Home Depot to fence out RV-dwellers behind store

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OAKLAND — A group of RV dwellers who have been living on a dead-end road behind the Fruitvale Home Depot will be forced out after the road is fenced off.

The Oakland City Council voted early Wednesday morning at the tail end of an 11-hour meeting to close the 600 block and 700 blocks of 37th Avenue, and allow Home Depot to put up a fence around it with a gate to allow emergency vehicles in. Council members Rebecca Kaplan, Noel Gallo, Loren Taylor, Sheng Thao, Dan Kalb and Nikki Fortunato Bas voted in favor of the closure; Lynette Gibson McElhaney and Larry Reid were absent.

Home Depot has been pressuring the city for months to remove the homeless encampments surrounding the store. In emails to Gallo — the councilman for the Fruitvale neighborhood — and Mayor Libby Schaaf, company officials have said the homeless have made customers and employees uncomfortable and have been stealing merchandise. In addition to the RV encampment on 37th Avenue, a larger encampment has been set up on a vacant lot next to the business’s front parking lot.

Gallo has construed Home Depot’s pressure to remove the encampments as a threat to leave, which he said could result in the loss of around 300 jobs.

“If you don’t have those jobs, then we’ll all end up on the streets,” Gallo said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Plans to clear the encampment in front of the store on Alameda Avenue are in the works, Gallo said in an interview Thursday, but nothing is set in stone.

Oakland landlord Gene Gorelik has launched a GoFundMe campaign called “Operation Save Home Depot,” in which he is trying to raise money to offer people living in the encampment $2,000 each to relocate to 11 Fourth St. — a parking lot south of Laney College owned by the Peralta Community College District that the city identified last year as a potential site for a sanctioned RV-dweller encampment.

Gorelik said he will go to the encampment at 8 a.m. Friday, rent a boom lift and announce his offer.

“If I start throwing out money from the boom lift, I think they’re going to come,” Gorelik said in an interview.

Gorelik said his offer will only stand if the encampment is empty by 8 p.m. Friday. Though he hadn’t raised any money on his GoFundMe campaign, he said Wednesday that he still plans to go through with what he called the “operation.” He wouldn’t say if he plans to pay out of his own pocket.

RV dwellers Carl Thomas and Ernie Winslow, who were at the 37th Avenue encampment Wednesday, said they have never stolen from the store, and feel as though they are being unfairly targeted and punished. At one point, Winslow said, thieves cut through Home Depot’s fence to steal a generator from him.

“You can lock me up and throw away the key if you could find video footage of me stealing,” Winslow said.

Five or so RVs were parked in a row on the dead-end street Wednesday afternoon; cones were set up to separate the encampment from the rest of the street. Thomas said the number of people who live there varies, since people shuffle in and out. He likes the area because it is secluded and safer than some of the other encampments, he said.

“I don’t have anywhere to go. What are you going to do, put me on another street?” he said.

Assistant to the City Administrator Joe DeVries, at the meeting, said the vehicles parked along 37th are in working order and can be driven away. After the details of the fence placement are worked out with Home Depot, the one person whose home is on the street and the one active business there, the city will post “tow-away zone” signs. After the RVs have cleared out, he said, public works department crews will clean up the site and the fence will be installed.