woman of color. Nikki found herself on the streets because of a confluence of factors, including family upheavals, losing her office job in San Francisco, and the increasingly prohibitive cost of housing in Oakland.
I was invited into the encampment by chance, after striking up a conversation with a resident named Iliano, while walking by. He brought me into an elaborate tent structure with a disco ball hanging from its ceiling and introduced me to Nikki (figure 4). After explaining my interest in writing about architecture, cities, and social (in)justice, Nikki invited me back to take pictures and talk to encampment residents. I returned four times in summer 2021 to hear what Nikki and her friends Janette, Francis, Iliano and Lost had to say about their life in the encampment. Nikki liked the idea of her construction work and hand painted signs adorning the encampment’s façade reaching a wider audience through a publication that emphasized visuals. After sharing initial drafts of this article, Nikki’s main request was that I add more photographs. Combined with the process of taking these photographs, the accounts of the Fifth Street Natives helped me read the encampment not only as an architectural expression of poverty and precarity, but also of aspiration and calculated self-presentation. The encampment’s members display a canny understanding of the dominant images of citizenship and belonging in their building practices. Their cultivated methods of architectural self-presentation push against a long history of discrimination (structural violence against the homeless, women and communities of color) and assert their right to land, health and autonomy in an expensive and apathetic city.
Figure 4. The highly personalized interior of the “She Shed,” with Nikki standing in the foreground and her dog Cooper sleeping on the floor. Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
The encampment is nicknamed the “Castle” by its founding members. The word “castle” assumes a state of siege and belies the residents’ extreme vulnerability. While the Castle’s cobbled walls are not impermeable, they can ward off thieves, other homeless people and, to a lesser extent, municipal actors. Residents want to make thieves and trespassers work for it, Janette told me. Unauthorized entry would require prying through layers of forklift pallets, tarp coverings, scrap metal, chain link fence and plywood fastened together with zip ties, string, dental floss and foam insulation. From the rear, the castle is protected by the same barbed wire topped chain-link fence designed to keep the encampment from spilling into a private lot. Pulling back the blankets and Christmas lights adorning one tent’s interior wall, Nikki revealed hidden spikes (figure 5). If in the process of breaching the perimeter a trespasser didn’t make enough noise to alert the Castle’s residents, they would certainly alert Nikki’s dog, Cooper.
“The accounts of the Fifth Street Natives helped me read the encampment not only as an architectural expression of poverty and precarity, but also of aspiration and calculated self-presentation.”
Figure 5. Nikki reveals the barbed wire and fence appropriated as the rear wall of the She Shed, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Despite its now three-year lifespan, the Castle is still vulnerable to eviction and demolition by the municipality. So far, the city tolerates the Castle’s presence provided that residents do not violate certain rules. Iliano explained one of many informal agreements between city officials and encampment residents. To leave enough space for passing automotive traffic, the castle’s walls must not stray past about 6 feet into the street. In explaining this, Iliano pointed to the even line of the Castle’s façade, running almost completely parallel to the street’s double yellow line (figure 1). Nonetheless, Castle residents experience an underlying anxiety that the rules for living on Fifth Street could change at any time. I asked why the Castle was not located in the empty space under the nearby BART overpass, wondering if living there might be less complicated. Nikki replied: “you can’t be homeless under BART” – Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) immediately removes you.
Figure 6. Recent additions to the encampment’s façade include white fences, mailboxes and bollards flanking the red door, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Physical walls can repel thieves, but not municipal actors. To address this, the Castle also erects political walls. It clads itself in a rhetorical armor made of accepted cultural symbols of citizenship and belonging. It invokes the American Dream and the suburban home through what could be called textual and architectural rights talk [1]. Many of the wood and metal scraps composing the façade are also painted white in an intentional reference to the picket fence, a recognized symbol of those whose right to the city is often unquestioned (figure 6). The Castle’s façade is decorated with its own version of lawn signs in the form of a dozen canvases painted by Nikki. One sign reads: “I AM NOT HOMELESS I AM A CSC CURB SIDE CITIZEN” (figure 7). The invocation of citizenship along with the rejection of the term “homeless” is an assertion of belonging and the right to one’s land. “I pay my taxes,” says Nikki, “it’s just that I live here.” Other signs serve similar purposes. One quotes the Fourteenth Amendment, asserting any law that deprives a citizen of life, liberty, property or equal legal protection unconstitutional. Another quotes Epictetus (“no man is free who is not master of himself”), emphasizing the encampment residents’ sovereignty and self-determination (figure 8).
Figure 7. Signs painted by Nikki Cooper. The canvas on the right features lyrics by rapper Nick Cannon. The music video contains imagery of early twentieth century lynchings, including one of a man Nikki says is her ancestor, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Figure 8. 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Oakland, California, 2020. Photograph by Nikki Cooper.
The recently completed portion called the Iron Gate is dense with the symbolism of the historically white suburban home, or what Dianne Harris calls “little white houses” (figures 9 and 10). The front door has a mailbox and is flanked by two red planters filled with plastic flowers. Above the door a patriotic eagle figurine spreads its wings, with an American flag flying behind. The eagle is flanked by two red hearts with “Mr.” and “Mrs.” painted on them–they refer to Nikki and her incarcerated boyfriend Shawn, who recently proposed to her. Above and below the door written on white clouds are the words “Living the American Dream. Are you?” Nikki’s message here is nuanced. On the one hand, says she’s being facetious, by displaying the disjunction between the promises of the American Dream and her current reality. On the other hand, it is also an earnest reflection of Nikki’s aspirations. She desires the stability, self-sufficiency and safety of having her own legally recognized property.
Figure 9. Nikki begins construction on the “Iron Gate” to the East of the Castle using salvaged materials, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Figure 10. The recently completed “Iron Gate.” Its façade is dense with references to American suburbia, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore
Figure 11. Painted wood panels against a white fence and bamboo screen, Oakland, California, 2020. Photograph by Nikki Cooper.
The Castle’s walls also exert an emotional appeal. The phrases “wish you were here” and “home is where the heart is” adorn the Castle’s façade alongside its more overt political proclamations. They affirm that this encampment is indeed a home, full of sentimental attachments (figure 11). Like an inverted domestic interior displaying family photographs, the flowers painted on the white picket fence feature the names of everyone who has ever lived in the Fifth Street Encampment (figure 12). These names number in the dozens. Names written on the same painted flower stems represent couples and families. A multimedia assemblage painted with churning water and the name of the Simon and Garfunkel song “A Bridge Over Troubled Waters” is arranged below a memorial with the names of recently deceased loved ones (figure 13).
Figure 12. Fence painted with flowers, each inscribed with the names of Castle residents, neighbors and their loved ones, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Figure 13. Multimedia assemblage and memorial, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Reflecting on her childhood in the East Bay, Nikki said “there was this old G – said as long as you have a foundation under you, you have a future, even if the walls you build on it are made of cardboard.” She expressed that if your foundation is built on quicksand (or on a public street), then your time is limited and your future uncertain. But Nikki has been the queen of the curbside castle with its unstable foundation for three years now (figure 14). This year alone, her community’s tenuous livelihood was threatened by arson, theft, pests, flooding and eviction. The very existence of the Castle is an act of resistance, or “an affirmation of life despite its impossibilities,” as Michele Lancione puts it.
“Encampment clearance punishes encampment residents for their backbreaking labor compensating for the inadequate public services and social safety nets that characterize neoliberal cities.”
Figure 14. Nikki on her throne in front of the Castle, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
Figure 15. Nikki in front of the Castle with oncoming cars, Oakland, California, 2021. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore.
The Castle’s residents are refugees in their own city; many have work but are still displaced due to increasingly exorbitant housing and rental prices. They are forced to choose between a “forever temporary” encampment existence or life drifting on the streets or trapped in miserable shelters [2]. Meanwhile, official initiatives continue to be insufficient because they ignore the root causes of homelessness, instead focusing on its symptoms and costs for the city. It should be clear that evicting and destroying encampments does not address the underlying conditions leading to homelessness in Oakland. Encampment clearance instead punishes encampment residents for their backbreaking labor compensating for the inadequate public services and social safety nets that characterize neoliberal cities. These demolitions ignore the messages of the city’s nontraditionally housed residents. Nikki remarked that they are more likely to be evicted than approached by the city: “no one’s knocked on my door and asked: what would it take to get you off the street?”
Castle residents have no illusions about the permanence of their encampment. I asked Nikki where she saw herself and the Castle in a few years. She said “oh I won’t be here. The politics of the street and the rules for the homeless are changing.” Short term, she wants to see if she can make money running a blog about Bay Area homelessness and through a GoFundMe account. Long term, she dreams about stability, independence and activism. One dream is to purchase a warehouse, where she would live in the upper story. The lower story would house a nonprofit organization dedicated to services for the homeless called the Underground Railroad West. But her underlying condition for each of these scenarios is maintaining her independence from the abusive partners, exploitative landlords, and stifling, underfunded institutions that the Castle currently allows her and the other Fifth Street Natives to escape.
Notes
[1] Teresa Caldeira argues that in the bare act of living in neoliberal cities where housing is a commodity but not a right, marginalized residents are forced under the constant threat of eviction to become fluent in “rights talk.” This rights talk becomes a means of staking one’s legitimate claim to the city, asserting one’s citizenship, and talking back against callous eviction policies. Terese Caldeira, “Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics, and Politics in Cities of the Global South,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35, no. 1 (2017): 3-20.
[2] Recent encampment literature emphasizes the paradoxical, dual nature of encampments. While they are designed and perceived as temporary fixes for temporary crises of housing and migration, they often end up far outliving their intended lifespans. Claudia Mansell, “Camp Code: How to Navigate a Refugee Settlement,” Places Journal, 2016; Charlie Hailey, “Camps: Contemporary Environments of Autonomy, Necessity and Control,” in Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White eds., The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture, London; Routledge, 2019; Andrew Herscher, Displacements: Architecture and Refugee, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017.
Citation
Jameson-Ellsmore, Ben, “Curbside Castle: Architecture and Aspiration at an Oakland Homeless Encampment,” PLATFORM, January 10, 2022.
