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Old Chair, New Heartbreak
TBT to that time in late December when we drove past this scene: a lovely chair strangely parked in a gas station bay. We pulled over around the corner. I grabbed my phone and walked over. As I move around taking photos, I hear a voice in the background. He says, you like the chair? I respond, breezily, I really do, but I’m just there to take its photo. I realize he’s talking to me from inside the passenger seat in the next stall. The door is open, and they’re watching my spontaneous, weird photo shoot. He says, it’s antique, you should take it; I’ll help you put it in…
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Furniture Reuse Thrives at Homeless Camps
For every couch that makes it on this feed, there are millions of others that don’t. (Americans threw away over 24 billion pounds of furnishings in 2015.) In my community, it seems the flow of street furniture goes directly through our many homeless encampments. Furniture cast offs from home and apartment dwellers often find new life within Oakland’s 4,000+ unsheltered population. Though not often talked about, this is reuse, as much as shopping on eBay or Craigslist is. In its most basic form, reuse is a survival skill. One that humans have relied on since the beginning of time. We can forget that when we’re lucky enough to choose to…
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Comfort for the Unsheltered
I met D as he was pushing this cart of furniture down the street. He found them at the DMV. “They were just left there,” he said. D was in transit to his tent in Mosswood park, a large homeless encampment just two blocks away. An abandoned stroller by the car wash caused him to stop. The cart wasn’t working well. We spoke as we unloaded and reloaded the entertainment center and chair from the cart to the stroller. D told me that he’s lost 5 tents to rats at Mosswood park. It’s inundated with rats, he said. Oakland’s unsheltered population recently earned national attention by @nytimes in a powerful…
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Rico’s Chair
The people behind the chairs on the curb can be hard to track down, but I got lucky yesterday. As I stopped to photograph this piece, Rico, as in Puerto Rico, he told me, asked if I was looking for a chair. He stopped sweeping the sidewalk and came to show me how it popped out into a twin bed. He said he was letting this one go because he had too many chairs. I complimented the green and yellow art on the inside arm. “It’s Russian,” he said, eyes twinkling. Though he seemed to be offering the chair to anyone who stopped to look, he said a woman who…
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Secondhand Supply Convoy
Silly drawers sitting at a crosswalk. I can think of funny narratives about bad directions or objects on an exciting escapade but in my heart I think the truth is much more sobering. Oakland has over 4,000 homeless people on its streets, a surge of 47% in just two years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. I believe these drawers are a tiny glimpse into a supply convoy of materials used to construct repurposed up-cycled shelters. Sounds Pinterest worthy, doesn’t it? Repurposed. Up-cycled materials. Tiny homes. But instead, it describes a devastating reality of homeless encampments. People are constructing temporary homes out of what is plentiful in their surrounding environment…
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Couches for Seating or Shelter?
What if the valuable humans who are left to rot in the streets are sleeping under a key that could get them out of their prison?
