Coronavirus Update: Mayor Schaaf Says Oakland Has Found Housing For 200 Homeless
OAKLAND (CBS SF) -- Hundreds have been placed in hotels, but some critics say the effort to combat coronavirus among Oakland's homeless is not moving fast enough.
As the virus continues its rampage, it's the homeless who may be most vulnerable considering they are often in close contact with others and many have some sort of medical condition.
That's why getting them into hotels has become a top priority In Oakland. So says Mayor Libby Schaaf who tells KPIX5 a total of about 200 homeless people from Oakland have now been moved to hotels left vacant because of the stay-at-home order.
The mayor says there have been no coronavirus outbreaks in Oakland shelters so far. But she admits, there's not enough testing to be sure.
"In Oakland, we were very fortunate that we only had to move 53 individuals out of our shelter system and into a hotel," Schaaf said. "Because the rest of our shelter system is designed to be socially distant."
Those 53 people were removed from shelters and tested negative for Covid-19, the mayor said. About 150 others are also staying in a hotel designated for especially vulnerable homeless folks who are 65 or older with medical conditions.
"By Monday, that number is going to be much higher," Schaaf said. "They are working very hard every day and they have accelerated the pace at which they are processing people and moving them into that hotel."
Still, some advocates point out there are more than 4,000 homeless people in Oakland, according to the latest homeless count.
"Is she waiting for everyone to die?" asked Needa Bee, a homeless advocate who lives in a camper in Oakland. "So what, 200? Move everyone. Everyone needs to be inside," Bee said.
Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan wrote a letter this past week, urging the governor and the mayor and Alameda County to move more quickly and get everybody who is homeless into hotels.
"There are thousands of hotel rooms that are vacant now throughout the region, so the notion that there are no places where people could go is not true. So what I'm calling for is urgent action to acquire those hotel spaces and to make them available immediately to put people in and prevent the spread of disease," Kaplan said.
Kaplan is worried Oakland could have some of the same problems San Francisco has experienced: outbreaks in the shelters. She said she wants health officials to move with more urgency and at a larger scale.
"Imagine if the shelter-in-place order for those who are housed had instead said only one percent of those who are housed have to shelter- in-place. We would obviously think that wasn't much of an order," Kaplan said. "If our plan for the homeless is one percent of the homeless will be helped, that's not a real plan."
At his Saturday briefing, Governor Gavin Newsom announced Project Room Key has secured more than 10,000 hotel rooms for homeless folks statewide. Schaaf says some of those are in Oakland. And while it's the county, not the city, that makes these decisions, she says she is pressing for more hotel rooms immediately.
"I always applaud impatience. I am certainly accused of being impatient myself," Schaaf said. "And we should be impatient when it comes to our most vulnerable. But we also have to be strategic. I do not want to put people in situations where we will have to send them back outdoors when the health crisis is over. And so I am being very thoughtful about what interventions we can employ right now in the health crisis that potentially could serve us for the long run."
